Business Analyst

As part of the Enrollment Solutions & Effectiveness team, the Business Analyst role is focused on eliciting business requirements across Enrollment & Customer Engagement department. This role will engage in testing solutions produced and implemented by Product and Engineering teams. The goal is to ensure staff and customers can have an engaging and efficient operational and customer experience with our Enrollment & Customer Engagement teams.

This role also focuses on recommending improvements for business processes, products, and features that would support a positive, and efficient enrolment and customer experience for internal and external customers. Overall, this role will act like an interpreter, and they are the go-to person when it comes to communications between business stakeholders and IT/Product teams to ensure all involved work together to attain the best results.

Core Responsibilities & Duties

• Requirements Gathering & Analysis

• Analyze business processes and information with a critical view to Identify pain points, and design scalable solutions to increase productivity and improve the user experience.

• Decompose high-level business and user requirements into functional and nonfunctional requirements, specified in an appropriate level of detail suitable for use by project team members who base their work on the requirements

• Analyze data to identify and define problem statements and use judgement and project management methodologies to develop employee-focused solutions.

• Requirements Management & Communication

• Write requirements specifications according to standard templates, using natural language simply, clearly, unambiguously, and concisely

• Communicate requirements to ensure all stakeholders have a shared understanding of the solution and to secure approval from stakeholders with the authority to approve

• Develop, improve and oversee the review and validation of written specifications with subject matter experts, development team members, and other partners to ensure on-time completion with all necessary sign offs.

• Business Analysis Planning & Monitoring

• Work to identify, define and scope Enrollment and Customer Engagement operational priorities and work with program and change management teams to ensure the delivery of mission-critical platform changes.

• Determine the best requirement elicitation techniques, requirements deliverables, and amount of time needed from stakeholders based upon knowledge of a given project or product.

• Ensure requirements are documented, traceable and testable through implementation. Performs current state analysis of existing business systems, applications and functions.

• Manage issues and changes to baselined requirements by identifying business impact of the changes and through effective application of change control processes and tools

• Develops and maintains user support documentation, analyzes software maintenance requirements including trouble report and change proposal analysis, and propose economical and efficient solutions as part of developing IT solutions to user requirements.

• Participate in Program Increment (PI) Planning sessions with our Agile Facilitation, Product Solutions & Product Management Teams

• Solution Assessment & Validation

• Works with project team to ensure proposed solutions align with requirements and maximizes value to stakeholders

• Defines requirements for solutions needed to transition from a legacy system to a new one

• Defines acceptance criteria, perform gap analysis on proposed solutions, and make recommendations

• Collaborate directly with project team to evaluate impact of defects and to develop plans for resolution or other mitigation

Additional Responsibilities & Duties

• Consulting

• Perform interviews of project stakeholders and translate this information into manageable and executable requirements for Product Solution & Product Management analysts and developers.

• Assist in the scoping out of Enrollment and Customer Engagement roadmap discussions and planning

• Lead business analysis and thoroughly document of current and future state business processes that require improvements.

• Apply deep understanding of the current business, industry context, regulatory context, future vision to develop an enterprise-wide business architecture capabilities and roadmap

• Lead requirements elicitation sessions using various methods, including but not limited to interviews, document analysis, requirements workshops, surveys, site visits, business process descriptions, user stories, scenarios.

• Occasionally act as lead for a customer team of junior business analysts to test new product features: design test cases to monitor system functionality and support system enhancements of new technology/experiences that support enrollment operations.

• Drive business stakeholders toward consensus and decisions regarding prioritization of requirements

• Prepping, speaking, and presenting ideas/solutions to drive adoption and engagement across the organization by impacted teams.

• Serve as a liaison to the following:

• Business Sponsors and Stakeholders - maintain a close working relationship to elicit business requirements and discuss scoping decisions across greater Pearson Virtual Schools departments

• Enterprise Architecture, & Security - collaborate early on during business requirements to review business capabilities identification as well as taking into consideration the necessary internal security processes and procedures

• Product & Information Technology Teams - collaborate with all facets of Product and Info Technology to maintain consistent alignment with technology initiatives, strategy and compliance.

Qualifications

• Credentials & Experience

• Bachelor's Degree: business administration, information technology, human factors, engineering. Or,

• Commensurate experience 3 to 5 years in a business or technology business analyst role in an agile and waterfall environment of more than 10 employees, focused on digital capabilities, or in similar roles in diversified, multi-brand businesses. And,

• Skills and ability to create Business Process Flows, User Stories and Business Requirements Documentation (BRD), required.

• Desired Qualifications

• Business Analysis and/or Agile certifications are highly desirable for example: Certified Scrum Professional, “ ScrumMaster (CSP-SM), Certified Scrum Professional, “ Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSP-CSPO), Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Scaled Agilist (SA), SAFe Advanced Scrum Master (SASM), PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP).

• Knowledge

• In-depth understanding of how to be successful business process definition and analysis, business requirements, gap, root-cause analysis activities.

• Knowledge of software development processes/procedures, service-oriented environments, and Agile practices.

• Experience in contributing to the creation of business cases for technology-related solutions.

• Technical Skills

• Ability to lead discussions and learning sessions with 5 attendees.

• Proven ability to effectively write Business Requirements Documents (BRD) that includes a clear business analysis approach and scope, requirements communication plan.

• Must be able to create User Stories that truly understand the end users.

• Ability to review and Quality Assurance data from multiple systems with a high level of confidence and deep understanding of the impacts across those various systems.

• Ability to perform Needs/Root Cause/Basic Data Analysis.

• Strong written and verbal facilitation communication skills in a virtual environment, with an emphasis on translation of code and/or data into business terms.

• Experience using Salesforce CRM product, including workflows, validation rules, and integrations.

• Support Product Owners in backlog management, iteration planning, and elaboration of the user stories.

• Create process flow diagrams, and wire frames to ensure goal/system alignment

• Design and develop requirements including writing basic functional and non-functional specifications.

• Identifying Acceptance Criteria or gathering and composing other on-demand documentation.

• Strong Microsoft skills (i.e., Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Server, Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, MS Project, SharePoint)

• Experience with one or more of the following process management tools: MS Visio, ARIS, Signavio, & Blueworks.

• Professional Expectations

• Ability to work in fast paced, multi-tasking, and collaborative environment, yet produce timely and high-quality requirements-related work products.

• Demonstrates a sense of calmness under periods of uncertainty or change while dealing with stress in a manner that sets the necessary tone for the team and function.

• Be comfortable talking about data in a deep and detailed way.

• Acute business acumen and understanding of organizational issues and challenges

• Ability to decipher “signal from the noise” – comfortably working with ambiguity and changing requirements

• Global outlook with sensitivity and awareness of social and cultural differences

• Travel up to 10% may be required

Job: TECHNOLOGY

Organization: North America Connections

Schedule: FULL_TIME

Req ID: 1043