Ziyaad Sayed

Joining as a Senior Business Analyst, my role was to increase the digital footprint of the company, address operational inefficiencies and ensure business and I.T alignment. My duties include:

• Responsible for updating and maintaining the Point of Sale (POS) system with the latest products and pricing.
• Maintain the inventory system to ensure adequate stock levels at all times.
• Responsible for reporting, analysis, and business presentations to internal and external stakeholders.
• Use Microsoft Excel to generate monthly reports detailing business performance in both the wholesale and retail division.
• Create workflow diagrams to identify key areas for operational improvement.
• Review service level agreements of all current service providers.
• Develop an online presence for the business with a wordpress website, Facebook page and paid Google ads.
• Draft reports on company financial metrics to assess successes and account for deficiencies.
• Perform gap analysis to identify areas of improvement.
• Conduct interviews with key business users to collect information on business processes and user requirements.
• Responsible for the hiring and training program of all new warehouse staff.
• Conduct market research into competing brands and market trends.
• Apply problem-solving skills to analyze and resolve issues impacting business operations and goal achievement.
• Analyze open orders, backlog, and sales data to provide sales team with valuable insights.

Joining as a Business Analyst, I was tasked with the development of a web application called C5, which aimed at using business information modelling (BIM) software to improve the quantity surveying process. My duties included the following:

• Work within the Agile framework; attended daily stand ups, sprint planning, sprint review and sprint retro meetings.
• Define, groom, and prioritize the product backlog and
  create actionable user stories for the development teams
• Manage the sprint backlog and sprint goals.
• Work closely with product owner and UX designer to establish product roadmap.
• Combine business and systems knowledge to create functional designs with UX team which was then signed off by product owner.
• Produce business requirements, user story list, sprint planning and design documents.
• Work with Scrum team to test and certify application features before deploying to production.
• Analyze business requirements to understand business needs.
• Conduct interviews with key business users to collect information on business processes and user requirements.
• Perform critical analysis on information consolidated from multiple stakeholders, broke down high-level information into detailed workable requirements.
• Conduct User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
• Review and sign off on test cases created by testing team.

Joining Sanlam as a Business Analyst, I was tasked with gathering and translating requirements from end users to further develop the two web applications used for Will and Trust administration as well as support the daily operational needs of the business. My duties included:

• Create scripts which were used to generate daily reports on excel by pulling information from a SQL database.
• Attend daily stand ups and report progress to scrum master.
• Conducted interviews with key business stakeholders to collect information on business processes and user requirements for the Will and Trust administration systems.
• Translate, understand, specify, test and
  implement business systems requirements.
• Liaise with the development team to ensure they understand all requirements.
• Utilize information gathered from stakeholders to create BPM diagrams which were used to map out existing business processes.
• Perform User Acceptance Testing (UAT) after each new development.
• Work with solutions architect to develop an I.T roadmap and presented it to top level management.

As an intern in my Honours year, I was tasked with developing a web application which will add value in the real world. My team and I decided to develop a C# web application for on demand services which will allow a homeowner to book a tradesmen to perform services such as plumbing, painting and electrical. My duties in this project included:

• Develop product roadmap based on timeline afforded.
• Collaborate with the team to select coding milestones on pre-release software project development.
• Design intuitive graphical user interfaces to improve user experience.
• Collaborate on stages of systems development lifecycle from requirement gathering to production releases.
• Document progress in all iterations.
• Estimate work hours and track progress using Scrum methodology.
• Build databases and table structures for the web application.
• Translate technical concepts and information into terms parties could easily comprehend.
• Supervise work of programmers, designers and assigned tasks and monitored performance against targets.
• Conduct presentation to all stakeholders demonstrating the web application and how it works.