Business Analysis

Business Analysis for enhancing search engine experience on the portal

Client: CISCO Systems | Vendor: Comsys Services, LLC

Nam Technologies, Inc. recently worked on a short (6-sprint) Scrum project that had a nearly a full-time BA allocated as a resource to the team. We attended all the planning meetings, retrospectives and stand-ups. Our work was managed just like the rest of the team’s: written as tasks and posted on the Scrum board. There was huge value in having Nam as a part of their team. We ensured our delivery be always resulted in dependable go-to resource for all the tucked-away documentation and hard-to-find system descriptions. Out of scope of this project is drafting requirements or use cases, or reports.

We were enhancing search experience on global sites of CISCO’s portal. As a business analysis contract, we extensively worked in the agile environment with variety of stake holders of the project to track the progress of various developments in the test result optimization. Additionally, our Business Analyst involved in the below activities throughout the project.

• Participate in the requirement elicitation session with cross functional teams and assess the impact on cisco.com search results for the migration of web pages to the new web content management system Adobe CQ5.
• Manage UAT (User Acceptance Testing) with end users for the relevancy testing of search algorithms including coordination and user acceptance signoff.
• Participate in strategic discussions and roadmap delivery with the business teams for Search Engine Optimization.
• Participate in search engine relevancy tuning of algorithms with the technical teams.
• Work on OBIEE Reporting Tool to prepare reports based on different business cases for various stakeholders who have their content on cisco.com.
• Create Cross Functional Information Boxes (xIBs) to enhance search User Experience and results findability.
• Work on Microsoft FAST platform to do analysis on the web pages in order to optimize them for better search ranking and experience.
• Coordinate, facilitate and provide periodic updates on the performance of search engine to the stakeholders.
• Respond to search feedback from the external users of cisco.com with appropriate technical/ business solutions.
• Consult business stakeholders on optimizing the pages by analyzing the HTML metadata on the web pages.
• Work with business user community and technology team to gather requirements, document existing business processes, make recommendations on how to improve existing business workflows & processes and obtain consensus from various stakeholders.
• Critically evaluate information gathered from multiple sources, reconcile conflicts, decompose high-level information into details, abstract up from low-level information to a general understanding, and distinguish user requests from the underlying true needs.
• Conduct walkthrough meetings with the Business and Technical team before getting to the design phase.
• Identify and document Change Management needs and risk analysis/mitigation for the cisco.com websites worldwide.