Richard Orekoya

Richard is a versatile and dedicated Business Analyst with 7+ years of global expertise and a multifaceted role acumen in driving IT/business projects to successful completion through meticulous requirement elicitation, stakeholder collaboration, and solution delivery within Agile and Waterfall environments. 

He is experienced in all facets of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) across many industries such as government agencies, banking, logistics and supply chain, transportation, e-commerce/retail, and education, to mention a few. This is coupled with his intrinsic ability for business process optimization, stakeholder management, and agile project management. Richard is adept at navigating the complex landscapes of various industries, specializing in implementing IT/business solutions that optimize operations and drive business success. Proficient in understanding business processes through journey maps, managing product backlogs, and collaborating with stakeholders to drive continuous improvement. 

He is recognized for enhancing system functionalities by ensuring all user requirements are met while adhering to budgetary constraints and timelines. He is also committed to fostering an environment of continuous improvement and learning within IT/Business project teams, ensuring alignment with the latest industry trends and technologies.

• Conducts in-depth research to evaluate and articulate business challenges, pinpointing their root causes using root cause and gap analyses, and translating essential business needs into viable business process solutions; transitioning from current to target state business architecture; ensuring coherent and strategic progression. 
• Elicits and analyzes requirements through effective business/SMEs/Technical stakeholders’ interaction and JAD sessions/workshop facilitation. 
• Authors several Requirement Management Plans, which encompass business background, problems, goals, affected system areas, actors & personas, non-functional & functional requirements, and a visual model.
• Documents user actors and personas, creates the customer journey, and captures essential characteristics and motivations to align requirements and solutions with user needs.
• Regularly works with stakeholders and product teams to convert business narratives and break down large epics into actionable features and user stories using the gherkin method, while skillfully crafting clear use cases and acceptance criteria, ensuring a sharp focus on business team collaboration and aligning deliverables with organizational goals.
• Professionally utilizes ALM tools like JIRA and Confluence to document and manage clear, buildable, and testable requirements, maintaining traceability and coherent detailed designs.
• Engages agile teams and occasionally steps into roles like Product Owner to managing and prioritizing the product backlog (grooming), assigning story points, and elucidating ticket details when required.
• Occasionally acts as Scrum Master/Lead Scrum Master ensuring sprints alignment and facilitating various scrum ceremonies.
• Regularly collaborates with QA teams during UAT, demos, retrospectives, and sprint planning, representing development teams to clarify intended software functionality.
• Ensures cohesive development efforts by collaborating with various teams (providing input and feedback to finalize UI/UX deliverables (e.g., product road maps, wireframes, clickable prototypes, mockups). 
• Works with development and testing teams to analyze and deliver business requirements to stakeholders, providing key visual models like Swimlane, web sequence/use case and activities diagrams for all projects.
• Leverages a strong understanding of SAFe Agile methodologies, participating in and, as required, facilitates PI planning sessions, and documenting analyses and recommendations for technical product roadmaps.
• Identifies, manages/mitigates risks throughout the PI, ensuring that impediments and dependencies are effectively addressed.
• Performs cost-benefit analyses to quantify and/or validate problem statements and solutions while establishing pivotal business performance indicators.
• Analyzes data, processes, and systems to uncover issues and pinpoint opportunities for enhancement.
• Effectively manages time and prioritizes tasks, ensuring adherence to project timelines while exhibiting adaptability by remaining receptive to evolving business requirements.

Key Achievements:

• Enhanced stakeholder satisfaction by 25% through targeted decompositions of epic stories into actionable user stories and features across many projects.
• Successfully translated over 100 complex business requirements/stories into developer-friendly acceptance criteria, reducing development misunderstandings by 25% and enhancing the product quality.
• Led over 40 refinement sessions, clearly elucidating ticket details and enabling the assignment of accurate story points, which improved sprint planning accuracy.
• Facilitated over 50+ scrum ceremonies and implementing SAFe framework, contributing to a significant improvement in team alignment and product delivery pace.
• Identified and mitigated risks during PI planning and execution, preventing potential delays and ensuring a 90% on-schedule delivery of value.

EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS

• Master in Business Administration, University of South Wales, United Kingdom
• Bachelor of Science, Industrial Chemistry, University of Ibadan
• Bachelor of Engineering, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, The Polytechnic, Ibadan

MAJOR TRAININGS/CERTIFICATIONS

• Agile Mastery 
  • Certified Scrum Master (CSM) (Int. Scrum Inst; )
• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) (Int. Scrum Inst; )
• SAFe Scrum Master (SSM) (Int. Scrum Inst;)
• Business Operations & Project Management 
  • Certified Six Sigma White/Yellow Belt (Six Sigma Academy, Amsterdam)
  • Certificate in Project Management (University of Washington)
  • Certificate in Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies (University of Maryland)
• Data Analysis & Management
  • Tableau Data Analysts/Specialist Desktop Certificate (Udemy)
  • Certificate in Data Analysis with Python (IBM)
  • Certificate in Advanced Google Analytics (Google)