Senior Business Analyst job description

Business analysis — Senior Business Analyst
Leads analysis on complex, cross-team change and coaches analysts.

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design and run workshops for large or contentious changes with senior attendees, and recover a session that is going off the rails.
- Lead root cause work on costly or recurring failures, and test the conclusion with data rather than opinion.
- Define the options for a need, write the requirements section of a request for proposal, and lead a fair evaluation with the business.
- Tailor the analysis approach to a messy or high-risk change while keeping to the way the team already works, and explain to the sponsor why you chose it.
- Map stakeholders on a change that crosses several departments, recognize conflicting interests early, and plan how to get decisions made despite them.
- Elicit requirements in unfamiliar or highly regulated areas, and coach other analysts to question requests rather than transcribe them.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Business Analyst level (level 2 of 5) or equivalent

REQUIRED SKILLS
Elicitation
- Business Analysis Planning — You can tailor the analysis approach to a messy or high-risk change while keeping to the way the team already works, and explain to the sponsor why you chose it.
- Stakeholder Analysis and Mapping — You can map stakeholders on a change that crosses several departments, recognize conflicting interests early, and plan how to get decisions made despite them.
- Requirements Elicitation — You can elicit requirements in unfamiliar or highly regulated areas, and coach other analysts to question requests rather than transcribe them.
- 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 model scenarios across several systems and user roles, and use them to find the gaps in a proposed solution before it is built.
- Business Rules and Decision Analysis — You can untangle rules that conflict or have grown undocumented over years, and get the owners to agree a single correct version.
- Requirements Prioritization and Traceability — You can negotiate priorities when stakeholders disagree or scope has to be cut, and use traceability to show the impact of a requested change.

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, factoring in external drivers such as regulation and competitors, 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 redesign a cross-team process using lean or similar principles, and weigh automation against simpler fixes.

Data Analysis
- SQL Data Investigation — You can profile data from several tables to find quality issues or edge cases that change the requirements, and explain them to non-technical stakeholders.
- Spreadsheet Data Analysis — You can build a reusable analysis workbook others can update, with clear inputs, checks and assumptions.
- Data Mapping and Entity Modeling — You can model the business entities and relationships for a new solution, and resolve where two systems define the same thing differently.
- Business Outcome and KPI Definition — You can define outcomes for a change whose value is hard to measure, and challenge measures that track activity instead of results.

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 define the options for a need, write the requirements section of a request for proposal, and lead a fair evaluation with the business.
- User Experience Insight Analysis — You can agree with your analysts which user findings enter the backlog first, weighing cost and platform limits.

Strategy & Change
- Cost-Benefit Analysis — You can write the cost-benefit case for a significant change, including risks and sensitivity, and defend it when finance challenges it.
- Change Impact Analysis — You can analyze impacts that ripple across departments, spot the ones nobody raised, and feed them into training and rollout plans.
- Business Capability Mapping — You can use a capability map to explain which parts of the business a change touches.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can coordinate a small team's work on a shared goal: who does what by when, what has to wait for what, and a revised plan when things change.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into stages, and defend the estimate when it is challenged.
- 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 make the call on a problem outside your expertise and explain its cost, time and risk.
- Domain Expertise — You can advise the team on your area and apply new developments in the field where they pay off.
- 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 agreement on the facts and the next steps, and help colleagues frame 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 not involved can carry it on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and turn down a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead one piece of work shared by several people, on your own team and beyond, and make calls that they act on.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.