SUMMARY:

• Result oriented professional equipped with over FOURTEEN years of solid experience fulfilling roles with titles viz., Retail Functional Architect, Project Coordinator (On - Site and Off Shore), Senior Business Analyst, Scrum Master, Domain Quality Assurance Expert, Retail Domain Trainer with adept knowledge in Retail Store Operations, Training, and Process Conformance
• Excellent knowledge of Confidential -Eleven Now ecosystem-Recent Proposition (Android and iOS Customer Apps, Store Associate Tablet and Handheld, Admin Portal. Geographies: US and Canada), Confidential Store Systems, Echidna- Syntap's Customer Engagement Suite, In-Store Map Management, Content Management Systems, JDA Customer Engagement-Associate(iPad) and Consumer (iPod Touch/iPhone), Web Commerce Solution (catalog and pricing management), JDA Point-of-Sale, JDA Back Office System, JDA Central Office System, Portfolio Mobile Access solutions. Independently handled (internal) integration releases (functional) of JDA POS and JDA Merchandise Management systems, Transfers, Receipts, and Allocation, Price and Promotion Management, Inventory Control, Cost Management, Sales Analysis and Audit, Direct Store Delivery, Return to Vendor, Basics of Inventory Stock Ledger.
• Proficient in designing, implementing and managing Retail and E-Commerce Transaction Processing Systems-Retail Store Back Office Systems, Retail Point of Sale, Merchandise Management Systems, Customer Relationship Management, e-Commerce systems, Customer Engagement, Inventory Management System, Basic Wet Stock Monitoring and Ordering systems (including smart devices interface)
• Functional and Product exposure of JDA Merchandise Management and Customer Relationship Management, IBM Smarter Commerce suite (Websphere Commerce Server- a powerful customer interaction platform for cross-channel commerce, Sterling/IBM Selling and Fulfillment Suite- Order Fulfillment; Warehouse Management System; Transport Management System), Field sales and Field Service solutions, basic exposure to the salesforce.com ecosystem
• Extensive experience in design analysis using the Iterative Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) with the principles of Waterfall, RUP and Agile methodologies like SCRUM. Strong understanding of the following business units in an enterprise product development and service companies- product development, customer support, integration services, implementation services, Project Management Office.

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

Business Skills: Business Definition Requirements, Business Process Analysis & Research, Use Case Modeling, JAD Sessions, Requirements gathering, Gap and Impact Analysis

Project Management: Project Initiation, Requirements gathering, Estimation scribe, Project planning, Budget Management, Project Control, Change Management, Project communication and reporting, Project risk and issue assessment/management, Test and Test asset management, Project rollout, Project Closure, Vendor Management

Service Management: Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management

Product Management: aha.io, Atlassian JIRA (user story-defect-change request-project management)

Project Management: Version One, Microsoft Project, Atlassian JIRA Agile (user story creation, management, and defect tracking tool), Confluence and Microsoft SharePoint (Functional documentation repositories)

UI Mockup tools: Balsamiq, Omnigraffle (iOS)

JDA Merchandising Systems: Merchandise Management Systems (MMS), Portfolio Merchandise Management (PMM) (exposure)- also comprises of retail chain level inventory management and execution systems

Retail System Standards: National Retail Federation’s Association for Retail Technology Standards, Payment Application-Data Security Standards, Java POS, OPOS

Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS

Databases: Microsoft SQL Server 2xxx, My SQL, Microsoft Access

Hardware: Integrated Payment Systems EMV, Legacy PIN pads to latest Ingenico’s (direct interface of PIN pad with POS), Barcode Readers, Printers, Bump Bar basic Configuration, Cash Drawers, Mobile Portable Data Terminals (Symbol MX-Series), exposure to other retail hardware used on the shop floor

Defect Tracking Systems: Team track, Bugzilla, Atlassian JIRA

Desktop Applications: Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, OneNote, Project

Development Methodologies Experienced: Agile, Waterfall

POS Solutions: JDA Point-of-Sale, Oracle Retail POS, SAP for back-end operations, Radiant Systems- a division of NCR (@ Confidential -Eleven), 3 legacy POS systems as part of my reta­­­­­­­­il career, Adelaide Business Software's Retail Touch, ISS POS, Infinity POS, POSTEC PCC-Petrol Communications Controller

POS Industries Exposed: Fuel and Convenience, Grocery, Specialty, Electronics, Footwear

Custom Application Requirements (Ideated and Authored): Records Management System, Invoice Processing System/Business Document Management System, Sales and Media Reconciliation System, Cloud + Mobile Inventory Management System, Master Data Organizer and Publisher

