Business Analyst Project Management

Business System Analyst

A dynamic professional with 12+ years of experience in IT in Business and System Analysis/Testing/Project Management primarily in Insurance Property & Casualty (P&C), Life Insurance.

BlueChip Competencies:

●Over 12 years of Professional Experience as a Business Analyst with strong knowledge of Insurance, Property & Casualty interacting with clients and stakeholders with firm understanding of their needs.

●Strong knowledge on Guidewire Policy center and Claim Center Suites

●Experience in creating project Scope document and discovery document to define the scope of the project.

●Extensive experience in analyzing and requirements gathering and writing system functional specifications including use cases.

●Performed business and system level analysis and provided documentation for deliverables.

●Subject matter expertise in performing GAP analysis, risk assessment and cost benefit analysis by connecting stakeholders of the project/product rollouts.

●Strong experience in maintain product & configuration of insurance products in Property & Casualty insurance (P&C) while working with Stakeholders/Product owners in product maintenance support.

●Extensive experience in Test Plan Preparation (Functional, Regression and UAT)

●Prepared solution options, risk identification and have strong knowledge of financial analysis such as cost/benefit, ROI, buy/build, etc. Develops RFPs.

●Strong experience working in personal line of business such as Personal Auto, Personal Property, Personal Umbrella policies, Commercial Lines of Business-Inland Marine, BOP.

●Strong understanding of project life cycle and SDLC methodologies including RUP, RAD, Waterfall and Agile

●Expert in Auto, Personal Lines and Fire Insurance experience with national carriers

●Have Firm understanding of Business Process definition, Risk Analysis and SDLC methodologies.

●Designed and reviewed various documents including the Software Requirement Specifications (SRS), Business requirements document (BRD), Use Case Specifications, Functional Specifications (FSD), Systems Design Specification (SDS), Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM) and testing documents.

●Good Management, Execution and Documentation skills

●Developed and diagram business processes using BPMN.

●Hands on experience in managing all stages of Project lifecycle using formal project management methodology PMBOK, project planning, manage scope, time, cost as per the project constraint, formal change control, manage risks, issues and escalations, ensure quality of deliverables and provide accurate and timely project communications and status reports to the stakeholders.

●Expert in managing project cost actual vs. forecast for resources, effort and timeline and overall project budget.

●Competent in Creating Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams such as Use Case Diagrams, Activity Diagrams, Class Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams

Technical Proficiency:

Databases

Oracle, SQL Server

Business Management & Modelling Tools

MS-Visio, Confluence

Markup Language

HTML, XML

Project Management

MSP (Microsoft Project), Requisite Pro, Clarity

Quality Assurance Tools

HP-QC, HP-ALM

Testing Tools

JIRA, Rally

Methodologies

Waterfall, Agile-Scrum

Enterprise Communication Tools

Thunderhead, Image Right

Documentation

SharePoint Repository, Confluence, MS Word, MS Excel

Insurance Product Suite

Guidewire Insurance Suite- Policy Center (10.0), Claim Center (10.0), Duck creek

Microsoft Office

MS-Word, Excel, Outlook, Visio, Project, PowerPoint & SharePoint

Certification(s) Acquired

CBAP, PMP, ITIL V3 Foundation, Lean Six Sigma-Black Belt, Certified Scrum Master, AINS 21, AWS Cloud Practitioner, Guidewire Associate Certified, Guidewire ACE Policy Center Certified.

Work Experience:

Employer- Pull Skill, USA

Client- Country Financial Bloomington, IL

Test Lead/ Lead Business Analyst (Mar 2024-Present)

Project Description: Country Financials eHUB & ePayment Project’s Life & Health Line of Business is focused on providing payment solutions to their end clients where payments are initiated from My Country (Customer Engage Portal) or Navigator (Agency Portal) and Payment Gateway authorizes credit or debit card processing for eBusiness. ALIP is the Accenture Life Insurance Platform used to process nightly batches and applies payment to the insured’s policy for Whole Life and Term Life Policies.

●Developing Test Plans

●Providing Feedback

●Planning Projects

●Writing Reports and motivating Team Members

●Conducting and monitoring Test Process

●Requirement Gathering and Analysis

●Designing, Coding, Testing, Deployment and Maintenance.

●Creating Artifacts such as BRD’s, FRS, FRD etc.

Employer- Capgemini, American, USA San Antonio, TX Client- USAA (Sep 2023-Jan 2024 )

Senior Guidewire Business Analyst/Test Lead

Project Description: USAA Insurance is an American Insurance Company found in 1920s. They offer their extensive Insurance services in areas such as Auto & Vehicle Insurance, P & Casualty- Home & Property Insurance, Small Business, Additional Insurance and Life & Health Insurance. Extensively worked on adhering to ISO Business Templates received from Business for State and Country related static, dynamic and Rating forms.

