SUMMARY:

• Over 17 years experience delivering a wide range of innovative technology and business solutions
• Self motivated, Inquisitive, analytical, detail oriented, and organized
• Strong social and communication skills. Very comfortable leading and working in collaborative settings
• Broad technical background with a solid understanding of the software development life cycle (SDLC). Career started with hands - on software and hardware design and development experience
• Strong Business Analysis and Project Management experience with good Solution Architecture skills. Have contributed to many system architecture discussions employing both on-premise and cloud based solutions to address scaling requirements
• Clear understanding of project life cycle (initiation, planning, execution/monitoring, and closing stages) and different software development methodologies (Agile Scrum/Kanban, Iterative, Waterfall etc.)
• Agile coaching: Experienced in helping teams transition to and adopt Agile best practices
• Well familiar with a variety of industry standard practices and tools for planning, scheduling, documenting, communicating, and conducting on-site and remote meetings

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, Apple Valley, Minnesota

Sr. Technical Business Analyst, Development Services

Responsibilities:

• Their flagship product Nextera Admin allows states' departments of to manage and administer, with Questar's help, online testing of students in their school system.
• I am currently working on a project to migrate and integrate the functionality of another application, Collection of Evidence (CoE), to their Nextera Admin application, with the goal of productizing it from its current custom implementations for certain states
• CoE is used to record level assessments of special needs, or Alternate Assessment, students who cannot be tested in the same way as the state's general student population (i.e. through online testing).
• Alternate Assessment students are assessed through direct teacher-student interactions against state established standards and rubrics
• Currently, due to very tight delivery timelines, I am working on a fast-paced schedule to develop the CoE requirements and oversee the product’s development effort, first as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and then as a more generalized and configurable product as it moves through future releases
• The development methodology is Agile/Scrum, managed through JIRA/Confluence/Wiki, to deliver a Microsoft technologies/Vue.js based web application working with both on-shore teams and Europe based off-shore teams
• My activities include
• Requirements gathering and documentation
• Solution discovery with technical teams
• Participating in technical design meetings
• System Integration design
• Establishing and maintaining product oriented focus throughout the development effort
• Developing Agile epics and stories, and reviewing and estimating through daily grooming sessions with stakeholders and team members
• Coordinating with Scrum Master, Project Manager, and business stakeholders to manage the backlog and plan out the sprints
• Develop configuration and deployment plans and processes for onboarding future clients ther activities as needed

Confidential, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Sr. Business Analyst, EPMO

Responsibilities:

• Unified Payment Gateway: Strategic program to switch credit card and gift card payment processing from direct-to-acquirer model to cloud based common-payment-gateway model for both in-store and online payments to realize a wide range of benefits, chief among them being fraud mitigation and chargeback liability shift through EMV payment processing, PCI scope reduction, and smoother PCI audit process. Other benefits include the ability to support additional payment methods and platforms out of the box, tokenization, reduction of no-show losses through pre-charging for takeout orders, and overall improvements in guest experience. My activities, contributions, and deliverables included, among others
• Gathering and documenting functional requirements
• Evaluating payment gateway vendor solutions and making vendor recommendation
• Contributing to discussions to develop a comprehensive payment gateway solution
• Participating in and contributing to system architecture discussions and documenting data mappings between various on-premise and cloud based systems
• Evaluating and recommending the set of EMV payment devices, both mounted and handheld, to be deployed in each location
• Assisting in the selection of device mounting systems and UI/UX flows, taking ADA compliance into consideration
• Tracking vendor deliverables against requirements
• Developing and documenting business process change and continuous process improvement plans, creating business process flow diagrams and narratives, having them reviewed and approved, and obtaining signoffs
• Contributing to the phased rollout planning, and producing artifacts and deliverables in keeping with the rollout schedules
• Assisting the Operations team to develop new materials for restaurant teams
• Contributing to RICEFW document
• Working with QA team on their test plan
• Being the point person for other payment gateway integration projects
• Menu Label Compliance: Project to ensure that all print and digital menus and marketing materials present calorie information as required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), by the May 2017 deadline (the deadline was moved to next year at the last minute).
• Worked with BWW legal department to document compliance requirements
• Worked with recipe and nutrition teams to ensure that calorie and other nutrition information for all menu items and variants was available in the Genesis database
• Participated in discussions with IT around platform support for storing and presenting required calorie and nutrition information across all digital platforms
• Developed and documented business process flows (swim-lane diagrams) to capture the flow of information from source (Genesis) to all groups and systems consuming that information, proposed and obtained approvals for process improvement changes
• Worked with the database team to develop a cross- database to map Genesis recipe items to the menu items in various on-premise and cloud databases
• Developed and documented business processes around management and quality assurance of calorie and nutrition information, and single-sourcing it from Genesis
• Documented process flows for the marketing team to help them determine which requested marketing materials required inclusion of calorie information. Also helped them develop plans and procedures for continuous process improvements
• Next Generation Enterprise Infrastructure (Mulesoft ESB): Program to convert from BWW’s direct integrations model to a publish-and-subscribe model through the implementation of Mulesoft’s cloud based enterprise service bus (ESB) solution, followed by a series of conversion -projects to handle individual data integrations through the ESB. I was involved with the ESB program as a whole as well as with a number of the conversion projects in different capacities and to different extents. Methodologies varied among projects.
• ESB Program: Served as the representative of BWW Business interests to third parties. Contributed to overall solution discovery discussions on system architecture, selective cloud migration strategy, and overall project planning activities
• Master Data Services: Developed Process flow diagrams to document BWW’s new restaurant opening processes, as well as restaurant relocation, remodeling, and closure processes, and the data that is recorded by various teams at various times in Microsoft’s MDS database. Identified the data points to publish to the cloud to support the various data integrations to follow using the ESB’s publish-and-subscribe model. Also developed master data audit processes to both improve and ensure data integrity and quality going forward
• Franchise Sales Automation: Project to automate the process of reporting franchise restaurant daily sales information for royalty calculations and recording in Great Plains database. Facilitated end to end UAT sessions with Accounting department. Performed SQL queries against various interim on-premise and in-cloud databases to extract and verify data mappings and calculated values as data moved through various systems and stages to the accounting databases. Recorded and reported issues as they were discovered, and re-tested fixes and performance improvements in following sprints. Obtained final UAT signoff
• Other Integration Projects: Managed vendor relations on behalf of BWW. Facilitated meetings between vendors and integration development teams to obtain answers to questions as they arose, mostly related to data mapping
• Digital Innovations and Guest Experience Team Projects: Performed BA duties for a number of projects around guest dine-in and online ordering experiences
• PayBDubs.me: Implementation of NCR’s SaaS solution enabling BWW guests to pay for their dine-in experience by credit card using their personal mobile devices. Gathered and documented requirements, tracked the pilot and market test programs, created weekly reports based on raw sales data, and documented needed business process improvements. Worked on project delivery plans as well.
• Buzztime Tablet: Requirements gathering and documentation for dine-in ordering and payment capability through Buzztime tablets (encased Samsung tablets with Magnetic Stripe Readers), business process flow diagrams covering various business processes, including daily inspection and RMA processes
• Mobile App: Documented requirements for take-out ordering and payment for dine-in experience, attended meetings with third party vendor to review their UI solutions. Implementation of payment functionality was postponed until payment gateway solution is in place. Maintained requirements traceability and coordination with vendor’s Agile backlog, story prioritization, and development schedule
• Website Overhaul: Mapped online takeout order placement process with credit card pre-charging capability. Documented requirements for web site revamp effort, attended solution discovery meetings and contributed to architecture discussions

Confidential, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Sr. Business Analyst/Project Manager

Responsibilities:

• Business Analysis: Worked with product owners to understand requirements and develop the process flow. Coordinated with information architects and designers to develop the click-through experience in both wireframe and skinned-wireframe formats using OmniGraflle and inVision. Participated in User Experience and Usability testing as a remote observer and recorded user interactions, observations, and feedback for improvement analysis. Identified feature groups in user requirements and created JIRA epics and stories. Also established the JIRA workflow to be used in the development phase of the project.
• Project Management: Was the project manager for the prototyping project. Developed the time and budget estimates and established the project development schedule in an Agile Setting. Set up and drove/facilitated a variety of meetings (JAD, requirements gathering, design review, UE/Usability Testing etc.) and performed the usual project management activities; planning, estimating, tracking, status reporting, communications etc. Managed another project for a colleague on vacation. Additionally, worked with company executives, product owners, and team leads (front end, back end, database, QA, Delivery, etc.) to develop budget estimates for 14 projects related to future releases of the company’s core product, G5.
• Agile Coaching: Provided guidance on transitioning from traditional waterfall methodology to Agile Scrum/Kanban methods and adopting Agile best practices and tools

Confidential, Minnesota

Sr. Business Analyst (IT), RDIS

Responsibilities:

• Development: All development was done in an Agile/SCRUM setting with team members participating from different parts of the country and the globe
• BA Activities: Performed a variety of tasks typical to the Business Analyst role in an Agile setting.
• Worked closely and extensively with the product owner and stakeholders on an ongoing basis to capture requirements into epics and stories.
• Analyzed requirements and business strategic objectives and proposed creative solutions to ensure buy-in and continued support from senior management as well as enterprise-wide user adoption
• Worked closely with the product owner and UI/UX design team to ensure that the application and screen flows and designs were all in sync and also took ADA guidelines into consideration
• Supported the product owner and stakeholders in their efforts to pitch the solution to the community at large, and fine-tuned the solution based on community feedback to produce a product with enhanced value
• Also coordinated with other BAs connected with the larger One Biology program to ensure harmony with user and system requirements for other related ongoing and future projects
• Agile Coaching: Provided valuable input and advice to management around Agile best practices as the company transitions from traditional and legacy development methodologies to the Agile development model.
• Technology: The application was developed using Microsoft technologies - Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.51, SQL Server, C#.NET, ASP.NET, and MVC Framework. Story creation, backlog grooming, and sprint planning and management were done through Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS)

Confidential, Richfield, Minnesota

Sr. Business Analyst

Responsibilities:

• Worked on two new enterprise-wide customer facing additions (Recommendations Hub and Life Events) to the company web site from project kickoff to MVP and next releases as well as on enhancements to existing applications
• Worked closely with business stakeholders, product managers, and program managers throughout the scoping and development phases to analyze business requirements, understand intent, and align to a common understanding of deliverables and schedules
• Participated in and contributed to discussions on program strategy, product design, and project planning, including systems and resource planning. Provided appropriate direction to development and QA teams and worked closely with them through all releases
• Conducted numerous cross-functional JAD sessions covering overall application architecture and design. Performed detailed analyses to determine impact of proposed solutions on existing functionality, and called attention to and proposed remedies for any issues discovered
• Performed all the usual Business Analyst functions in an Agile setting: Analysis, solution discovery, JADs, feature and story mapping, story creation and estimates, traceability and dependency matrices, process flow and other diagrams, data mapping and interface specifications, iteration planning, daily stand-ups, validations, QA and UAT facilitation, retrospectives, process improvement ideation etc.
• Provided guidance in adopting Agile Scrum/Kanban processes and management tools
• Tools used: VersionOne, JIRA, Confluence, Kanban, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Visio, Sharepoint, Basecamp etc., Axure, Adobe design and imaging products, Snagit, Webex, Skype, Join.me, Google Hangouts etc.

