Dilraj Bhatia

"My personality types are Coordinator, Innovator, and Manager. These personality traits come in very handy in my role as a Business Analyst where I get to analyse business problems and design product solutions.I am a creative person who loves to come up with new ideas, identify problems, and come up with solutions to those problems. I love working with people from different backgrounds and having meaningful conversations with them and understand their perspective.I enjoy nature trails, traveling, and doing social work where possible. In the last few years, I have taught basic computer skills to children in Cambodia and India. It was a brilliant experience to see the enthusiasm of the kids to learn technology."

"I work as a freelance/contract IT Business Analyst(BA) and Product Designer in NHS Digital. In simple terms, BAs do problem finding in a business, consolidate views of different types of users, and work with Stakeholders and software development teams to create solutions for the problems identified. As a Product designer, I ensure that the products we design are easy to use for the end-users and meets their needs.My work usually consists of the following activities:1. UNDERSTAND USER NEEDS - Identify end-users, stakeholders, and interview them to understand their user needs or business problem areas. Since I work in NHS Digital, most of my end users are doctors, nurses, and patients. The senior stakeholders are business representatives who have a stake in the project. 2. PROBLEM FINDING - Host requirements workshops with the users where we use various techniques such as brainstorming, creating business process flows and user journeys to understand how the business or product currently works. What are the areas of improvement in the product? What do we want to improve or change in the product in future? Sometimes, it might be a brainstorming session of a completely new product.3. DESIGN PRODUCT - Host Design workshops with software developers or software suppliers to create solutions for the business needs or problem areas identified in the business or product. Here we analyse the problem areas of the business in depth.4. PROTOTYPE - Create prototypes for the solution/product designed. A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. 5. TEST PROTOTYPE - Test the prototype with end-users and gain feedback and created a user testing report. It’s important to get this feedback so that we don’t design a product that is not useful to end-users and does not achieve desired benefits.6. ANALYSE - Analyse and report findings of user testing to the business stakeholders and create business requirements for the product.7. STAKEHOLDER APPROVAL - Get agreement from business stakeholders on the business requirements.8. HANDOVER BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS - Communicate business requirements to software suppliers and collaborate with them to build the product.9. SUPPORT SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TEAM - Answer and resolve any queries on business requirements from software suppliers.10. SOFTWARE TESTING and IMPLEMENTATION - Help with software testing and implementation of the product and train end-users to use the product.The starting salary for this role is usually 32-35k"

"I started out as a software developer and gradually I started to interact with the customer to understand what they need from the product so that I could develop/code software products effectively. For example, they would say that they want a simple to use login page with a username and password which I would then develop. This is called gathering business requirements.I soon realised, that I really enjoy understanding the business and user needs and analysing them and converting them into business requirements which I would then give to software developers to develop software products. This led me to start exploring Business Analysis and Product Design as a full-time career. As I enjoy visuals and drawing too, I learnt how to create simple visual designs for software applications that works for end-users and explored User product designing as well. Product design is about what does the customer/user experience when they use your product? For example, Should the login page for a website have one login button? How should we display error message when password is incorrect?Is the product intuitive and easy to use? Does it solve their problem and meet their needs? Designing products for business users really interests me and it's great to see the end-users happy with your product when it meets their expectations. For example, If a social media app does not let you connect with anyone then it surely does not meet your need to socialise with others. It is not a good product design as it is not meeting the user's need to socialise with others."

"I live an interesting and simple life. I live with my husband and we love to go out for nature walks or do gardening together. I really enjoy my work and at the same time take breaks to pursue my other interests.In the past two years, I have worked with a Social Organisation in India that houses and supports mentally destitute women and abandoned children. I loved doing recreational activities with mentally challenged women and tutoring the children.I also volunteered in rural Cambodia to teach computer skills to children. I like to create right balance between work and personal life and enjoy every moment in both spheres of my life.I love to come up with new ideas for apps and discuss them with my network of friends and explore it."

"My typical day starts with meditation which is followed by a quick run or cycling. I start work around 8:30 am. Usually, we start with a quick 10-minute meeting with our team where each person says what they did yesterday and what they plan to do today and any work blockers. It’s a very good way to plan your day and exchange information with your team and avoid any duplication of work. Then I crack on with my work which is usually any of the activities mentioned in 'what I do' question depending on at which stage we are in the project. One of the projects which I had worked on was about creating an online training/learning portal for developing leadership skills.It was very interesting to understand from business stakeholders details of what leadership programme would be hosted on this portal and how would the students use the programme or tutors mark the assignments submitted by the students of the programme. We hosted a user requirements workshop to understand from the students what format of the programme would work best for them. The tutors mentioned the challenges they face when marking the assignments online. The business stakeholders provided details on the layout of modules of the programme etc. Overall, it was a very successful workshop where we could understand the needs and the perspectives of the students, tutors and business stakeholders.After this workshop, we created user journey diagrams that detailed how students and tutors would interact with the portal. How would business stakeholders upload content of the programme on the Portal etc? We validated these user journeys with end-users in the second workshop.These activities are very engaging and these workshops require a good level of planning and preparation. They are very crucial in understanding user needs and it is important to keep the focus on the goal of the workshop as its very easy to derail when there are too many perspectives. Sometimes it gets difficult to get an agreement from all stakeholders when there are conflicting viewpoints and it requires soft skills to come to a common ground. I usually finish work around 4:30 pm, after which I love to chit chat with my family and friends and wind down with tea and a good book to read."

"Bachelor of CommercePost Graduate Degree - Master’s in Information Technology"