●Responsible for Dwelling and Mortgage DB Pre-Inception Work.

●Responsible for Pre-Inception work of merging Mortgagee Contact details into Contact Manager.

●Responsible for Implementation of Dwelling Lines of Business.

●Responsible for coordinating and maintaining requirements gathering sessions.

Employer- Capgemini, American, USA Hartford, Connecticut Client- Hartford Insurance Group (June 2021-Aug 2023 )

Senior Guidewire Business Analyst/Test Lead

Project Description: Hartford Insurance is an American private mutual company that focuses on property, casualty, and auto insurance, and also offers commercial insurance, life, health, and homeowners coverage as well as investment and retirement-planning products. ICON Replat form which is Producer Engage Application upgrade from legacy online agent application to ICON Replat form (Producer Engage). Online Quoting Platform is a customer engage portal which was upgrade from online legacy application to OQP. NGS Small Commercial LOB state roll out project, including new forms and coverages implementation and rating changes. Worked extensively on Commercial LOB -Inland Marine & BOP.

●Managed & Prepared requirements document for Personal Property for Guidewire Policy Center.

●Managed & Prepared requirements documents for GW Producer Engage portal application on

Personal Property LOB.

●Gathered requirement by analyzing data, identifying trends, and providing insights that helped Inland Marine Commercial Line of Business. Performed activities such as Risk Analysis, Data Analysis, Performance Monitoring, Product Development, Market Research etc.

●Gathered business requirements, Functional and Non-Functional by conducting JAD sessions from key stakeholders, customers, and subject matter experts to define the scope of the project.

●Preparing user stories based on Guidewire Policy center functionalities and different policy transactions for Personal Property LOB.

●Assisted the project manager with activities like effort estimation, resource management, issue/risk analysis, milestone tracking and associated documentation.

●Coordinated daily Meetings (Agile methodology), Project Planning, sprint planning, sprint review and sprint retrospective.

●Created various use cases related to functionalities for business users (agents), coverages, quotes, permissions to update business products.

●Closely worked with Change Control Board to manage and document Change Requests

● Assigned defect issues/tickets to the appropriate teams and analyze them based on the priority.

Follow up on the issues and coordinating with the testing and development team and make the necessary changes to implement the system.

●Performed Gap Analysis to check the variance between the existing and implementation states.

●Identified measurable success criteria to pilot the solution to ensure it met the business case, requirements, and desired outcomes.

●Built and executed global change and behavioral measurement plan to ensure business leader alignment and end user adoption.

●Successfully transitioned to appropriate business owner for sustainment.

Employer- Wipfli, Wisconsin, USA Madison, Wisconsin

Client- American Family (Nov 2020-June 2021)

Senior Guidewire Business Analyst/Test Lead

Project Description: American Family is an American private mutual company that focuses on property, casualty, and auto insurance, and also offers commercial insurance, life, health, and homeowners coverage as well as investment and retirement-planning products.

●Managed & Prepared requirements document for Personal Property for Guidewire Policy Center.

●Managed & Prepared requirements documents for GW Producer Engage portal application on

Personal Property LOB.

●Gathered business requirements, Functional and Non-Functional by conducting JAD sessions from key stakeholders, customers, and subject matter experts to define the scope of the project.

●Preparing user stories based on Guidewire Policy center functionalities and different policy transactions for Personal Property LOB.

●Assisted the project manager with activities like effort estimation, resource management, issue/risk analysis, milestone tracking and associated documentation.

●Coordinated daily Meetings (Agile methodology), Project Planning, sprint planning, sprint review and sprint retrospective.

●Created various use cases related to functionalities for business users (agents), coverages, quotes, permissions to update business products.

●Closely worked with Change Control Board to manage and document Change Requests

● Assigned defect issues/tickets to the appropriate teams and analyze them based on the priority.

Follow up on the issues and coordinating with the testing and development team and make the necessary changes to implement the system.

●Performed Gap Analysis to check the variance between the existing and implementation states.

●Identified measurable success criteria to pilot the solution to ensure it met the business case, requirements, and desired outcomes.

●Built and executed global change and behavioral measurement plan to ensure business leader alignment and end user adoption.

●Successfully transitioned to appropriate business owner for sustainment.

Employer- LTI, NJ, USA

Client- Horace Mann Insurance Springfield, IL

Senior Guidewire Business Analyst/Scrum Master (Feb 2020- Sep 2020)

Project Description: Horace Mann is an educator of educator insurance company for over 75 years based in Springfield Illinois providing end to end-insurance solutions (Policy Center, Claims & Billing Center)

●Worked closely with the business stakeholders, subject matter experts to understand the scope and objective of the project.