Confidential

Business Analyst

Responsibilities:

• Attended numerous multi-team JAD sessions covering overall application architecture and design. Contributed to the discussions and captured decisions and next steps in light of business requirements and stakeholder requests
• Worked closely with solution architects to capture and document application workflows and produce artifacts to facilitate communication across all project teams involved
• Analyzed impacts of proposed solutions on existing functionality and business processes, and documented and tracked issues to resolution, proposing solutions along the way as necessary
• Produced scoping documents with high level estimates from development teams for stated requirements, obtained stakeholder signoffs, and contributed to prioritization and planning efforts
• Performed typical Business Analyst functions in an Agile setting (already mentioned in BBY Dotcom section)
• Tools used: Microsoft Office suite for artifacts generation, Version One and Google Docs for iteration planning and tracking, basecamp and sharepoint as common document repositories, Skype, Lync, Google Hangouts, and Webex for communication with team members and internal and external partners, Adobe design and imaging products, and PHP/MySQL development related tools and technologies etc. for BA work

Confidential, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Senior Systems Analyst/Business Development Manager

Responsibilities:

• Analyzing and documenting the as is inventory flow and control processes
• Requirements Analysis: Identifying and interviewing the business stakeholders and users about desired functionality and creating the related Requirements Specification document
• Architecting a Solution: Analyzing the business requirements to propose a solution incorporating both business process flow and technological improvements to achieve desired objectives. Liaised with the development team to create the detailed functional specifications and obtain the requisite approvals and sign-offs.
• Solution Development: Work with the development team to refine the proposed solution and help develop QA Tests. Coached the team on Agile best practices through the development process.

Confidential, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Senior Systems Analyst

Responsibilities:

• As an independent consultant I worked on a client’s website re-engineering/re-design project. Also working on some project/product incubators and providing technical consultation to clients.

Confidential, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Business Development Manager

Responsibilities:

• Business Strategy and Development: Participated in high level meetings on a routine basis to formulate marketing and business strategies based on analysis of the ever-changing landscape of technology offerings, market trends, and customer feedback. Identified and recommended courses of action vis-à-vis streamlining of and improvements in business processes.
• Client Solutions Development: Worked with corporate clients to identify and understand their business needs and architect and develop creative solutions to address those needs. Also focused on relationship building and keeping clients and prospective clients informed about how to leverage our products, services, and overall capabilities to achieve their own business objectives. Supported the sales teams in client presentations as and when needed
• Product Line Development and Procurement: Responsible for nearly a third of the company’s product offerings. Researched and identified product sourcing and worked with vendors to ensure quality, best pricing, and profitability.
• Management: Served in a variety of business and technical management roles covering activities and projects ranging from day to day operations to development of solutions for internal and external consumption. Managed and provided direction to project groups of different sizes and composition. Led and ensured proper communication between various departments. Helped in conflict resolutions and handled client issues that occasionally escalated to the management level. Also made sure that our employees were not lacking the proper tools to carry out their assigned tasks.

Confidential, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Project Management

Responsibilities:

• Managed a variety of in-house hardware, software, and IT infrastructure projects, including follow-up enhancement projects. Worked with different departments to identify their system and network needs, developed project plans, including budget, schedule, and resource allocation plans to meet those requirements, and coordinated the execution efforts to deliver on time and within budget. Prepared and delivered presentations and status reports as and when needed.
• Software Development: Led the development effort to create the company’s e-commerce web site and a variety of in-house tools to improve efficiency. Assembled and gave direction to the development teams and ensured that task completions remained on schedule. Depending upon the project, the development methodologies or practices employed were typically Iterative or Agile/SCRUM.

Confidential, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Team Lead

Responsibilities:

• Worked on the design and development of a range of products targeting the emerging Network-Applicance (NAS, SAN) and Dedicated Application-Server markets. Established product feature-sets through Requirements Analysis work encompassing market research, interviews with potential clients/users, and internal high-level meetings.
• Collaborated closely with the hardware design teams to develop the various hardware/software specifications. Products were designed to run on customized Linux distribution. Led the detailed software design specification effort and worked with the development team to evaluate open-source technologies and third-party add-ons. Employed the Iterative development methodology to progressively refine the design while staying within allocated timelines and budgets.