Subject Matter Expertise: Define solution evaluation criteria, evaluations, and documenting business rationale

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, Irving, TX

Business Consultant/Senior Business Analyst

• Converted a rudimentary vision of the CDO into various tenets of the 7Now ecosystem (Customer Apps-iOS, Android, and Responsive-Future applications, Store App-Tablet and Handheld, Admin Portal). Served as the subject matter expert devising functional features
• Derived conceptual feature set using mind maps for all the applications followed by detailing them into functional and technical requirements
• Independently defined solution evaluation criteria, performed evaluations, communicated and conducted interviews with vendors, documented findings, recommended solutions decision (provided business rationale behind the decision) to the business stakeholders
• Assisted the Product Director in defining the design needs (deliverables expected off the design team, which were included in the contracts)
• Actively partaken in design discussions with the UI-UX stakeholders to provide them a high-level perspective of the feature set expected to be built into the applications
• Documented and distributed functional, non-functional, performance, system requirements to the development and quality stakeholders
• Scouted solutions through publicly available API’s easing out the development stakeholder’s efforts, performed competitive analysis and published findings to the senior management and other teams on the digital team. Provided several pointers to the Digital team increasing SEI store presence across
• Interacted and shared findings with several parties- On-site, Off-Shore, development, Quality Assurance, Merchandising, Marketing, Accounting, External Vendors, Product Management, PMO, CDO, Instructional Design, Copywriters, Design members
• Ensured issues are identified, tracked, reported, and resolved in a timely manner. Devised guidelines for the QA team members to follow when reporting issues reducing the lead time for the developers to address them
• Researched, provisioned several utilities and tools that assisted in streamlining the development and Quality assurance processes and efforts
• Coordinated with PMO, Product Management, Development, Quality Assurance (QA), Design, IT stakeholders ensuring that they understood the business requirements
• Evaluated hardware and accessories needs for the stores, partaken in UAT, devised an action plan for the go-live, and was involved in the field testing of the application
• Served as the gatekeeper and semi-administrator for project tracking and management tool - JIRA, document and collaboration utility - Confluence, team collaboration tool- #Slack
• Educated the team on the vision for the ecosystem, walked them through the mind maps devised for the solution alongside walking them through detailed requirements as the development progressed
• Third-party solution companies worked with- Projekt202, NEC, Stripe, USPS, Addressy, OpenWeather, NewRelic, T3, Gladson, Jumio, PostMates, UberRush. Evaluated and interacted with other competitors of these solution providers
• Currently assisting Canada team to identify solutions enabling them to emulate solution
• Appreciated by the entire team (Senior Management and Development stakeholders) for bringing the project to shape just within a span of 1.5 months. Have been appreciated multiple times for performing beyond expectations
• Spearheaded several initiatives independently that assisted in the team’s overall work progression resulting in a successful delivery of the solution within a span of less than SIX months
• Independently defined requirements for the overall solution landscape. Several technical recommendations done will be taken up in the consecutive solution release cycles
• Assisted cross-teams and provided feedback about the solutions being worked upon by the team within the Digital team there by prompting them to timely address the issues. Several of the ideas proposed are currently in the team’s roadmap for the respective teams.

Confidential,Deerfield, IL

Business Consultant-Product Liaison-Retail Business Applications SME Horizon Program

• Authored the Weekly Executive Status updates, release highlights for senior leadership
• Managed schedules, project scope, assets, and overall project organization to ensure requirements and project delivery dates are clearly communicated, understood and executed upon
• Liaised with the Product Owner team to arrive at the business requirements
• Served as a functional bridge between off-shore and on-site teams by holistically transferring knowledge to the off-shore teams working effectively on the development deliverables
• Lead several functional walk-through sessions by setting up the context of the program organized by business applications and IT teams seeking an understanding of the application to convert them into workable user stories
• Maintained and managed the sanctity of Agile, Scrum project management tools-JIRA and Confluence
• Actively shared retail and store systems domain knowledge to the team members (which was new to the domain).
• Functionally Lead the team to perform a top-down approach to estimate and size the functional depth of the applications, identifying the complexity of each application from the front of transitioning it over to mobile, identified and validated the use of each stakeholder system to understand the important of each tenet of the store system.
• Currently involved with support and development teams of legacy systems (host systems) to seek knowledge and document the findings not limiting to the interfaces, programming and application deployment stacks, etc.
• Maintained strong working relationship with various business stakeholders, UX/CX team members
• Actively worked with the product owner team and Project Management Office (IT Team and App Dev Interfaces) to create, prioritize, and maintain the product backlog including semi-JIRA administration
• Innovated new strategies reducing time to transition knowledge to off-shore teams.
• Supplemented workforce through online automation tools, resulting in decreased work fatigue among associates.
• Facilitated effective presentation of applications to executive stakeholders via the use of newly identified desktop utilities.
• Drove app production through the regular creation of status updates, management of schedules/assets/organization, and collaboration with stakeholders ranging from the Product Owner to IT teams.

