SUMMARY:

• Over 7 years of IT experience as a Sr. Business Analyst/Business Systems Analyst with focus on understanding business logic, business process improvement and determining solutions to business processes.
• In addition served as a linguist for department of defense (Civilian contractor) in Afghanistan working with Special Forces Units.
• Creative and aggressive person capable of forming and maintaining positive and productive team environments
• Vast experience in Finance, Retail and Healthcare domains as well as Data Warehousing
• Extensive experience working in dynamic environments and provided significant contributions to assure that high quality results are achieved within the timeframe specified during the requirement analysis
• Excellent communication and presentation skills
• Experience working with business users as well as senior management
• Strong knowledge of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) methodologies including Waterfall, Rational Unified Process (RUP) and Agile Software Development
• Proficient in creating Use Case diagrams, UML diagrams, sequence diagrams, collaboration diagrams, activity diagrams, class, and ER diagrams
• Experienced in writing User Stories, managing Product Backlog Items (PBI)
• Experience in conducting User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Smoke Testing, Regression Testing, Performance Testing and Functional Testing
• Extensive experience in performing GAP, SWOT, cost benefit and ROI analyses
• Extensive Knowledge in writing test cases, test scripts and test plans
• Experience in analyzing and documenting business requirements and functional specifications including use cases
• Conducted successful projects with the help of development and testing teams to achieve deadlines timely and proficiently
• Experience working with off - shore teams
• Extensive knowledge of principles, practices and procedures of QA methodologies used in application development and requirements-based testing
• Experience in training end users as to how to use and implement the products
• Dynamic leader and team builder, consistently motivating others toward success
• Ability to think out of the box and provide innovative solutions
• Exceptional problem solving and sound decision making capabilities along with the ability to resolve difficult situations
• TECHNICAL SKILLS

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

Methodology: Agile, Waterfall

Management tools: Rational rose, ClearCase, Sharepoint, JIRA, Rally

Office tools: MS office, MS Visio, MS project

Languages: SQL, HTML, XML, UNIX

WORK EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, Minneapolis, MN

Sr. Business System Analyst

Responsibilities:

• Interacted with the Subject Matter Experts (SME) and stakeholders to get a better understanding of client business processes and gather business requirements
• Worked with call center team to ensure that customers had a smooth experience
• Worked with member/email support team by enhancing their process and giving them feedback to improve the efficiency and ensure higher quality service
• Performed Gap Analysis to identify the deficiencies of the current system and to identify the requirements for the change in the proposed system
• Provided key input in working with users in defining project and system requirements
• Understood and worked within HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) guidelines
• Documented Requirement Traceability Matrix for traceability of requirements
• Conducted iteration kick-off meetings with Business Users, IT and QA teams to document Product Backlog Items (PBI)
• Worked closely with business users to prioritize and scope out the Product Backlog Items (PBI) based on priority and bandwidth
• Facilitated Product Backlog Grooming sessions, Sprint Review meetings and Retrospectives with Scrum Master and Dev team.
• Conducted SPRINT sessions with 2-week iterations
• Led Daily Standups to develop User Stories, and User Interface Specifications
• Reviewed user stories with stakeholders to approve and gain agreement on direction of the technical solution
• Played a vital role in impact analysis and sizing T-shirt estimates and dollar amounts of initiatives
• Prepared Data Flow and Visio Diagrams to review the future state of the business processes
• Managed and added functional and non-functional requirements that came out as a result of testing and added them to the Product Backlog Items (PBI)
• Prepared and provided detailed weekly progress report to the Project Managers and the business stakeholders
• Was involved in creating test plan, writing test scripts, execution of the test and analysis of results
• Helped prepare for and conducted User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
• Worked closely with Product Manager, System Analyst and Development team to sign off feature file test cases as part of Agile ATDD Acceptance Test Driven Development process
• Performed GUI testing to make sure that the final product was in line with the business needs and their requirements
• Prepared and tracked burn down charts and velocity charts for timely delivery of projects
• Created documentation including online help, printed user manual, and training materials

Confidential, Richardson, TX

Sr. Business Analyst

Responsibilities:

• Interacted with the eligibility and finance team to get a better understanding of client business processes and business requirements
• Understood and worked within HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) guidelines
• Performed Gap Analysis to identify the deficiencies of current claims system and to determine the requirements for the change in the proposed system
• Documented the as-is processes and created MS Visio flows to depict and understand the current business processes
• Prepared Data Flow and Visio Diagrams to review the future state of the business processes
• Provided critical input in working with users in defining project and system requirements
• Conducted iteration kick-off meetings with Business Users, IT and QA teams to record Product Backlog Items (PBI)
• Managed and added eligibility requirements that came out from testing and added them to the Product Backlog Items (PBI)
• Worked closely with business users to prioritize and scope out the Product Backlog Items (PBI) based on priority
• Created story mapping for complex workflows
• Was responsible for breaking Epics into user stories and defined Acceptance Criteria
• Helped the Scrum Master to organize sprints
• Aligned stories for upcoming Sprint Sessions on the JIRA board
• Participated in SPRINT sessions with 2-week iterations
• Participated daily standups to develop User Stories and User Interface Specifications
• Reviewed user stories with stakeholders to approve and gain agreement on direction of the technical solution
• Worked on 10-15 User Stories simultaneously at different stages of development and sign-off during each sprint
• Worked with the UI developer to implement UI and create enhancements to optimize user experience
• Performed Demos for Business for In-Progress User Stories
• Prepared and provided detailed weekly progress report to the Project Managers and the business stakeholders
• Helped the QA team in creating test plans, writing test scripts, execution of the tests and analysis of results
• Understanding the mapping requirements between frontend product (kplus), backend product (URBIS) and developing the mapping between the two.
• Logged all issues/defects found in JIRA and maintained statuses on all
• Assisted in preparing User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
• Developed User Acceptance Testing plan, for ATDD and carried out UAT successfully.
• Created documentation including online help, printed user manual, and training materials
• Escalated any timeline related issues due to delay in delivery to the Project Manager

