Description
The Business Analyst is the liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate, and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies, and possibly information systems. The Business Analyst understands and analyzes business processes and opportunities in the context of the requirements and recommends solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals. The incumbent must clearly understand project change management and how the role plays a key piece in the change management process. The incumbent must also be able to fulfill basic project management responsibilities throughout project lifecycle. Further, the Business Analyst will act as the subject matter expert (SME) providing coaching, guidance and mentoring to other team members supporting project initiatives.Primary
Responsibilities
- Independently initiates, identifies and coordinates the analysis of business needs in project areas.
- Interfaces or liaison between business owners/users and development project teams to determine, communicate and validate business requirements.
- Supports projects by understanding business needs, opportunities, problems, impacts, risks, and presents and agrees to recommended solutions.
- Gathers requirements utilizing various methods and approaches.
- Understands, gathers, and defines requirements of all types, and documents with process flows and diagrams.
- Writes detailed business requirements, functional specifications and, when involved in project teams using an iterative development methodology.
- Identifies and communicates requirement/scope issues and takes lead in driving to resolution for scope inclusion into the project.
- Ties the strategic objectives to the project and quickly demonstrates a detailed understanding of the business, and be able to help determine solutions to problems.
- Identifies opportunities for increasing business efficiency through improved manual and automated process systems.
- Understands business processes and products for assigned business functions and the relationships between those processes and information systems, including the impact of system changes to business processes.
- Determines the impact of system change to the business and vice versa.
- Builds consensus among stakeholders, often recapping direction and decisions made.
- Applies logic to conflict management and issues.
- Maintains user confidence and protects operations by keeping information confidential.
- Supports a variety of applications, sites, and departments.
- Assists in facilitating User Acceptance Testing o derive test strategy in creating and reviewing test cases.
- Communicates risks and ensures understanding of these risks.
- Provides on-going project management and status reporting at all levels.
- Composes user stories.
- Creates and maintains project schedules by developing project plans and functional specifications, estimating time requirements, establishing deadlines, monitoring milestone completion, and tracking all phases of the project lifecycle.
- Provides timely reporting of issues that impact project progress, coordinating actions, and resolving conflicts.
- Conducts project meetings with project team(s) regularly to review project deliverables and deadlines.
- Performs other duties as assigned.
Qualifications
Any combination of relevant education and experience and/or related professional designations/certifications in this field is highly desirable.
Education
- Minimum Required: BS/BA degree or equivalent business and technical experience
Experience
- 7+ years of experience in Business Analysis or Project Management.
- Experience with Salesforce Service cloud or Sales cloud
- Experience working in an Agile environment
Essential Skills
- Must have strong analytical skills and be able to work under aggressive deadlines.
- Experience is writing user stories in Scrum Sprint cycle approach.
- Ability to anticipate and resolve problems.
- Ability to work with multi-location resources.
- Experience as an effective and highly contributing team member on projects.
- Demonstrated track record of assisting others, meeting assigned timelines.
- Demonstrated ability to analyze technical and/or functional problems.
- Demonstrated ability to create solutions and ideas that add value.
- Ability to communicate technical subject matter to non-technical audience.
- Provide insight to business team regarding technical challenges.
- Excellent verbal, written, and presentation skills; demonstrated ability to effectively communicate technical and business issues and solutions.
- Strong organizational skills and the ability to organize work, establish realistic goals and deadlines, and execute the plan.
- Ability to prioritize tasks and manage multiple and changing priorities.
- Intermediate skills in Microsoft Office applications, including MS Visio and MS Project.
- Ability to negotiate with business users and IT personnel across departments to agree on the best solution for all users.
- Excellent relationship building skills.
- Strong leadership and mentoring skills.
- Knowledge of iterative development methodologies preferred.
- Project management or development lead experience preferred.