Confidential,Minneapolis,MN

Retail Functional Architect/Product Manager-Project Coordinator

• Partnered with business and other stakeholders and the solution architects along with the CIO and Director of Retail services defining user requirements and prioritization.
• Worked on the wireframes, UX requirements, provided nuances for fluid and responsive UI, integration and support with e-commerce implementation partner (Professional Access/Zensar Technologies).
• Responsible for product delivery and related integration with third-party host systems. Performed GAP analysis for new functional requirements to bridge the gap between the development team members and the business users.
• Worked as a senior member closely with the Senior Management including the CIO and the Director of Retail Services.
• Performed hardware vendor negotiations with local and international vendors spread across continents (USA, China, India, and Korea) to mull out a custom-built tablet (embedding a barcode scanner, receipt/media printer, MSR embedded with Chip-and-PIN capabilities) and a tailor-made operating system to support the devices to serve as test and demo device.
• Responsible for delivery of limited technical design documentation, Functional System Design document, data mapping document, and technical testing scripts along with the functional testing/execution of the test cases.
• Acclaimed for adherence to strong project methodology artifact creation not limiting to approvals, change requests, UI/UX design artifacts.
• Worked on the product roadmap and was actively involved in the architectural discussions to provide pointers from the host systems along with the integration requirements.
• Handled activities with a diverse scope where analysis of data require an evaluation of identifiable factors.
• Involved in creation of business/stakeholder reports in the perspective of communicating the project accomplishments on a weekly basis. Have led the daily team stand-ups (Off-Shore) and provided to the responsible stakeholders with respective updates.
• Provided functional know-how and actively involved in generating test scripts for testing the solution.
• Responsible for coordination of project tasks on engagements with the Senior Members in the team. Provides functional direction to the overall scope of the customer and associate engagement solutions.
• Provided internal training, implementation support activities, or work on internal development projects to the team members. Recently created a domain training collateral that will be used by the off-shore team for the overall training needs of the interns along with existing Subject Matter Experts.
• Partnered with the Quality team to clearly define the test scenarios, reviewed and worked towards getting the test scenario approved by business.
• Collaborated with technical lead(s), developer(s) and tester(s) from global cross-functional agile team(s) to design, implement and test the changes and ensure business acceptance
• Prepared training materials appropriate for target audiences and developed solution and conducted training sessions.
• Authored, administered, and liaised requirements for interfacing with third-party APIs and servers providing rich content (digital assets) across the system touch points for the mobile and web applications of the Syntap ecosystem.
• Mentored and coached other business analysts specifically in requirements gathering methodology and creating AEM functional specifications.

Confidential

Retail Functional Architect a.k.a., Product Manager/Senior Business Analyst-Project Coordinator

• Served as an acting Project Coordinator. Also served as a liaison with an external contractor team who worked for the solution’s iOS mobile and iPad applications (JDA Customer Engagement suite)
• Active involvement in architecting mobile apps that interacts with the web services. Also involved in the testing of web services using SOAP UI and POSTMAN clients.
• Maintained and improved the existing web suite of applications, provided feedback to the team responsible to get the issues resolved to fulfill the business needs of the mobile apps (JDA Commerce Suite)
• Partnered with the Product Management Group, Product Director to devise the product backlog.
• Authored user stories and use cases as well as facilitated functional requirement walkthroughs, responded to test team’s queries with respect to the solution.
• Provided cross-training and education to testing (QA) and development associates.
• Provided functional guidance and leadership to the Product Quality Assurance and external contractor teams with real-time business scenarios.
• Proactively identified problems arising from the project execution with respect to scope, timelines, and budget; outlined options, recommended solutions, and escalated to the senior management when needed.
• Reviewed the User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) design proposals from the external vendors and provided them with feedback on the usability and functional requirements.
• Assessed the functional testing requirements of each feature.
• Presented the feature enhancements to cross-location teams and updated the status of the release goals across to Product Management Group.
• Provided domain content for the Implementation Guides, Version One User Stories, and cross team's feature requirements.
• Effectively communicated online research findings and happenings in retail across the teams building positive momentum towards the possible adaptability of the features to the product.
• Worked with the Development and QA team to ensure that the test plans for each feature of the release are thoroughly tested and signed-off by the product director.
• Researched and provided the QA team members with testing tools to simplify and automate their QA process thereby reducing the test efforts by 40%.
• Reviewed test cases, monitored, triage, and assigned defects for resolution and for re-testing across to respective test team members.
• Actively participated in cross-functional product team’s sprint demos and provided them with feature suggestions and feedback.
• Team Member- JDA Ace Pillar Team for timely delivery of the Functional QA activity.
• Provided several functional inputs/gaps from market research findings/internal product feature enablers across to Product Management Group, which have been added to the product backlog as feature enhancements for future releases.

