Head of Business Analysis job description

Business analysis — Head of Business Analysis
Owns the business analysis practice and its standards company-wide.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Elicitation
- Business Analysis Planning — You can define how business analysis is planned and resourced across the organization, and decide where analysis effort is spent and where it is not worth it.
- Stakeholder Analysis and Mapping — You can shape how the organization identifies and involves the people affected by change, so no major group is found late in any program.
- Requirements Elicitation — You can set the elicitation standard for the organization, and are brought in on the changes where getting the need wrong would be most expensive.
- Elicitation Workshop Facilitation — You can run the workshops that settle the organization's most disputed requirements, and develop other facilitators to the same standard.

Requirements
- Business Requirements Documentation — You can set the documentation standards and templates other analysts use, and review their work for ambiguity before it reaches delivery.
- User Story and Acceptance Criteria Writing — You can coach product owners and analysts to write better stories, and keep several teams' backlogs consistent where their features meet.
- Use Case and Scenario Modeling — You can decide when use cases, scenarios or stories fit a change best, and review other analysts' models for missing paths.
- Business Rules and Decision Analysis — You can analyze complex decision logic such as pricing, eligibility or approvals, and separate rules the business should be able to change from those built into systems.
- Requirements Prioritization and Traceability — You can set how requirements are prioritized and traced across the organization, balancing control against the speed teams need.

Process Analysis
- Process Modeling with BPMN — You can set modeling conventions for a team, review other analysts' models, and keep a library of process maps people actually use.
- Current-State and Gap Analysis — You can assess where the whole organization falls short of its strategy, and frame the gaps in terms leadership acts on.
- Root Cause Analysis — You can build a habit across the organization of finding causes before funding fixes, and challenge leaders who skip the step.
- Process Improvement Design — You can set the organization's approach to continuous improvement, and decide which processes are worth redesigning first.

Data Analysis
- SQL Data Investigation — You can investigate unfamiliar or messy data models quickly, and review other analysts' queries for logic errors before anyone relies on the answer.
- Spreadsheet Data Analysis — You can review others' spreadsheet analysis for errors and fragile logic, and know when a question has outgrown a spreadsheet.
- Data Mapping and Entity Modeling — You can lead the data analysis for a large migration or integration program, and agree data ownership with the business.
- Business Outcome and KPI Definition — You can make measurable outcomes a condition for approving change across the organization, and use the results to decide what to fund next.

Solution Delivery
- Low-Fidelity Mockups for Requirements — You can mock up a full workflow across several screens to expose gaps in the requirements, and hand clear intent to designers without doing their job.
- User Acceptance Testing Coordination — You can set the acceptance testing approach for a portfolio, and fix the recurring reasons UAT finds problems too late.
- Solution Options and Vendor Evaluation — You can set how the organization chooses between building, buying and changing the way it works, and advise leadership on the biggest of those calls.

Strategy & Change
- Cost-Benefit Analysis — You can set how change is justified across the organization and hold completed changes to the benefits they promised.
- Change Impact Analysis — You can set how impact is assessed for every significant change in the organization, so no group is surprised by one.
- Business Capability Mapping — You can use capability mapping to shape the organization's investment plan, and keep it the shared view leaders plan against.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can set the everyday habits for how work is organized and followed up across the organization, and teams you do not lead adopt the routines you introduce.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast work and staffing quarters ahead, and the way you estimate becomes what the wider organization plans against.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can take on the outcomes the organization is most exposed on, and other leaders send problems with no owner to you by default.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organization by building the tools and habits that make the careful way the easy way.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can crack problems the organization has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole kind of problem.
- Domain Expertise — You can influence how the field is practiced beyond this organization, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years.
- Continuous Learning — You can set what the organization invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement.

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organization communicates, and the forums and norms you create clearly improve how information travels through it.
- Collaboration — You can remove the barriers that stop teams working together, and how the organization collaborates changes because of what you built.
- Writing & Documentation — You can set the writing standard the organization works to, and documents you wrote are still in use long after you have moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organization in its most important relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organization, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organization grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong in their field.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organization's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) (required from Lead Business Analyst)