Lead Business Analyst job description

Business analysis — Lead Business Analyst
Sets the analysis approach across a portfolio and leads analysts.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Elicitation
- Business Analysis Planning — You can set the analysis approach across several projects, so analysts plan in a consistent way and their work lines up with how each delivery team runs.
- Stakeholder Analysis and Mapping — You can read the politics around a large change, advise sponsors on who has to be won over, and keep the map current as people and priorities shift.
- 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 design and run workshops for large or contentious changes with senior attendees, and recover a session that is going off the rails.

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 keep priorities and traceability coherent across several teams and releases, and catch requirements that have fallen between them.

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 run gap analysis across several business areas at once, and turn it into a sequenced set of changes leaders can fund.
- Root Cause Analysis — You can lead root cause work on costly or recurring failures, and test the conclusion with data rather than opinion.
- Process Improvement Design — You can run a program of process improvements for a business area and show the measured result of each change.

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 tie outcome measures across a portfolio to business goals, and make sure they are checked after release, not forgotten.

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 run evaluations for major purchases or platform choices, and recommend an option that weighs cost, fit, risk and how hard it would be to switch away later.

Strategy & Change
- Cost-Benefit Analysis — You can build cases for large investments across several areas, and stop weak cases before they reach a funding decision.
- Change Impact Analysis — You can assess the combined impact of several changes landing on the same people, and advise leaders when to sequence or delay them.
- Business Capability Mapping — You can build and maintain the capability map for a large part of the organization, and use it to show where spending overlaps and where it falls short.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can keep several people's work in step across teams, agree priorities and hand-offs with them, and keep one shared task list that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work that spans several teams, name the assumptions behind each figure, and rework the plan when those assumptions break.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, taking the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can set how quality is checked on complex work shared by several teams, and you spot the problems that only appear where their pieces meet.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in areas where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, time, and the effort needed to keep them working.
- Domain Expertise — You can bring in good practice from outside the organization and make it work here, and your judgment clearly improves the work you touch.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Writing & Documentation — You can own the documents behind a large piece of work, coordinating contributions so that people who were never involved can carry it on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead across team boundaries, build the credibility that makes people follow you by choice, and create room for others to lead.
- Mentoring — You can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team.
- Strategic Thinking — You can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged.

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