Confidential,FRISCO, TX

Business Manager

• Articulated product’s value proposition, competitive differentiators, and alignment to industry needs at both the business and technical levels.
• Demonstrated excellent communication skills during the course of sales presentations, meetings, and other demonstrations.
• Partaken and lead functional discovery sessions with prospects to identify areas of opportunity and define how requirements map to the product functionality/features.
• Gathered and assessed client’s technical specifications and requirements.
• Supported product optimization by providing feedback to product management teams.
• People Management, Mentoring and training associates with functional knowledge comprising of various systems within the retail ecosystem. Devised and measured the training plans of associates (handled both the freshmen and associates who come with experience).
• Supported technical team with documenting for a Statement of Work from the functional standpoint.
• Served as a liaison between Project Managers and Development team to understand details of proposed solution's direction and design and communicate information back to the sales organization.
• Participated in several workshops (HCL and IBM) on “Trendsetter features available within the IBM Smarter Commerce Suite”.
• Studied multiple business models in the e-commerce ecosystem and provided business understanding to the B2B integrator team.
• Provided Sterling B2B Integrator team within the IBM Smarter Commerce practice team with business understanding, translated the requirements from store systems.
• Conceptualized and documented an Intellectual Property (IP) HomeNeeds.com (POC).
• Sought functional understanding of an Intellectual Property (IP) Mappin- a tool to generate Mapping Requirement Specification and provided some usability enhancements along with providing support to the testing team on the front of developing a test strategy to test the tool. Also provided usability enhancements to the product, which will be incorporated in the future releases of the IP.

Confidential,Scottsdale, AZ

Functional Architect/Product Manager-JDA POS Suite

• Served as a lead member of the product delivery team including serving as a single point of contact for the implementation services, customer support, and integration services team members.
• Collaborated heavily with the functional and technical team members across all phases of the product development.
• Created, maintained, and managed project documents are not limiting to functional specs, user stories, product backlog, UI mockups, new requirements gathering documentation, product training (raw versions), implementation guide inputs (raw versions).
• Provided cross-training and education to testing (QA) and development associates as and whenever needed.
• Partnered with the Product Director in responding back to Request for Proposals, chalking out a Mobile Product Strategy to be presented to the executive team.
• Interacted with the stakeholders of the customer (USA based Home Improvement Retailer), gathered functional requirements, reviewed the Statement of Work and negotiated the product feature mapping with the existing requirements.
• Acted as a liaison and a single point of contact for the JDA Integrator team from the POS team frontage, while integrating the application with the JDA’s Merchandising Systems.
• Provided guidance to the Product Quality Assurance team with real-time business scenarios and educating them of the intricate detail about testing a POS system.
• Effectively communicated online research findings and happenings in retail across the teams building positive momentum towards the possible adaptability of the features to the product.
• Researched and provided multiple software utilities to both the development and QA teams, which saved thousands of man hours for the company.

Confidential

IT Business Analyst

• Elicited requirements using interviews, document analysis, requirements workshops, surveys, site visits, business process descriptions, use cases, scenarios, and task and workflow analysis.
• Conducted impact assessments to facilitate the completion of the gap and future state analysis on people, processes, and systems.
• Proactively communicated and collaborated with external and internal customers to analyze information needs and functional requirements and deliver the following artifacts as needed: Business Requirements Specifications, As-is, and To-be process maps, Traceability matrices, Impact Assessments and Use Cases.
• Worked closely with the franchisees, QA, and technical team members to ensure that requirements address the franchisees and internal customers’ needs.
• Performed elicitation sessions with the IT team about the systems requirements along with the business users needs and documented the findings along with disseminating them through the company’s document repository.
• Worked closely with the management to ensure we had total compliance to SDLC.
• Worked with the development QA teams to assess the time estimates for project execution.
• Worked within the team as well as an Individual contributor. Handle technical support calls occasionally during high volume and system downtimes.