Ali Afshar
Montreal,QC
Summary
Agile Business Analyst and Scrum Master/PM offering 17+ years of total experience with an impressive record of delivering pure Agile/ Hybrid greenfield projects and continuous enhancement of existing applications.
Highly skilled in understanding requirements of complex projects and communicating to the stakeholders
Overview
16
16
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Scrum Master/Senior Business Analyst
Rogers Communication
03.2017 - 06.2023
- Focused primarily on training teams to write good user stories, prioritize work based on business value and handling of tasks by team.
- Brought in Agile best practices such as continuous integration, code/design reviews, transparency, accountability, Jira tracking, product visioning, self-management, empowerment and role training.
- Protected team from over-commitment, managed backlog, prioritized resolution of defects/bugs.
- Responsible to remove impediments, as these projects relies on data from multiple departments, hence requiring constant, effective communication to unblock team and make sure team remains on task at hand.
- Mentored teams, leading them to be self-directed with strong accountability, decision making, conflict resolution, and transparency.
- Facilitated meetings to iron out blockers, conducted JAD sessions with Product owner and other stakeholders on regular basis and helped team to make better use of these time and estimate more effectively, thus ensuring healthy sprint progress.
- Kept teams focused on sprints priorities, business values, and protecting team from over-committing
- Communicated team status/progress via Story Acceptance rate and defects and make sure stakeholders are aware of what is going on.
- Worked with product owner during Sprint review sessions to make sure all stories met Definition of Done and get stories accepted within sprint.
- Performed active coaching role for organization wide Agile implementation and embracement.
Senior Business Analyst
Rogers Communications
09.2010 - 02.2017
- Prepared documentation on business requirements, functional specifications, use cases, data flows, end-user adoption plans, assumptions and organization structure using interviews, document analysis, workshops, job shadowing and task/workflow analysis
- Refined requirements using critical evaluation techniques (e.g. gap analysis) and highlighted problem areas, gaps or conflicts derived from information gathered .
- Worked with both Technology and Business Partners to facilitate understanding, clarification, and implementation of business requirements
- Employed strong analytical, questioning and listening skills to elicit information from various personalities across organizational and functional boundaries
- Acted as interim Project Manager and Subject Matter Expert(s) in definition, testing, training, implementation, and support of functional requirements.
- Conducted Project Coordination activities such as project planning, change control, reporting and meeting coordination
- Worked closely with Vendor to meet project timelines and requirements
Agile Business Analyst
CPNI Inc.
05.2007 - 08.2010
- Worked as Product Owner in Extreme Programming Shop developing mobile payment solutions
- Defined User Stories and managed Product Backlog based on Project Charter
- Researched, analyzed and documented business requirements and functional specifications according to standards such as ISO 20022 and SWIFT
- Translated user requirements into comprehensible functional requirements for end product
- Created process models, specifications, diagrams and charts to provide direction to developers and project teams.
- Defined User Acceptance Criteria
- Managed day-to-day activities for assigned projects to ensure deadlines are met by participating in iteration planning and daily stand up meetings .
- Collaborated with QA department and supported system and integration testing including application workflow, review of test results, bug prioritizing and fixes.
- Acted as liaison between Product Manager and development team.
- Tested and provided feedback for application on real devices and websites.
Education
Certificate in Business Analysis - Business Analysis
University of Toronto
Toronto, ONMaster of Philosophy (Mphil) - Computer Science
The Hong Kong University of Science And Technology
Hong KongMaster of Science - Industrial Engineering
Sharif University of Technology
Tehran, IranBachelor of Science - Applied Mathematics
Tehran University
IRANSkills
- Strong problem solving & technical skills coupled with confident decision making for enabling effective solutions
- Educated and reinforced Scrum methodology and agile framework to team members (Product Owners, QA and Dev team) and key stakeholders
- Working closely with Product Owner and write "good " Stories and racking and managing product backlog
- Possess good Communication skill and fast learner with appetite to grasp and adapt to changing technologies
- Insightful knowledge of Business Process analysis and design, re-engineering
- Conducting system study and coordinating with team members for Requirements Mapping, System Design & integration
Accomplishments
- Prepared documentation on business requirements, functional specifications, use cases, data flows, end-user adoption plans, assumptions and organization structure using interviews, document analysis, workshops, job shadowing and task/workflow analysis
- Refined requirements using critical evaluation techniques (e.g. gap analysis) and highlighted problem areas, gaps or conflicts derived from information gathered .
- Helped Product Owners to right user stories including UATs
- Performed an active coaching role for a program and department wide Agile Implementation
Skills
Methodologies - Agile-Scrum, , Waterfall
Tools - JIRA, Confluence, SharePoint, MS Project, MS Office, MS Visio
Training Attended - Software Testing & Quality Assurance, SWOT Analysis & its applications, Benchmarking(BM), Value Engineering
Certification
+ CBAP - Certified Business Analysis
Certified Safe 5 Scrum Master
+ PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
+ ITIL Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management
Languages
- English
Full professional proficiency
- French
Read & Write - B1 level
Speaking and Oral Comprehension : A1
Timeline
Scrum Master/Senior Business Analyst
Rogers Communication
03.2017 - 06.2023
Senior Business Analyst
Rogers Communications
09.2010 - 02.2017
Agile Business Analyst
CPNI Inc.
05.2007 - 08.2010
Certificate in Business Analysis - Business Analysis
University of Toronto
Master of Philosophy (Mphil) - Computer Science
The Hong Kong University of Science And Technology
Master of Science - Industrial Engineering
Sharif University of Technology
Bachelor of Science - Applied Mathematics
Tehran University
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