Confidential, Mounds View, MN

Business Analyst

Responsibilities:

• Gained knowledge of the existing system through interacting with the business users for better understanding of what needs to be improved
• Created MS Visio flows to depict and understand the current business processes while documenting the as-is processes
• Gathered essential requirements through surveying a cross-section of intended users for the improvement of the product.
• Organized and facilitated customers and internal stakeholders requirements gathering sessions with the purpose of defining and documenting the functional and non-functional business requirements
• Broke down processes into sub-processes and created process mappings and user interface definitions for each sub-process to help acknowledge the changes in every device individually
• Adhered to the guidelines laid out for the Agile framework for the development process through the entire Software Development Life Cycle
• Involved in SPRINT sessions that with 2-week iterations
• Participated in daily stand ups to help update story boards and created new user stories
• Developed, created and maintained Project Backlog Items (PBI)
• Worked closely with the development and QA teams and acted as a SME for them
• Worked on functional specifications for the new system along with the QA
• Interacted with the User Experience teams, testing teams, development teams, business and the project management teams in understanding, clarifying, articulating and delivering requirements, changes and maintenance related activities
• Helped prepare for and conducted UAT and UI testing
• Involved in the End-to-End testing of the new system to make sure that all the components are working properly and documented any new requirements to the PBI as per business’ request
• Documented defects and worked with developers and QA to fix these defects
• Worked closely with the project manager to maintain and update the project plan, communicate any road blocks and get approval on any change requests

Confidential, Minneapolis, MN

Business Analyst

Responsibilities:

• Involved in gathering new functional and non-functional requirements and modifications to existing requirements
• Prepared Business Workflow models that cover “How” the information collection processes are accomplished
• Created Workflow Diagrams for the modules - Corporate gift cards and Checking Balance of the gift cards
• Prepared user stories for the Corporate Gift Card Program covering the modules for ‘E-Gift Card, ‘Mail a Gift Card’ and ‘Buy in Bulk’
• Documented the requirements using Business Requirement Document (BRD) and Functional Requirement Document (FRD)
• Conducted workflow, process diagram and gap analysis to requirements to improve the storage of the demographics for the future usage
• Provided support to the Product Manager to maintain and prioritize the product backlog
• Provided input during the Sprint Planning meetings and created Sprint Backlog items
• Participated in daily scrum meetings as the business representative with 3 week iterations
• Shared the lessons learnt and best practices adopted in the Sprint during the Retrospective meeting at the end of the Sprint
• Worked alongside QA to help with the testing and further developing the solutions
• Worked alongside the Product Owner to groom the user stories with the delivery team in backlog grooming sessions
• Helped the Product owner in Sprint estimation of user stories
• Helped business team in conducting the UAT
• Worked with Product Owner for prioritization of user stories in sprint backlog planning
• Gathered existing UAT test cases/scripts from IT partners and reviewed them
• Participated in defect Review meetings with software developers, QA engineers, managers, suggested enhancements to the existed application from business perspective
• Worked closely with the Project Manager to update the project plans weekly

Confidential, St. Paul, MN

Business Analyst

R esponsibilities:

• Worked as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate, and validate requirements for changes to business processes
• Prepared documentation and system flow charts to develop a comprehensive depiction of the existing business processes
• Led and facilitated business process mapping and used business processes as a starting point to perform gap analysis to check the compatibility of the existing system infrastructure with the new business requirements
• Extracted business requirements from the end users keeping in mind their need for the application
• Conducted interviews with key business users to collect requirements and business process information
• Facilitated JAD sessions for communicating and managing expectations with the final users of the product
• Prepared Business Requirement Documents (BRD) which were reviewed by cross-functional teams to analyze the high level requirements
• Understood the underlying business logic and processes to help design solutions to new requirements to solve business problems
• Created Use Cases using UML, Process Work flows, and Functional Specification Document (FSD)
• Collaborated with Quality Assurance team to maintain quality procedures and ensured that appropriate documentation is in place
• Facilitated User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with the stakeholders and the business users
• Led the business team during the different IT project phases
• Worked with offshore IT teams to help with design and development
• Ensured issues and risks are identified, tracked, reported and resolved in a timely manner
• Assisted in enforcing project deadlines and schedules
• Maintained a weekly centralized project status report to achieve the timeline

Confidential

Interpreter/ Linguist

• Executed real-time translation from Pashto into grammatically correct English in the operational environment of Afghanistan to forward deployed commanders in support of Operation Enduring Freedom
• Explained cultural references and attitudes to team to best minimize misunderstanding
• Base Defense Operations Center Liaison Interpreter to Host National Guards
• Provided interpretations in Pashtu, Urdu, and Farsi languages in support of missions.
• Performed language interpretations of various formats of media which proved critically essential to the success of interrogations and informed of cultural awareness regarding Afghan culture
• Received Certificate of Merit and Appreciation for service