IT Business Analyst  

Under the supervision of the IT Academic Solutions Section Head, the Business Analyst III is responsible for the identification, analysis, and development of business requirements; the recommendation of business process improvements; communication with business partners for clarification, testing, and error reporting, and the implementation and documentation of supported systems used in the various units. (e.g. Academic Units, Academic Offices, Finance, Accounting, HR, or the like)

Main Duties and Responsibilities
I. Business Needs Analysis

• Understand the needs of the clients, analyze the organization's requirements to determine the solution options, define the functional requirements that will be signed off by both business and technical stakeholders, and ensure that the requirements are properly supported by the design, code, test, and final product.
• Conducts data gathering and analysis with the clients, to understand the organization's needs and determines appropriate solutions, whether through system enhancements or changes to manual processes, and provides estimates for implementation.
• Determines, analyzes, and documents the organization's requirements from the various client partners and/or client project managers.
• Translates conceptual user requirements into clear, detailed functional requirements.
• Reviews business cases submitted by the project proponents for alignment with the overall IT Plan and University strategy, determining the viability of the solution in line with available resources and other criteria for project justification and approval.
• Understand technical options, limitations, costs, and risks, communicate tradeoffs to business partners, and work with them to shape requirements accordingly by providing recommendations and suggesting better alternatives to proposed solutions that will make the development more systematic and efficient.
• Provides design and development support to the Systems Analysts and Developers, by clarifying requirements and resolving issues, to ensure that design and code align with the signed-off requirements.
• Works with Client Managers and business teams to prioritize requirements to address issues and potential impact and/or benefits of the changes.
• Collaborates with the Systems Analysts and Developers for clarification of business requirements, testing, and reporting of errors found in the various supported systems.
• Coordinates with the Systems Analysts and Developers to create the system specifications for IT Academic Solutions systems or modules.
• Works with various client partners and/or client project managers to address issues and potential impact and/or benefits of the changes in the proposed system.
• Establishes and maintains relationship with business partners to provide effective solutions.
• Implements and documents the supported systems used in the assigned units (e.g. Academic Units, Academic Offices, Finance, Accounting, HR, or the like).

II. Software Support and Training

• Provides testing support to system and user testers, by analyzing defects reported by end users and endorses defect assessment to Systems Analysts and Developers for resolution.
• Performs actual system testing and user test coordination, by developing and conducting reviews of user test plans, scenarios, and cases, based on signed-off requirements, as needed.
• Provides post-implementation and production support for supported systems including analysis of production problems raised by client users.
• Conducts systems training for the client users, as needed.

III. Performs other work-related tasks as may be required by the immediate
supervisor and authorized representatives

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Critical Thinking: Ability to interpret policies and procedures to make informed decisions
• Requirements Analysis: Investigating business situations to define recommendations for improvement action.
• Requirements Documentation: Ability to describe the business requirements, and how these were attained, including the End-User standpoint.
• Solution, Approach, and Action Recommendation: Ability to recommend a possible solution including the appropriate actions needed to implement it.
• Issues Identification and Resolution: Ability to actively identify areas for improvement, and to provide recommendations to address these issues.
• Scoping and Estimating: Ability to gauge a project’s coverage and provide an estimated time for completion of related tasks.
• Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC): Ability to apply the standard System Development Life Cycle
• Waterfall or Agile Methodology: Knowledge in either the traditional software development life cycle tasks or use of the iterative software development cycle that relies on feedback, and continual user involvement.
• Testing and Quality Assurance: Investigating products, systems, and services to assess behavior and whether these meet specified or unspecified requirements and characteristics.
• Business Process Management/ Business Process Re-engineering/ Change
• Management: Creating new and potentially disruptive approaches to performing business activities.
• Training: The skill or knowledge to conduct end-user training for supported systems and software solutions.
• Programming: Developing software components to deliver value to stakeholders.

Education and Experience Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, or related course
• At least 2 years of work experience in Systems Development / Software Engineering
• Trainings/relevant experience in Business Systems Analysis experience in IT
• Programming experience is a plus, but not required