Ciara Whelan

BA team lead on a digital program overseeing and coordinating the efforts of multiple business analysts working across concurrent projects to launch new retail, small business and commercial banking platforms.

• Coach and lead a team of BAs to assist in their growth and help ensure that the right processes and templates are used.
• Work with the assigned BAs and other stakeholders to create BA plans, managing assignments and allocations to ensure they are sufficient to meet the business needs and stated goals of the initiative while also aligning with individual skills.
• Work with the project managers to provide input to the annual resource budget planning.
• Conduct regular meetings, including stand-ups and 1-to1’s, to ensure that the BA team understands their deliverables, blockers are identified and resolved or escalated, and due dates are being tracked to.
• Work with internal customers to understand business needs and translate them into requirements and project scope.
• Collaborated closely with stakeholders to identify opportunities for process improvements and drive continuous innovation in the organization.
• Implemented best-practice methodologies that improved overall project delivery timelines while maintaining quality standards.
• Requirements management and delivery planning, tracking requirements traceability throughout the project lifecycle.
• Completion and tracking of change requests.
• Collaborating with vendors, product, and business teams to document requirements including BRDS and NFRs.
• Lead the review of functional requirements to ensure completeness and sign off; lead functional requirements workshops to assist the technical and QA teams to ensure understanding and successful delivery of downstream artifacts.
• Provide weekly status reporting and deliver biweekly program updates.
• Working as part of the wider BA practice to develop a standard set of BA deliverables, templates, and a bank wide requirements repository.
• Aiding in the roll out of SDLC tools including Confluence and Jira to support the practice and the ongoing projects.

Program manager and implementation team lead working on a portfolio of complex omni channel digital banking implementations for Credit Unions across Canada. Leading consulting activities with all levels of client staff to guide them through the design, development, and implementation, ensuring a successful delivery of the new digital products (mobile banking apps, online banking and public websites).

• Management of a team of 15 BAs, PMs and 5 QAs responsible for migrating clients.
• Acting scrum master for a team of front and back-end developers responsible for product build. Acting as the bridge between the agile product delivery teams and the waterfall client delivery teams to ensure alignment and timely feature delivery and defect resolutions.
• Development of an end-to-end implementation plan.
• Resource management and allocation.
• Project budget management and estimation including cost estimations for client chargeback.
• Management of a third-party vendor as well as liaising with the banking hosts to ensure the required technical changes are completed.
• Determining the unique client aspects for each implementation, tailoring of the digital banking solution and implementation plan to meet the client’s needs, technical requirements, and strategic goals.
• Escalation path for issues experienced by clients and internal team members.
• Weekly project reporting including executive presentations and team reporting processes.
• Product SME providing support to all team members on bug resolution.
• Defect management and ownership of UAT and internal test cycles and reporting.
• Creating, and maintaining implementation artifacts and processes to be used by the entire team.
• Coached team members on productivity strategies to accomplish challenging goals.

Joined Accenture as a graduate analyst in the Technology Growth Practice and advanced to the position of manager in the Digital Practice . Throughout this time working in multiple fast paced positions and projects across several clients gaining experience as a systems test coordinator, SIT lead, Reference data analyst and manager, defect manager, implementation lead and project manager.

As a Digital manager worked as a project manager leading a 90+ team implementing a data hub to consolidate data from over 30 source systems and allowing regulatory reporting vital to the banks’ lending practice.

• Management of a large on/offshore team of data modelers, architects, and designers responsible for the phased design and build of a large enterprise data hub to consolidate data from over thirty source systems.
• The planning and management of each design and build phase under tight timelines, ensuring that the worked was aligned with downstream teams consuming the provisioned data.
• Liaising with both client and external vendor stakeholders and leading design workshops to ensure complete understanding and successful delivery of requirements.
• Documentation of all project deliverables including project plans, approach documents, technical and functional design documents, RAID logs and training manuals.
• Liaising with the program Test team to ensure full end to end testing of the overall solution.
• Defect management and prioritization during testing phases
• Solution architect for two source systems ensuring the integration of all required data attributes into the overall data architecture
• Ensuring the effective training of the BAU teams and consulting with the client and vendor teams to ensure a smooth transition of the product
• Management of deployment including the development and ownership of the strategic implementation plan to include resource allocation, back out planning and client sign off
• Ownership of the detailed deployment run book and daily status reporting throughout the implementation period
• Managing the development and design of data quality rules and data reconciliation and validation ETL build.
• Drive the development and execution of consistent data governance procedures and ensuring procedure adoption within business units.
• Consulting key business SMEs to develop key metrics to determine data quality.