●Responsible for delivering business requirements document and converting them into functional and technical requirements.

●Responsible for conducting JAD sessions for Scrum Team

●Responsible for Backlog and Sprint Refinement session and User Story Writing

●Responsible for Test Case Design and execution for user story

●Understand and Created Acceptance Criteria for the User Story

●Responsible for end-to-end project delivery including UAT.

●Worked extensively in analyzing all the legacy forms based on which the new Product Model was implemented.

●Was Lead BA for Guidewire Policy Center State Rollouts for PA, CA, NC for different UW Company or Personal Lines of Business

●Analysis and drafting requirements for coverage pattern overview

●Responsible for understanding Configuration information for a particular type of coverage associated with a policy line.

●Responsible for understanding the requirements for categorizing coverage patterns, exclusions/inclusions patterns & conditions patterns.

●Responsible for understanding various factors to configure the coverage availability such as effective dates, industry codes, UW company & policy & transaction types.

Employer- Andre Global Inc., NYC, USA

Client- NJM Insurance Group Trenton-NJ Sr. Guidewire Business Analyst/Test Lead (Aug 2019-Nov 2019)

Project Description: New Jersey Manufacturer’s is a major P/C regional insurer, has selected Guidewire Insurance Suite as its new platform for underwriting, claims management, billing, and rating and policy administration.

●Worked closely with the business stakeholders, subject matter experts to understand the scope and objective of the project and gathered business requirements from business users

●Created BRDs for specific Business features

●Analysis and documentation of fields to be passed to the integration team for ordering NJM and legacy claims for Homeowners LOB

●Understand the coverages for Homeowners and enhance Guidewire Policy Center Product Model Configuration

●Responsible for creating & documenting requirement process flows use cases and field level specifications and business rules for Homeowners user stories

●Created Test Cases and Test Plans for the requirement user stories

●Understand and create acceptance criteria’s where all requirements should be met thoroughly

● Worked on Guidewire Claim center enhancements for existing personal lines.

●Worked on Inception for the upgrade of Claim center 6 to Claim Center 9 conducting War room sessions and creating Inception notes during live sessions and sending out MoM to all the participants at the end of the session.

●Worked on upgrade of CC6 to CC9 gathering requirements explaining the changes to business from previous version and formulating documents

●Understand mainframe based policy admin applications to perform data feature and function mapping for the data to be migrated to Duckcreek PAS

●Worked on end to end testing and UAT support across all Duckcreek LOBs

●Identified all Batch jobs and Rating factors from legacy system to be migrated to Duckcreek

Employer- United Global Soft Inc., India

Client- The Co-Operators Insurance Guelph-Ontario

Sr. Guidewire Business Analyst/Scrum Master/Test Lead (Oct 2018-July 2019)

Project Description: The Co-operators Insurance is a major P/C regional insurer, has selected Guidewire Insurance Suite as its new platform for underwriting, claims management, billing, and rating and policy administration.

Their integrated subsidiary companies provide solutions in four core areas: property and casualty (P&C) insurance, life insurance, institutional asset management and brokerage operations.

●Managed & Prepared requirements document for Personal Auto and Personal Property by using Guidewire Policy Center.

●Gathered business requirements, Functional and Non-Functional by conducting JAD sessions from key stakeholders, customers, and subject matter experts to define the scope of the project.

●Assisted the project manager with activities like effort estimation, resource management, issue/risk analysis, milestone tracking and associated documentation.

●Coordinated daily Meetings (Agile methodology), Project Planning, sprint planning, sprint review and sprint retrospective

●Created various use cases related to functionalities for business users (agents), new claims, quotes, access to updated business products

●Closely worked with Change Control Board to manage and document Change Requests

● Assign defect issues/tickets to the appropriate teams and analyze them based on the priority. Fix the issues coordinating with the testing and development team and make the necessary changes to implement the system.

●Performed Gap Analysis to check the variance between the existing and implementation states

●Identified measurable success criteria to pilot the solution to ensure it met the business case, requirements, and desired outcomes.

●Built and executed global change and behavioral measurement plan to ensure business leader alignment and end user adoption.

●Successfully transitioned to the appropriate business owner for sustainment.

Client- The Economical Insurance Waterloo-Ontario

Sr. Guidewire Business Analyst/Test Lead/Scrum Master (Sep 2016-Sep 2018)

Project Description: The Economical Insurance is a major (P&C) Property and casualty insurance company uses Guidewire Claim Center for its robust policy administration system to enable them to help with Property/Casualty insurers replace their legacy core systems and transform their business

●Managed & Prepared requirements document for Personal Auto and Personal Property for Guidewire Policy Center.

