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
Behavioural competencies:

• Drives Results 
• Passion for delivery and quality
• Values Driven
• Optimistic
• Learns on the Fly
• Resilient
• Instils Trust
• People Savvy
• Drives Results
• Problem Solver

Additional attributes:

• Proactive in approach to planning
• Risk Mitigation
• Solution Driven
• A strong delivery focus
• Highly adaptable and resilient (Able to work under pressure and Change Readiness)
• Ability to prioritize and work on multiple tasks simultaneously
• Ability to deal with complex models and their application

Education:

• Matric 
• BSc Comp Sciences / Information Systems or equivalent tertiary qualification (Advantageous)
• Business Analysis Diploma / Advanced Business Analysis qualification or related Business Analysis Certification (Advantageous)
• BPMN Course (Advantageous)

Technical Knowledge:

• PL/SQL – writing/running queries (Beneficial)
•  SQL, UML, XML and OO
• Processes: ITIL (Incident, Change, Release, Problem Management),
• Technologies: SQL (Oracle and IBM Netezza), UML, XML and JSON
• Tools: Enterprise architect, Visio, SoapUI (SOAP) / REST client (JSON), Atlassian tool suite (Jira, Confluence)
• Other: Software architecture, facilitating JAD sessions, data modelling techniques, UML Process Design, Industry compliance standards and legislation