Vidhya Shanmugam

"My personality types are Influencer, Investigator and Quality Controller. Some of the common qualities across these 3 types mention that I should be trustworthy, honest and reliable, and I couldn't agree more. In my work life, most of my managers have fed back to me that if there is a urgent job that needs to be done well, they would think of me to deliver the work.Business Analysis is looking into the details of existing processes or policies within a work environment and providing solutions to make it better. I believe the detail-oriented approach of the investigator personality and quality controller's traits to challenges existing process helps me do my work better. My role also involves working well with others and across different teams and different roles."

"My main role is to understand people's need for changing systems, processes, policies, or all of these together to make improvements. I work with leaders, managers and employees to understand the current issues, problem areas or requests, articulate and document the business needs into requirement statements, and help build an effective business process with use of technology.If the requirement demands a new technical solution, I have to work with software engineers and developers to create an application based on the business requirements. I will have to create list of primary users of the process and teams that will be affcted, and speak to all the people involved across different teams before building the solution. The tools I use would be a visual diagram like a flowchart to show user roles and tasks performed and order of activities in a structured way. Once the solution is developed, I help users to test the new application before the system can be used by a team.I enjoy the new challenges each project brings in this role. Every project will have challeges of its own and each of them will challenge your skills and expertise and offer great opportunities to learn. There is never a dull moment in this role and it is one of the reasons I thoroughly enjoy my job.The salary varies depending on experience - it can start at £30,000 for small scale project works, and increase to £70,000 or more when you reach a consultant role working in large scale transformation programmes."

"I was born in India and completed my professional qualification in Engineering in Computer Science, before moving to the UK to join my husband who worked here. Before moving to the UK, I worked in a contact centre providing technical support for US customers for 6 months. I worked at odd hours i.e. from 8.00 pm to 4.00 am in the morning to suit the working hours of American customers. It was tiring but interesting at the same time. After marriage, I moved to UK and took few months to adapt to the new country and way of life here. I was'nt ready to apply for jobs that I was qualified for due to self doubts so settled for administrative work and did admin roles in couple of companies. I joined National Grid in 2015 and this was a turning point in my career. I worked in various teams within the gas distribution department, and slowly worked my way up to become Team Leader. I had an opportunity to work on IT project that replaced a simple database application to sophisticated enterpise planning system. This opportunity ignited my interests for new technology and enabled me to use my skills gained while studying computer science. My experience on this project gave me the confidence to look out for more opportunities to work on small scale projects/transformation projects and step into the role of business analysis. "

"I am married and have a 10 year old daughter. In my spare time, I like to spend time cooking, going for long walks and reading. I have tried to go outdoors for walks almost everyday since the pandemic started, and in summer 2021 I enjoyed trips and hikes to Peak District and Scotland. I like to travel to new places and visited 10 countries so far and enjoy exploring different cuisines around the world and learning about different cultures. During the pandemic, I have been trying to use Duolingo application to learn Italian, as Italy has been one of my favourite countries I have travelled and I would love to travel there again. I read books that help me get deeper understanding of myself and that inspire to be better person, my favourite book has been The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People "

"My typical day involves working on IT projects to support my colleagues, customers and suppliers to make improvements to ways of working. Essentially, I collect information from teams that want to make things better. For example, this could be replacing paper application forms into electronic forms that can be accessed online, and creating additional features such as how to make the form work, what questions will need to be asked on the form, who are the users, who are the approvers of the form and so on. I will document these requirements, alng with user stories, and hand this information over to the technical team who will use their coding skills to build an application that can be used by the customers."

"I hold a Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering. I am working towards a International Diploma in Business Analysis. "