Senior Business Analyst

Role overview

The Senior Business Analyst plays a pivotal role in bridging the gap between business needs and IT solutions. As a key point of interface and liaison between the sector users, stakeholders, subject matter experts and our system support vendor partners and their sub-contractors, you will be responsible for gathering user requirements, understanding business priorities, and translating them into actionable plans for process improvement, system enhancements or new application development.

Key responsibilities and accountabilities

Requirements gathering and analysis

• Conduct in-depth interviews and workshops with stakeholders, subject matter experts, and end-users to understand business processes, needs, and pain points.
• Analyse business rules and identify opportunities for streamlining processes or improving efficiency.
• Document business and user requirements clearly, concisely, and accurately, ensuring alignment with business objectives.
• Conducts data analysis: reviewing data sets for problem utilising SQL and other data analysis tools as required.
• Supports the Practice Lead – Business Analysis to develop the business requirements and functional design of a legislatively compliant payroll system.

Solution development and implementation

• Works closely with the development and test team to ensure requirements are integrated into the development and testing plans.
• Ensure solutions comply with established business rules and industry regulations.
• Assist with development and maintenance of comprehensive test plans to ensure the functionality and effectiveness of new systems and processes.

Communication and liaison

• Act as a liaison between business users, IT teams, and external vendors, effectively communicating technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
• Clearly articulate business requirements and solutions to stakeholders at all levels.
• Manage client expectations throughout the project lifecycle, ensuring their needs are heard, understood and addressed.

Production support

• Provide ongoing support to business users after system implementation or process changes.
• Troubleshoot any issues that may arise and work collaboratively to find resolutions.
• Monitor and evaluate implemented solutions to ensure they meet business needs and identify areas for further improvement.

Business knowledge

• Develops a strong understanding of the business areas assigned to them, based on data collection, sector, vendor and internal interfaces and relationships
• Has a strong understanding of the education sector, Education Payroll’s role in it, vendors who supply it and its structure and relationships.
• Actively builds and maintains Education Payroll, Ministry of Education and client relationships with the education sector Keeps abreast of the activities within the education sector.
• Keeps abreast of the activities within the education sector.

Mentoring and coaching

• Coordinating and overseeing the work of business analysts, and peer reviewing work of senior business analysts.
• Mentoring and providing subject matter expertise to peers on best practices for business analysis activities within Education Payroll.

Other

• Contributes to setting and monitoring standards for documentation of business analysis artefacts (eg, business requirements, business processes, user guides, and other artefacts).
• Supports the Agile methodology and plays an active role in embedding the Agile practice at Education Payroll.

Leadership expectations

The following leadership expectations apply to this role.

Lead self

• Demonstrate the Education Payroll values:
  • Ako | Learning and improving
  • Mahi tahi | Working together
  • Aro ki te kiritaki | Customer focus.
• Maintain positive relationships.
• Hold yourself accountable.

Lead Education Payroll

Business planning

• Plan and take actions that ensure a sustainable workforce now and into the future, including developing succession plans.
• Define and prioritise initiatives across the medium and short term that align with the Education Payroll strategy and objectives.

Risk management

• Identify, assess, mitigate and record risks arising from internal process, people, systems or external events that could potentially disrupt business operations and/or breach legislative requirements.
• Escalate risks that cannot be sufficiently mitigated within your span of control.
• Take collective responsibility for enterprise risk management and understand the cumulative impact of risks across the organisation.

Customer orientation, continuous improvement and quality assurance

• Consider the customer’s perspective, needs and satisfaction in all aspects of business strategy and operations.
• Approach operations with a continuous improvement mindset, working to enhance products, processes and services incrementally over time.
• Assure performance and quality objectives are being met through regular assessments and reviews. Take appropriate action where performance is below standard.

Required experience, skills and knowledge

To be successful in this position you will need:

• must have 5+ years as a Senior Business Analyst or similar role
• must have 2+ years’ experience working in an Agile environment
• previous experience in UX design (desirable but not necessary)
• previous experience in business analysis for a web service (desirable but not necessary)
• previous experience in planning, implementation, and introduction of new stakeholder requirements
• previous experience in coordinating and overseeing the work of other Business Analysts, including mentoring, and providing subject matter expertise on process and best practice for requirements elicitation
• proficiency in leveraging a range of technologies and the organization’s available tools to support business requirements
• previous experience in the development of current state baselines, future state modelling and business requirement gathering and documentation
• previous experience of analysing complex issues and developing effective options for action
• a good understanding of business process management and process modelling using BPMN 2.0 with experience to ARIS as a relevant toolset
• well-developed and applied attention to detail
• excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical audiences
• the ability to build strong relationships with key stakeholders and customers
• previous experience in change management – introducing changes to stakeholders using the appropriate channels
• demonstrated operational knowledge of payroll practices, processes and technology (desirable but not necessary
• previous experience in working with the Scaled Agile Framework (desirable but not necessary).

If you have more questions about this role email myhr@edpay.nz and we will be able to get you talking to the right people.