Requirements Engineers in Germany

Topics:

• Further development of the CRM system NKAM and technical separation of “direct” and “indirect” sales
• Redesign of the discount management area and outsourcing to another system.
• Designing numerous improvements on the wholesale side to reduce manual effort down to the level of user stories.

• Self-employed · Berlin, Germany
• Co-founded the company and own the entire technical side: product architecture, backend, frontend, infrastructure and operations.
• Designed and built the Automated Booking System (ABS) as well as the core platform and payment logic.
• Development of AI-powered SaaS products, from architecture through backend and frontend to production operation.
• Technical consulting on product architecture, data protection and permissible automation.
• Building, running and monetising my own API products for AI agents, each available as a REST interface and as an MCP server.
• Full ownership of architecture, infrastructure, billing, legal texts and go-to-market.

• Impact: Structured requirements analysis and quality assurance as a foundation for the further development of a software solution.
• Analysis, documentation, and coordination of requirements. Conducting stakeholder analyses, interviews, and workshops to gather and validate requirements. Conducting requirements reviews and working closely with business departments and development teams.

Techniques & Tools: Requirements Engineering, Stakeholder Management, Workshop Facilitation, System Context Modeling, Requirements Reviews, Quality Scenarios, Miro, Jira, Confluence

• Analysis of the existing reporting platform, including processes and governance topics, with stakeholders from Sales and Marketing.

• Detailed analysis and evaluation of customer-defined requirements for existing reporting and new dashboards to be established.

• Support for stakeholders in managing sales processes and identifying KPI trends at an early stage.

• Use of Microsoft Power BI as the central analysis and reporting platform.

• Development of a proposal for the required further development of processes and the Power BI platform.

• Documentation of AS-IS business processes and derivation of company-wide KPIs, including coordination with stakeholders.

• Analysis and assessment of the customer's Power BI platform.

• Analysis of processes and data governance.

• Documentation of AS-IS business processes.

• Development of recommendations for further developing processes and the reporting platform.

• Design and implementation of dashboards in Power BI.

• Development of company-wide KPIs and coordination with stakeholders.

• Microsoft Power BI.

• Data analytics.

• KPI definition and reporting.

• Dashboard design and data visualization.

• Stakeholder management and requirements management.

• Ongoing support and further development.

Project overview: The use of “Generative Pretrained Transformer” (GPT) technologies will greatly change the world of work in the coming years. ITZBund is developing a basic service for this purpose, which can be used by its 200 customers. This basic service is offered both on-premises and in the cloud. Launched in 12/23, production systems (based on the MVP) had already been successfully rolled out and operated for several authorities and federal ministries by 05/24.

Project metrics:

• 2024 budget approx. 20 Mio €
• approx. 70 people directly involved in the project
• regular (indirect) contact with approx. 80 people in the wider project environment

My main responsibilities:

• Overall responsibility as external project manager
• Project definition phase/ Project setup and establishment of the project organization
• Strategic and operational project planning, as well as project design and ongoing adjustments
• Ongoing coordination with the project owner and stakeholders at ITZBund
• Ongoing coordination with sub-project managers, agile roles, and other project team members
• Responsibility for project controlling, quality management, risk management, and change management
• Responsibility for providing the basic service in on-premises and cloud environments and its ongoing development
• Planning and leading several hypercare phases
• Collaboration and ongoing coordination with a federal ministry partner project and delivery of an MVP
• Coordination with the agile teams
• Coordination with operations, release, and deployment
• Responsibility for delivering initial customer projects
• Responsibility for developing AI governance
• Ensuring accessibility (BITV)
• Responsibility for setting up a sub-project for marketing activities
• Support in setting up an efficient proposal process
• Stakeholder management

Approach:

• V-Modell XT ITZBund
• Scrum

Tools used:

• Microsoft Office, Skype, MS Project, Confluence, Jira, Sharepoint, Miro

• Restructuring of the network architecture/topology, followed by installation, setup and testing of the network at a small business.
• Resolution of server (permissions and roles) and connection problems (WAN, (V)LAN, WLAN).
• Infrastructure support and maintenance.
• Creation of documents such as manuals, architecture documents and design documents.
• Revision of manuals and technical documents, as well as creation of VBA macros.
• Use of AI and basic prompting, as well as formulation of AI requests.
• Adjustment of workflows due to legal requirements and optimization of existing workflows.
• Delivery of courses and training for adaptations, new features and changed workflows.
• Modeling basis: BPMN.
• System environment: MS Office 2019/365, Win10/11, Teams, Netgear (Switch), QNAP, Synology (NAS), Linux (Ubuntu).

