Senior Agile Business Analyst IND

1. Job Purpose

The key purpose of this role is to collaborate with the organisations stakeholders and be responsible for the gathering and analysis of requirements for the development of the product and translate them into actionable functional and technical user stories and acceptance criteria.  The role with be a key conduit between the lab development teams, engineers, other domain services and stakeholders to ensure alignment with the product owners vision and goals in line with the prioritised backlog.

The Senior Agile Business analyst will participate in agile ceremonies and support sprint readiness including sprint planning, daily stand-ups, workshops and retrospectives.  

The Senior Agile Business Analyst will be responsible for the facilitation of workshops to capture and analyse the business requirements; documenting and discussing potential solutions requiring extensive liaison with both internal and external stakeholders.

The role will be accountable for ensuring a DOR (definition of ready) status for all functional and technical user stories ensuring the inclusion of, but not limited to; clear and defined acceptance criteria, feasibility assessment, estimated engineering and development effort, dependency identification including on other tasks, stories or external factors, APIs, Microservice functionality and integrations, data changes and testing acceptance criteria.

The role will ensure adherence to governance standards as set by the Lab and central teams ensuring review and acceptance by the product owner and where required, relevant business stakeholders.

1. Core Responsibilities

• Responsible for the requirement gathering and analysis for the prioritised backlog managing activity with cross functional teams within agreed timelines
• Responsible for ensuring a comprehensive understanding of business needs translating those into functional and technical user stories ensuring they align with the overall vision as defined by the product owner
• Responsible for facilitating and managing user story refinement working closely with the product owner, development team and business stakeholders to refine user stories and break them own into smaller tasks ensuring they are clear, concise and actionable.
• Support the product owner in prioritising the backlog and backlog items based on business value and delivery constraints and dependencies
• Support the product owner to actively participate in agile ceremonies and identify areas for improvement which can be implemented to enhance product performance, meet business OKRs and contribute to the product owners vision and roadmap 
• Ensuring the development of a deep understanding of business processes, procedures and architecture
• Ensuring the development of a deep understanding of existing, new and emerging business domain services and technologies
• Ability to embrace change and uncertainty by being flexible and responsive to evolving business needs, market trends and dynamics 
• Ensure end to end traceability against quality standards as set by the Product Owner and Engineering leads including the utilisation of  specifications using appropriate templates.
• Collaborate in the planning, design, development and deployment of new applications and enhancements to existing applications.
• Contribute to the end of Programme Increment retrospectives
• Conduct business impact assessments and feasibility studies as required
• Act as a key SME for the Lab product management team and modernisation/transformation function representing the function in core working and steering groups.
• Conduct research into systems, processes and products as required, making recommendations for the best options available to meet business objectives.
• Support the QE team in the creation of test strategy plans, which align with requirements along with the Test Manager.
• Work to the agreed Group quality framework to ensure process risk is mitigated and, where required corrective action implemented.
• Support with the ongoing development and enhancement of robust team operating frameworks, document and tools.
• Manage communication in relation to requirements, standards and embedding change.
• Support with creation of new Vendor RFP documentation.
• Ensure that you fully understand and comply with the organisation’s Risk Management Policies as they relate to your area of responsibility and demonstrate in your day to day work that you put customers at the heart of everything you do.
• Ensure that fully understand and comply with the organisation’s Data Governance Policies as they relate to your area of responsibility and demonstrate in your day to day work that you treat data as an important corporate asset which must be protected and managed.
• Maintain the company’s compliance standards and ensure timely completion of all mandatory on-line training modules and attestations.

1. Experience Requirements

• A solid background in business analysis with a minimum 5 years (or equivalent) previous experience as an Agile Business Analyst or Business Architect within the Financial Services industry is essential
• A minimum 5 years experience of demonstratable experience working in an agile environment such as scrum including an in depth knowledge of agile principles and ceremonies is essential
• A minimum 3 years experience of working with Mortgage and Savings, products and domain services is essential   
• Significant and demonstrable experience in proficiently writing technical and functional user stories including defining acceptance criteria and alignment with business objectives essential
• Significant and demonstratable experience delivering value change to an iterative approach delivery smaller value releases is essential 
• Demonstratable experience conducting benchmarking and acceptance testing to define user stories is essential
• 4 years (or equivalent) experience working with stakeholders to define and document as-is and to-be business processes/requirements, including facilitating workshops is essential
• Experience of Microsoft Quality Centre, Confluence & JIRA is essential
• Effective change management skills. Ability to support & adapt within a changing environment is essential

1. Knowledge Requirements

• Extensive practical knowledge of tools, techniques, processes for elicitation and management of Business and technical Requirements is essential.
• Significant technical understanding of domains services, software development processes, technologies and architecture is essential
• Familiarity with financial services and preferably banking services domains 
• Excellent practical knowledge and understand of, and compliance with, regulatory requirements and Risk Management policies is essential
• Extensive practical knowledge of Agile change methodology is essential  
• Extensive knowledge of savings and mortgage products is essential
• Detailed knowledge of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Agile tools is essential.
• Excellent analytical, mathematical and creative problem solving skills is essential.
• Capacity to thi