Senior Business Analyst

My client is a South African investment company focusing on Technology, Media, Telecommunications and Financial Services.

Their employees are always at the forefront of business technology, and are counted upon to use their knowledge and skills, to move the company from strength to strength.

As the Senior Business Analyst, you will be accountable for guiding the clarification of the business requirements, through in-work collaboration with the business stakeholders internal and external, and for leading and Guiding the BA and QA team.

The detail:

Prioritize and Plan work activities within the BA and QA Team

• Facilitate and participate in discovery/inception workshops to create a shared understanding of user needs and the potential technology solution required to deliver to these needs.
• Identify user journeys that map out how a user will go through the system.
• Work ahead of the team to get clarity on some (not all) requirements before the next iteration.
• Create relevant user stories.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams comprised of product management, / UX, technology, support, testing, and other subject matter experts to gather and analyses functional needs and user story requirements Groom user stories through business interviews, workshops, or procedures and map user stories ensuring they come together as a cohesive whole.
• Provide the Product Owner with key information for prioritization and estimation.
• Facilitate and participate in iteration meetings (product backlog grooming, planning meeting, daily stand up, review meeting, and retrospective).
• Obtain sign-off during iteration review sessions.
• Manage the stories, ensuring that all requirements are loaded as stories, ensuring the stories are assigned to epics.
• Showcasing stories to stakeholders.
• Work very closely with the user experience team to ensure that processes, wireframes, and content are optimally intuitive to end-users.

Manage the Backlog for the Business Analyst Team

• Ensure that the activities needed to fulfill each item in the backlog are identified, outlined, and prioritized before the next sprint.
• Clarify the goals and business value of Minimum Marketable Analysts/Minimal Viable Products.
• Clarify any ambiguity until it is understood by the team.
• Review user stories with the Product Owner from a strategic point of view.
• Capture and keep the business and data rules up to date.
• Ensure that where stories are blocked, these stories are prioritized to other iterations and new stories identified to replace them in the current iteration

People Management responsibilities

• Actively mentor and coach Business Analysis and QA Team. Managers are ultimately responsible for the welfare and growth of their team members.
• Provide the right mentorship and coaching opportunities to develop team talent.
• Provide frameworks to help team members prioritize their work.
• Identify and recruit top talent, and then put that talent to work solving the toughest problems with the most impact.
• Invest in developing team members so that they can operate at increasingly higher levels of problem-solving.

Manage the Testing of Development Outputs

• Define the Testing Strategy
• Build a testing team of professionals with appropriate skills, attitudes, and motivation.
• Identify Training requirements and forward them to the Project Manager (Technical and Soft skills).
• Develop the test plan for the tasks, dependencies, and participants required to mitigate the risks to system quality and obtain stakeholder support for this plan.
• Assign tasks to all Testing Team members and ensure that all of them have sufficient work on the project.
• Ensure content and structure of all Testing documents/artifacts are documented and maintained.
• Document, implement, monitor, and enforce all processes for testing as per standards defined by the organization.
• Work with users to develop acceptance criteria or test cases for the system.
• Produce acceptance tests from acceptance criteria.
• Provide regular feedback by testing the deliverables against a user story’s acceptance criteria.
• Provide regular feedback by validating that the product meets the business goals.
• Provide support and input into system testing activities including participating in the development of the testing approach, development of test cases as well as the creation of testing scenarios.
• Understand the testing effort by analysing the requirements of the project.
• Estimate and obtain management support for the time, resources, and budget required to perform the testing.

Collaborate with the team to deliver on the backlog

• Wear different hats: designer, tester, facilitator, product owner, etc.
• Create a shared understanding of what the product is supposed to do.
• Collaborate with the rest of the business analyst team to ensure that stories are delivered effectively and quality standards are adhered to.
• Collaborate with developers, testers, and user experience teams to ensure that they are engaged ‘in the work’ to understand the business context.

General

• Perform other related duties as assigned by management.

We’d love to hear from you if….

• You have knowledge of development methodologies, i.e.: Agile
• A Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or other related fields, or equivalent work experience
• Excellent communication and interaction skills
• You understand business needs and are able to analyse requirements?
• Experience with requirements elicitation, gathering, documentation, and management?