Confidential, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Principal Software Engineer/Project Lead/Product Manager

Responsibilities:

• Actively involved in the design and development effort of a number of Java based Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) software products related to, or offshoots of BillerPlus, Seleriti’s flagship ASP/licensed-software based EBPP product. Projects include, among others, an AFP-SVG Transcoder utility for transcoding IBM’s print data stream into standard SVG format, Pay Anyone and Demand Debit, two web-based ACH payment processing engines, ERMiS, an e-CRM client-server application, and Mobiliti, an XML compliant server engine for information content transcoding and publishing to web-enabled mobile devices. Some projects have been completed.
• Worked on the detailed design of the Demand Debit and Pay Anyone applications and completed ACH connectivity and transaction processing tests with Confidential and US Bank. Planned and coordinated the overseas development effort of the AFP-SVG Transcoder utility, and actively contributed to the design and development effort of ERMiS and Mobiliti, including development of test prototypes. Also created complete technical specification, design, and user documentation for all products. Development methodologies employed were Agile and Iterative.

Confidential, Eden Prairie, Minnesota

Senior Software Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Responsibilities included client requirements gathering, design specifications generation, hardware and software architecture design, database schema design, development effort planning, coordination, and management, documentation, budget and resource planning and allocation, QA, product rollout, and client sign-off. Additionally, owing to a special request from a client late in the project delivery cycle, developed an Excel/VBA based reporting tool that connected to Confidential ’s main Oracle backend database to extract, process, and report daily US dollar based transaction data in Canadian currency. Development methodologies: Agile and Iterative.

Confidential

Analyst Consultant

Responsibilities:

• Worked on medium-sized software development projects. Responsibilities included customer business requirements analysis, technical specifications, cost estimation, deliverables, project plans, timeline, cost-estimation, delivery plans, and signoff.

Confidential

Engineering Consultant

Responsibilities:

• Project Planning and Implementation: Helped in the development of Project Plans, identification of project technology strategies, development of schedules with key milestones, and risk identification and contingency planning. Ensured adherence to proper development, QA, and documentation standards. Also responsible for developing a variety of software modules using C/C++.
• Management: Managed development staff for small to medium-sized software development projects. Ensured projects are completed on time and according to corporate quality standards. Served as focal point for other departments on project status or other project information. Participated in decisions about hiring,, and resource allocation recommendations etc.

Confidential, New York

Technology Consultant

Responsibilities:

• Course Development: Designed and developed a course on the UNIX operating system for Confidential, and taught it a number of times to students, staff, and faculty.
• General Instruction: Instructed and co-instructed introductory to advanced level courses on Microsoft Office and Adobe applications, and a number of computer networking topics.
• Planning and Evaluation: Contributed to the overall planning and organization of Confidential ’s program. Also evaluated a number of courses offered by Confidential .

Confidential, New York

Laboratory Instructor

Responsibilities:

• Instruction: Instructed as many as 120 out of students each semester up to four times a week in laboratory work for a number of core undergraduate level courses in Physics. Proctored and graded exams, and assisted individual students with their course work.

Confidential, New York

Research Assistant

Responsibilities:

• Researched the Load Flow Fractals problem in Power System Transient Stability Assessment studies. Investigated sensitivity to initial conditions of Newton-Raphson and Quasi-Newton Load Flow algorithms and resulting Fractal regions in initial condition space, and developed a new load flow algorithm to eliminate such Fractal regions.
• Investigated the adverse effects of employing Linear Feedback control strategies to dampen out selective fundamental mode vibrations in large, flexible, truss-like structures attached to space stations and exhibiting nonlinear dynamics. Developed numerical methods based on Stability Region concepts to compare the effectiveness of different control strategies.

Confidential

Electrical and Software Design Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Worked on the hardware and software design and development of microprocessor based dedicated purpose computer system. Designed and developed embedded controllers, real-time software, and secure wireless communication system capable of withstanding severe field conditions.