Business Analyst

Overview

Position Purpose
The Business Analyst's role is to elicit, analyze, specify, and validate the business needs of stakeholders. This includes interviewing stakeholders and gathering and compiling user requirements to understand the technology solutions they need. The Business Analyst will also apply proven communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills to help the business make good technology decisions. The Business Analyst will research new technology services and solutions that could drive business strategy, enhance business capabilities, create new business models, and drive business innovation.

This position is responsible for understanding the business, the industry, markets, and members, and ensuring that new technologies are well-researched so the business can optimize processes and achieve goals. As such, the Business Analyst needs to have significant research and reporting skills in subject matters pertaining to both IT and the business, and must have a thorough understanding of the business to identify its needs and envision emerging technology solutions.

This individual will apply proven analytical and problem-solving skills to help validate, verify, communicate, and resolve systems/software application issues through careful testing in order to maximize the benefit of IT initiatives.

• Assumes responsibility for the analysis and strategic planning of new applications to meet business needs.
• Document and chart existing business processes in order to define current business activities for the development of procedures and models.
• Identify and implement process and procedure improvements.
• Conduct interviews to gather user requirements, workflow storyboards, use cases, scenarios, and other methods.
• Identify and establish scope and parameters of requirements analysis on a project-by-project basis to define project impact, outcome criteria, and metrics.
• Work with stakeholders and project team to prioritize collected requirements.
• Research, review, and analyze the effectiveness and efficiency of existing requirements-gathering processes and develop strategies for enhancing or further leveraging these processes.
• Ensure that testing activities will allow applications to meet business requirements and systems goals, fulfill end-user requirements, and identify and resolve systems issues.
• Collaborate with analysts, and system owners in the testing of new software programs and applications.
• Ensure that any new software integration into company systems meets functional requirements, system compliance, and interface specifications.
• Prepare and deliver reports, recommendations, or alternatives for improving processes in operating systems across the organization.

• Assumes responsibility for the acquisition and deployment of technology solutions that enhance business capabilities, improve processes, and support innovation.
• Assist in conducting research on software and hardware products to meet agreed upon requirements and to support purchasing efforts.
• Participate in the QA of purchased solutions to ensure features and functions have been enabled and optimized.
• Participate in the selection of any requirements documentation software solutions that the organization may opt to use.

• Assumes responsibility for operational management of business requirements, including analysis, documentation, validation, testing, and stakeholder communication.
• Analyze and verify requirements for completeness, consistency, comprehensibility, feasibility, and conformity to standards.
• Develop and utilize standard templates to accurately and concisely write requirements specifications.
• Translate conceptual user requirements into functional requirements in a clear manner that is comprehensible to end users/project team.
• Create process models, diagrams, and charts to provide direction to end users and/or the project team.
• Develop and conduct peer reviews of the business requirements to ensure that requirement specifications are correctly interpreted.
• Assist with the interpretation of user requirements into feasible options, and communicating this back to the business stakeholders.
• Manage and track the status of requirements throughout the project lifecycle; enforce and redefine as necessary.
• Communicate changes, enhancements, and modifications of business requirements – verbally or through written documentation – to project managers, sponsors, and other stakeholders so that issues and solutions are understood.
• Conduct all types of application testing as needed, such as system, regression, and acceptance testing methods.
• Communicate test progress, test results, and other relevant information to project stakeholders and management.
• Develop, distribute, and coordinate in-depth end-user reviews for modified and new systems or applications.

• Assumes responsibility for establishing and maintaining effective…