●Participated with the business team in the creation/completion of project charters and project scope for Guidewire Policy Center modules

●Gathered business requirements, Functional and Non-Functional by conducting JAD sessions from key business stakeholders, customers, and subject matter experts to define the scope of the project.

●Create user stories and tasks related to them in Rally.

●Work Closely with the business clients to understand the goals and objectives of the project and determine the deliverables

●Created and owned various User Story and Process Flow diagrams.

●Worked on requirements for Guidewire Claim center for customization of the tool

●Documented requirements for Claim center version upgrade to 8.0

●Defined, developed, documented and communicated system requirements for the application to be implemented

●Developed and diagram business processes using BPMN

●Identified the issues/bugs post implementation and fix them doing proper research

●Worked with production data to validate business requirements

●Collaborated with developers and business subject matter experts to analyze requirements and design trade-offs and priorities.

●Established and maintained relationship between requirements for consideration during change management and requirements allocation

●Actively attended all SCRUM meetings including -Sprint review, Sprint planning, Retro, daily Scrum Calls, Sprint Demo

●Supported Development and testing phases in Agile (Scrum) by conducting walkthroughs of requirements, and providing clarification

●Oversaw software developers’ progress on applications and applied principles of agile methodologies to keep projects on track.

●Coached team in optimal time utilization through concepts of scrum and agile management methodologies.

Client-Wawanesa Insurance Winnipeg-Manitoba

Sr. Guidewire Business Analyst/Scum Master/Test Lead (July 2014- Aug 2016)

Project Description: Wawanesa Insurance is a Canadian mutual company owned by its policyholders. It is property and casualty insurer in Canada.

●Worked directly with the client to understand project requests, gather requirements, define objectives, deliverables, and delivery dates, plan resources and develop a clear and actionable project plan.

●Day-to-day client point-of-contact for all project-related tasks, proactively setting and managing client expectations on an ongoing basis throughout the project.

●Developed project scopes, objectives and a detailed project plan to track progress.

●Efficiently and effectively, communicate and manage day-to-day problems. Understand when (and why) to escalate issues. Facilitated meetings, and ensured the team receives clear direction for the next steps.

●Lead various application enhancements, data analysis and reconciliation from various data feeds.

●Analyzed business requirements, create functional specification and design document

●Lead the offshore team to troubleshoot and coordinate production issue fixes, deliver various reports requested by the business team and other deliverables on time with client satisfaction rating.

●Worked with program manager to manage, support or create project budgets

●Worked with the PMO manager to champion ongoing process improvement initiatives to implement best practices for Agile Project Management

●Worked with Product Management to understand the priority features and fixes and cascade this information to Developers

●Conducted training and workshops for Lean's tools (VSM, 5S, 6σ, TPM), change management culture within suppliers

●Participated in Change Management activities to deliver training for over 500 employees in the PMO nationwide

●Improved timeframes for more than 50% of projects by successfully maintaining a change management process.

●Introduced new process improvement initiatives like C360, change management, RAPID model, etc

●Mentored 5 selected projects & entrepreneurs in shaping their dream into a viable business proposal.

Client-Portage la Prairie Mutual Insurance St. Catharines-Ontario

Reporting Business Analyst (May 2012- June 2014)

Project Description: The Portage la Prairie Mutual Insurance Company writes automobile insurance in Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI.

●Gathered requirements by conducting detailed interviews with business users and SME’s.

●Communicated and Integrated on a regular basis with the project manager and development team during different stages of the project.

●Schedule working sessions with the business to understand and document the various aspects of the deliverables.

●Created Templates using Image Right

●Developed use cases from requirements and created UML diagrams such as use case diagrams, activity diagrams and sequence diagrams.

●Adept at preparing business requirement documents defining project plans, writing system requirement specifications and delivering project and status reports.

●Familiar with MS project to manage schedules, deadlines, resources, collaborate with different teams and analyze project information.

●Worked on analysis of forms data from thunderhead.

●Interacted with Business Owners to understand the forms content.

●Prepared various forms mockups to identify static and variable data.

Education: Master’s in Electronic Business Technologies, University of Ottawa, Canada, 2012

M.B.A (ITM), Devi Ahilya University, India, 2009

Undergraduate in Computer Science, Devi Ahilya University, India, 2007

Personal Details:

Name

Garima Sharma

Address

1320 E Algonquin Road Apartment 30, Schaumburg, IL,60173.

Passport

AK 506806

Visa Status

TN Visa- Canadian Citizen, valid till Dec 2025

Mobile#

+1- 609 -933-6312

Primary Email

***********@***.***

LinkedIn Profile

Linkedin Profile Link

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