Business Analyst at Discovery Limited

Key Purpose

• Understanding the business requirements and through a structured process documenting, validating and translating it into functional specifications that are used by developers to craft a technical solution
• Testing and validating the functionality of the technical solution against the business requirements
• Interfacing between the business client and the development team with regards to the business and functional requirements
• Ensuring that the business requirements are delivered in the implemented solution
• Working with multiple business areas and multiple teams that require deep integration of solutions
• Building and maintaining strong relationships with clients and acting as a consultant on the application

Areas of responsibility may include but not limited to
Act as a consultant to the client on the application

• Participate in client planning forums and advise on solutions
• Challenge the business in their thinking, especially to understand the intent of the business requirement
• Assist business to articulate the benefits they wish to realize with the solution
• Pursue enquiries with clients to understand the "why" rather than the "what" of the business request
• Facilitating the development of a Business Case

Customer Requirements Specification (CRS): 

• Follow a structured process to listen to, understand and document client requirements
• If needed, facilitate activities like interviews or JAD sessions to expand the understanding of the business requirements
• If required, perform analytical tasks, data extracts, run queries or any other form of analysis to gather information
• Following up with clients to clear up ambiguity and possible misunderstanding
• Documenting the requirements in a Customer Requirements Specifications (CRS) document (which may include UML models, business process documents)
• Ensuring alignment between the Business Case and the CRS
• Review the functional requirements with the client, using appropriate formats such as presentations and walk-through discussions and obtain sign-off on CRS

Product Requirements Specification (PRS): 

• Design and validate the functional solution
• This involves interpreting the CRS into a set of Functional Requirements Specifications (FRS)
• Apply knowledge of the system, interfaces and dependencies to highlight integration aspects that must be considered
• Identify a set of stakeholders that need to be involved in creating and validating the PRS
• Interview business and technical owners, as well as experienced members of the development team (Development Manager, Architect, Business Analyst Senior)
• Identify and Involve other teams and domains that must be integrated to for the solution to work
• Build & demonstrate GUI prototypes, to validate the designs
• Perform modelling & build data models that simulate the solution
• Identify and design a set of test cases/scripts, test scenario's and test data sets to accompany the PRS
• Validate the PRS and Test Basket with the client and identified stakeholders and obtain sign-off

Solution Proposal: 

• Review the approved CRS and PRS with the development team
• If required, revert back to client or other stakeholders if technical issues require business decisions in order to proceed
• Answer queries from the development team on business or functional aspects of the required solution
• Defend the client business requirements

Project Documentation: 

• Perform Project Management activities, such as providing the client as well as relevant team members with estimates of the duration of tasks
• Provide updates to project schedules
• Maintain and update the scheduling system
• Coordinate work activities between the client and development team (e.g. scheduling JAD sessions)
• Maintain project documentation
• Provide input to technical design, and liaise between the client and the technical team
• Act as a project manager: define & manage risks, define and document scope, update and report on progress, assign tasks and manage delivery
• Manage and prevent scope creep
• If required, conduct a Post Implementation Review (PIR)

Release Notes & Training Material: 

• Update and publish release notes related to the current system changes implemented and notify impacted parties
• Assist trainers with queries or release notes
• Present initiation papers to other teams at the Channel Forums
• Develop procedure manuals for the system (for use by development team)
• Maintain and update the CRS and PRS with any added content
• Upload CRS, PRS and TS to the SharePoint server and load links into the scheduling system
• Keep status updated
• Check documents in and out of system
• During go-live, perform live monitoring of the new system
• If required, make configuration settings/updates, version number changes, workflow and configuration table changes

Query Report: 

• Respond to incidents escalated by the Incidents team
• Log issues in the appropriate issues logging system
• Conduct preliminary analysis on issues
• Provide reporting to Development Manager or PM on project activities and status.

Service Level Agreements: 

• Agree required support functions with business prior to go live, and document in SLA
• During go-live, provide end user support if required
• Be on standby for possible client issues during go-live
• Provide ad-hoc "walk through" support on site with clients
• During go-live, participate in the resolution of serious errors by implementing emergency changes
• Provide assistance when presentations are done to external clients (e.g. Brokers)

Personal Attributes and Skills

Behavioral competencies

• Team Player
• Coach
• Process Champion
• Customer Champion
• Consultant
• Risk Mitigation
• Solutions driven
• Knowledge Manager
• Project Manager
• Tenacity
• Stress Management
• Persuasion

Technical Competencies:

• Project Management
• SQL queries
• Business Writing Skills
• Presentation and Facilitation Skills
• Solution Architecture
• Process Mapping
• Entity Diagram mapping
• Software testing pack design, functional testing

Education and Experience

Education

• Processes: ITIL (Incident, Change, Release, Problem Management), CMMI
• Technologies: SQL, UML, XML and OO
• Other: Software architecture, facilitating JAD sessions, data modelling techniques, UML Process Design, Industry compliance standards and legislation

Experience

• 5 years solid Business Analysis experience. 
• SQL, UML, XML and OO experience