Senior IT Business Analyst, IT Projects
Waltham, MA

Job Description

About us

Every day we deliver safe and secure energy to homes, communities, and businesses. We are there when people need us the most. We connect people to the energy they need for the lives they live. The pace of change in society and our industry is accelerating and our expertise and track record puts us in an unparalleled position to shape the sustainable future of our industry.

To be successful we must anticipate the needs of our customers, reducing the cost of energy delivery today and pioneering the flexible energy systems of tomorrow. This requires us to deliver on our promises and always look for new opportunities to grow, both ourselves and our business.

Job Purpose

The Senior Business Analyst will be responsible for investigating business situations, identifying and evaluating options for improving business process & systems, defining requirements and ensuring effective use of information systems in meeting the needs of the National Grid business. The Primary Role of the Senior Business Analyst is to document business critical or complex solutions that meet the user needs and improve business performance by providing the analysis of business requirements, problem solving and troubleshooting as part of a project delivery team. The analyst will maximize common processes, common off the shelf solutions, project approval process, and existing architectures of National Grid.

Activities related to agile projects:

* Requirements - Developing and facilitating 'User Story' requirements, helping to set up the initial backlog, facilitating/assisting with initial prioritisation of items on the backlog, facilitating MVP reviews with business, discussion around what should be delivered in each sprint
* Sprint Preparation - Requirements elaboration - analyzing and breaking down user stories and documenting detail required for developers in 'Functional' sprints, helping to organise / prioritize deliverables from the backlog at regular intervals
* Development Sprints - Supporting where required, working as part of the team, ensuring consistency during sprints, helping flow of work i.e. stories broken down to right levels, helping others understand the user stories if required - act as translator between technical teams and business teams
* Testing - Supporting with creation of User Acceptance Criteria - 'Given, When, Then', reviewing test scripts to check they adequately test business requirements, helping ensure traceability of requirements
* Other Tasks - Facilitate retrospectives and reviews, process mapping - ensuring an E2E cohesive solution considering, assisting with training and business readiness, requirements traceability - user stories and features kept up to date, assurance of the quality of the product, being able to explain the 'classic' Agile approach and how this works and support any new inexperienced team members, good knowledge and use of agile tools e.g. JIRA, VSTS, use and knowledge of Kanban boards, scrum, other agile methodologies as required

Key Accountabilities

As part of matrix resource pool that will move between projects, solutions, Line of Business and relationships to meet with the work load of the production plan, your responsibilities will include:

* Elicit, analyze, document and manage business and user requirements (both functional and non-functional) Identify potential solutions for the business and provide input to issues or risks (through solid knowledge of the business and user requirements)
* Identify project interdependencies and communicate requirement/scope issues and participate in driving them to resolution for inclusion in the functional specifications
* Develops detailed requirements via interviews, documented analysis, requirements workshops, surveys, site visits, business process descriptions, use cases, scenarios, business analysis, task and workflow analysis
* Demonstrate clear capability to document the ASIS, TOBE process flows. Conduct full analytics collaboratively to identify and provide solutions for gaps and abnormal work flows
* Manage stakeholder expectations as it relates to gathering business requirements
* Assist the QA team to develop User Acceptance Testing to execute, and track deviations found, facilitate non-technical work around sessions for remediation and document testing progress
* Actively champion and contribute to the continuous improvement of business systems analysis best practices, using innovative ideas to increase effectiveness of the overall analyst organization
* Provide leadership to improve current processes including strategy/approach, requirements gathering, process modelling, use cases and other areas of expertise based on established business analysis tools and techniques
* Demonstrates deep knowledge of the National Grid's Infrastructure Program Delivery team project life cycle (SDLC) and project sanction process and champions these common approach and processes across the business and IT delivery teams
* Professional in developing sound relationships with key business representatives, business partners and stakeholders to deliver business service delivery (i.e., BRM, Strategy and Architecture, Service Delivery, DR&S and other teams across NS IS)
* Ensure that the design and integration of proposed systems, software, and hardware solutions, lead to the development and growth of the organization through effective use of technology. Identifies, proposes, and influences business solutions
* Performs additional duties as required

Qualifications

* Good Leadership skills and a track record of line management in significant business or IT influence.
* Undertaking roles in which analytical thinking is applied to produce business improvements within the National Grid Environment across a variety of business situations and complexity.
* Knowledge of IT project development processes and wider organization units of IT
* An understanding of how National Grid is organized as a business, what the business functions do and how National Grid and makes money
* Relevant business analysis qualification - e.g. BCS ISEB Diploma in business analysis or similar
* Relevant non-IT qualifications will also be considered on the basis they match the skills profile.
* 5+ years of Senior Business Analyst experience
* Well versed with software development methodologies such as Water fall / Agile / Iterative software methodologies
* Preferred experience in Infrastructure, Networking or Cyber Security
* Excellent written and verbal communications skills - ability to articulate complex ideas
* Professional in applying Business Analyst and consultancy approaches and techniques
* Experience with IS strategic, investment and program planning
* Experience with the sanctioning process: jurisdictional, regulatory and costing requirements
* Experience supporting BRM relationship managers
* Strong commercial focus - good understanding of the cost and value drives of IS and business
* Good stakeholder management and influencing skills with colleagues, partners / vendors & project sponsors. Demonstrated ability to influence and resolve problems with limited support
* Ability to support multiple projects and complete deliverables efficiently with little or no rework

More Information

This position has a career path which provides for advancement opportunities within and across bands as you develop and evolve in the position; gaining experience, expertise and acquiring and applying technical skills. Internal candidates will be assessed and provided offers against the minimum qualifications of this role and their individual experience.

National Grid is an equal opportunity employer that values a broad diversity of talent, knowledge, experience and expertise. We foster a culture of inclusion that drives employee engagement to deliver superior performance to the communities we serve. National Grid is proud to be an affirmative action employer. We encourage minorities, women, individuals with disabilities and protected veterans to join the National Grid team.