Junior Business Analyst job description

Business analysis — Junior Business Analyst
Documents requirements and processes, guided by a senior analyst.

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it.
- Plan and run elicitation for a project on your own, choosing between interviews, observation and document review, and confirm what you heard with the people who said it.
- Write a requirements document for a project unaided, with business, functional and non-functional needs each testable and traced to its source.
- Write and refine stories for a team's backlog, split large ones into deliverable slices, and write acceptance criteria testers can use directly.
- Model a current and future process in BPMN on your own, with roles, decisions, hand-offs and exceptions shown correctly.
- Clean and combine data from several exports with lookups and formulas, and build pivots and charts that answer a clear question.

REQUIREMENTS
- No earlier level needed: this is the first level of the ladder

REQUIRED SKILLS
Elicitation
- Business Analysis Planning — You can follow the analysis plan for your part of a project and tell your lead when a task in it is taking longer than planned.
- Stakeholder Analysis and Mapping — You can list the people and teams named in a project brief and record who is responsible for what once a senior analyst has agreed it.
- Requirements Elicitation — You can plan and run elicitation for a project on your own, choosing between interviews, observation and document review, and confirm what you heard with the people who said it.
- Elicitation Workshop Facilitation — You can prepare materials for a requirements workshop, capture what is agreed on the day, and circulate the notes afterward.

Requirements
- Business Requirements Documentation — You can write a requirements document for a project unaided, with business, functional and non-functional needs each testable and traced to its source.
- User Story and Acceptance Criteria Writing — You can write and refine stories for a team's backlog, split large ones into deliverable slices, and write acceptance criteria testers can use directly.
- Use Case and Scenario Modeling — You can read a use case or scenario and check whether a proposed screen or process covers its steps.
- Business Rules and Decision Analysis — You can record a business rule as someone describes it, including the example they give, and pass it on for confirmation.
- Requirements Prioritization and Traceability — You can keep a requirements log or traceability sheet up to date as items are added, changed or closed.

Process Analysis
- Process Modeling with BPMN — You can model a current and future process in BPMN on your own, with roles, decisions, hand-offs and exceptions shown correctly.
- Current-State and Gap Analysis — You can gather facts about how a process works today, such as volumes, steps and systems used, for a senior analyst to analyze.
- Root Cause Analysis — You can collect examples and data about a recurring problem and summarize them in a form the people analyzing it can use.
- Process Improvement Design — You can spot obvious duplication or manual rework in a process you have mapped and note it for review.

Data Analysis
- SQL Data Investigation — You can run and adapt an existing SQL query to answer a simple question, and check the result looks reasonable.
- Spreadsheet Data Analysis — You can clean and combine data from several exports with lookups and formulas, and build pivots and charts that answer a clear question.
- Data Mapping and Entity Modeling — You can fill in a field-by-field data mapping sheet from system documentation and flag fields you cannot match.
- Business Outcome and KPI Definition — You can record the success measures a sponsor has named, and find where the data for each one lives.

Solution Delivery
- Low-Fidelity Mockups for Requirements — You can sketch a simple screen or report layout to show what a requirement means, using the team's usual tool.
- User Acceptance Testing Coordination — You can plan and run UAT for a project: scenarios, testers, environment, schedule, defect triage and a clear sign-off.
- Solution Options and Vendor Evaluation — You can collect product information and pricing from vendors and set it out in a comparison someone else has designed.
- User Experience Insight Analysis — You can use the feedback and usage data you are given to find where users struggle, and review the findings with a senior analyst.

Strategy & Change
- Cost-Benefit Analysis — You can gather cost figures and benefit estimates for an option and lay them out in the team's standard template.
- Change Impact Analysis — You can list the teams, systems and documents that use or describe a process that is about to change.
- Business Capability Mapping — You can find where a project sits on an existing capability map when someone shows you the map.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can keep your own tasks and deadlines in a current to-do list, and tell your manager as soon as work you own will be late.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate how long a task will take once the approach is clear, and you say promptly when the estimate turns out to be wrong.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can stay responsible after you hand work over: you check it did what it was meant to, fix your own mistakes, and give updates before anyone asks.
- Quality Focus — You can choose checks that suit the task in front of you, catch your own mistakes before anyone else sees them, and confirm the result works once people start using it.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can work out what is wrong in work you did not create, and you fix the underlying cause instead of working around the symptom.
- Domain Expertise — You can apply the basics of your field to the work you are given, and ask an expert when a task goes beyond what you have learned.
- Continuous Learning — You can pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it, and you turn what you learned into something others can reuse.

Communication
- Communication — You can explain your work so your team can act on it, and play a request back in your own words before you act on it.
- Collaboration — You can work well with people in other roles, share context and credit, and take criticism of your work without defending territory.
- Writing & Documentation — You can document your own work well enough for a colleague to follow it unaided, such as a how-to guide or a handover, and keep it current as things change.
- Stakeholder Management — You can keep your manager and immediate team informed of your progress, and you raise an issue before someone else discovers it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can act on direction well, seek feedback on how you work, and be open about what you need help with.
- Mentoring — You can share what you have just learned with your peers and help a newer colleague find their way around.
- Strategic Thinking — You can explain why the work you were given matters and who it is for.