• Business analysis of payments for the introduction of Wero EPI in Germany.
• Analysis and optimization of merchant processes in the context of acquiring and issuing.
• Analysis of interfaces for instant payments.
• Analysis of SCT-Inst processes, settlement mechanisms and reporting processes.
• Identification and clarification of gaps in merchant processes.
• Analysis and documentation of clearing and settlement processes.
• OSPlus process analysis and documentation.
• Coordination and alignment with scheme management as well as various payment service providers and financial institutions on merchant processes.
• Preparation and follow-up as well as active participation in EPI meetings on technical coordination and regulatory topics in payments, including content familiarization and prioritization.
• Preparation and documentation of project and steering committees in the EPI environment.
• Creation of status reports for the subproject.
• Maintenance and structuring of Confluence pages for project documentation.
• Coordination and alignment with the issuing teams on individual customer processes as well as aligning with bank processes and acquirer processes in the Wero environment.
• Communication with payment service providers regarding merchant and bank processes in the Wero environment.
• Organizational support for project management in special tasks in the EPI and Wero environment.
• Digital filing and documentation in Confluence and Microsoft Teams.
• Planning, implementation and tracking of work packages and steps.
• Quality assurance and project control.
• Consulting on IT strategy, IT architecture and interface management in the EPI and Wero environment.
• Technical environment: Jira, Confluence, XML, JSON, MS Office (Word, Excel, Teams, PowerPoint), SharePoint, Draw.io, Innovator, 3rd-level support, ITIL, creation and updating of software documentation, interface management, OSPlus, Scrum, KYC, payment, European Payments Initiative (EPI), Wero, Microsoft Loop, Instant Payments, SCT-Inst.

• Development of strategies, processes and system requirements to further develop the lead and campaign streams of a Salesforce system for the subsystems Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Analytics Cloud
• Gathering and creation of marketing strategy concepts for direct sales, focusing on lead generation for new and existing customers
• Analysis and optimization of existing and new contact points
• Derivation of system requirements and user tests for new developments
• Establishment of a requirements and implementation process for business needs at the interface between CRM strategy and marketing system operations
• Facilitation of ideation workshops with the project's stakeholders
• Mediation between business and technical project stakeholders
• Analysis and post-documentation of existing marketing strategies and the system functions already created for them
• Analysis of target groups and pre-system data quality as a foundation for new CRM strategies
• Consultation on content and asset strategy for marketing campaigns
• Definition of KPIs and other performance criteria for the system and CRM strategy

• Defined and established the areas of responsibility
• Built a governance model for the department and its areas of responsibility
• IT strategy, project management, process management, and quality and sustainability management
• Developed a communications strategy for the group
• Created the IT strategy
• Designed templates, guidelines, and processes for consistent ways of working
• Recorded strategic guidelines and grouped ongoing projects – derived a roadmap for strategic planning
• Reviewed ongoing projects
• Prepared staffing calculations and capacity planning
• Defined job profiles

• Clarification of project objectives, scope and the target business vision for building the AI-based knowledge database.
• Derivation of the initial architecture and implementation strategy for the Zasterbot chatbot, including separation of the MVP and further development stages.
• Development of a target business vision for building a structured knowledge database and integrating a future chatbot.
• Derivation and prioritization of use cases for information retrieval and provision by the chatbot.
• Modeling of data structures and flows for the effective organization of the knowledge database on the Base44 platform.
• Design and implementation of data models for storing and linking relevant information.
• Development of processes for extracting, analyzing and preparing raw data for the knowledge database.
• Ensuring data consistency and quality as the basis for the future chatbot.
• Planning the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for precise and context-specific answers.
• Implementation of functions for analyzing and displaying data from the knowledge database.
• Use of the Base44 platform with JSON Schema-based entities and a flexible permission concept.
• Implementation of Deno functions for backend logic, event processing and connecting external APIs.
• Integration of OpenAI services for initial data analysis.

• Conducted requirement analysis, management and process development according to Automotive SPICE in a SAFe context within agile structures
• Developed requirements in Codebeamer, DOORS Next Generation and PTC Integrity
• Advanced requirements tools Codebeamer and DOORS NG
• Applied Scrum in SAFe context, Jira, Confluence and stakeholder management
• Delivered management and team coaching/training, supported Scrum Masters and stakeholder management for requirement elicitation and process optimization
• Mediated conflict resolution at development and management levels
• Advised management on skill sets for new team members (NLP, Insights Discovery)
• Implemented Scrum & Kanban, designed and delivered team trainings
• Organized complete training programs considering existing company processes with individualized methods

• Collaborated with subject matter experts to define the system architecture for the "Health and Well-Being" real-time monitoring feature, leading to a 15% reduction in design iterations.
• Translated high-level stakeholder requirements into clear, verifiable system requirements.
• Managed requirements in Code Beamer to improve accessibility and version control.
• Created traceability matrices to ensure alignment between requirements, development, and V&V plans.

• Development of a code-supported tool for end-of-life control of product parts
• Creation of a template
• Evaluation and later creation of various additional codes and extensions
• Preparation of a short documentation
• Skills: Microsoft Excel VBA
• Products: Microsoft Excel
• Industry: cosmetics