Mona A. Shah

* *** ******, *** ***, Jersey City, NJ 07302● 508-***-**** ● acucdv@r.postjobfree.com

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

6+ years of professional experience as a Business Analyst with proficiency in requirements gathering, documenting functional specifications, designing user interface, developing use case and conducting systems testing

Strong IT experience in the financial services industry covering investment banking, client service, portfolio accounting and performance reporting

Experienced in interacting with front office users and analyzing business processes and documenting current business challenges to accurately define business requirements and translate into functional specifications for proposed solutions

Skillful in creating design documents like process flow diagrams using MS Visio. Experienced in creating UML based modeling views like Activity diagrams/ Sequence diagrams/ Use Case and Data Flow diagrams

Proficient in interacting with users, creating management reports and maintaining Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM) throughout the project lifecycle

Good working knowledge of SQL; Highly detail oriented and excellent at driving result oriented meetings

Strong communication skills, interpersonal skills and presentation skills, Good at managing multiple projects simultaneously

Excellent documentation skills, Adept at writing Use case specifications, business requirement documents and functional specifications

Experienced in preparing PowerPoint presentations using a variety of tools and techniques

Strong MS Excel skills in making pivot tables, working with different function types and performing data oriented slicing and dicing

Ability to work in teams and managing process in a fast changing and demanding environment

Excellent analytical, problem solving and resolution skills; strong communication skills; efficient negotiator with various stakeholders

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Database & Server Oracle, MS SQL Server, MS Access Languages HTML, SQL

Statistical Tools Excel 2007/2010, Access 2003/2007, Bloomberg Project Methodology Agile, Waterfall, Hybrid Client Specific Business Modelling tools MS Visio, SharePoint 2007 Document creation tools MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), MS Visio, MS Project Defect tracking tools JIRA, Mercury Quality Center PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Lazard, New York, New York Aug 2012 – Mar 2013

Business Analyst

Lazard is a financial advisory and asset management firm that engages in investment banking, asset management, and other financial services primarily with institutional clients. The Sales Services Technology Business Unit creates and maintains technology that supports all sales desks in the securities trading division. It provides applications and services to support a sales person’s pre-trade and post-trade workflows, including client management, revenue reporting, content distribution, trade marketing and event management, Our team worked on the re-write of Horizon - a revenue generating, client facing event management style which facilitates sales team to organize events and bring together Investors and Management Companies on a platform. The events can be a single day or multi- day conferences, road shows, etc.

Responsibilities:

Involved in all phases of Requirements Management including gathering, analysis, detailing, tracking and documentation; Performed GAP analysis for the change from old legacy databases to newly designed database

Created Business Requirement Document (BRD) and Functional Requirement Document (FSD)

Followed a hybrid approach, a combination of waterfall and agile methodologies

Worked closely with the investor community (Senior Management, SME’s, Business Analysts and Developers) to define product feature requests, business requirement specifications and change requests; documented requirements and transformed them into functional and non-functional requirement specifications

Spearheaded focus group discussions and user interviews, collated user requirements, analyzed the findings for the event and management grid screens

Developed and coordinated execution of test plans to ensure that the business requirements have been met

Worked extensively with GUI team for designing the screens and assisted in developing mock screens and prototypes of the user interface

Collaborated with QA team in reviewing and validating test cases, ensuring that the system is built to user requirements

Involved in preparing corporate presentation material and conduct various presentations for users, QA team and other audience to give them a complete walkthrough of how the application flows from end to end

Built and maintained the Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM) across deliverables of a project using SharePoint

Project Environment: Windows XP, DB2, MS Visio, MS Office Suite, JIRA, SharePoint Citigate Dewe Rogerson, Mumbai Jan 2009 – Jan 2012 Data Integrity Analyst

Citigate Dewe Rogerson is a renowned player in the corporate and financial public relations space. The company provides investor analysis and reporting services to companies globally. Our team worked on creating the Client Relations & Research (CRR) platform which sourced and summarized companies’ financial results, as well as prepared documents for financial results reporting. I was a part of the requirement gathering team as well as a coordinator between the end users and the CRR platform Responsibilities:

Worked with key stakeholders to perform requirements gathering, analysis, documentation, due diligence, project planning, and senior business stakeholder management

Created business requirements and functional specification documents detailing core processing, data integration, conversion and reporting needs

Worked with key stakeholders from Operations and IT to successfully define and implement the solution

Built various MS Access database prototypes to perform proof-of-concept studies and gap analysis to come up with robust requirements for CRR and data flow models for various modules in data sourcing, data enrichment and data transformation

Spearheaded multiple initiatives in this role with a goal to enhance client experience by making the CRR platform more scalable and reliable

Played a pivotal role in the successful implementation and overall architecture of CRR platform Project Environment: Windows XP, SQL Server, MS Access, MS Office Suite, SharePoint Independent International Investment Research, Mumbai Jan 2005 – Dec 2008 Business Analyst

Independent Research is a subsidiary of the London based company (IIIR). I was a part of the credit research team primarily tasked with defining business requirements for the development of a new platform that gauged the creditworthiness of each client based on risk rating models and fundamental research. The business would then use this application extensively to view the Client’s credit worthiness, risk profile, past results, ROE, etc. based on multiple parameters

Responsibilities:

Worked with business users to define product feature requests, requirement specifications, and process workflows within the credit profiling life cycle; documented requirements and transformed them into functional and technical requirement specifications;

Conducted one-to-one meetings and web-Conferences with different stakeholders; analyzed and came up with suggestions providing input to key software business logic while working with multiple teams

Analyzed vast sets of data to come up with business rules; Adept in querying, retrieving and analyzing large sets of data using SQL queries

Articulated business requirements from user interviews, workshops and then converted requirements into technical specifications for developers; Maintained evolving functional specifications and throughout the SDLC

Worked with other team members in reviewing requirements via Use Case Diagrams and Activity Diagrams

Conducted Daily Defect status and Progress meeting reports with QA team; carried out defect tracking using JIRA for identifying and documenting all issues, functionality gaps and new functionality needs

Assisted the QA teams in test strategy and planning and execution of test cases during the testing phase

Participated in Change control meetings recommending appropriate action after analysis of changing requirements

Project Environment: Windows XP, SQL Server, DBArtisan, MS Visio, MS Office Suite, SharePoint EDUCATION

MBA (Finance) (GPA of 3.8), Mumbai University

Bachelor of Management Studies, Mumbai University HOBBIES

Traveling, Reading, Cooking, Photography

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