Business Analyst

The Business Analyst will work remotely and closely with the Appian development team, playing a pivotal role in understanding and translating business needs into system requirements / user stories. This role involves performing detailed business process analysis, ensuring that the Appian applications align with business objectives and requirements, and writing detailed user stories that can be developed against. The analyst will ensure that the solutions delivered align with the business objectives and provide value to stakeholders.

• Collaborate with business stakeholders to gather requirements and capture business needs.
• Analyze and translate business needs into detailed system requirements and functional specifications, working closely with the Appian development team to ensure they understand and can meet these requirements.
• Liaise with business stakeholders, development teams, and other relevant parties to ensure clear communication and understanding of requirements.
• Assist in identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement in the transition to Appian solutions.
• Collaborate with refactoring and modernization teams to ensure Appian applications are up to date and efficient.
• Ensure information assurance and quality assurance in all Appian applications.
• Work with Business Owners, Business Architect, and System Architects to ensure optimization of enterprise solutions as part of the company's system architecture.
• Capture / understand business objectives, measures and targets to provide traceability.
• Ensure target solution aligns to and enables business objectives.
• Understand business issues and challenges of the company's member organization and industry.
• Critically evaluate information gathered from multiple sources, reconcile conflicts, decompose high-level information into details, abstract up from low-level information to a general understanding, and distinguish user requests from underlying needs.
• Elicit high/epic level and detailed requirements and translate into Jira user stories; methods of collection can include but are not limited to user interviews / surveys, analyzing documentation / business process workflows, existing system documentation.
• Drive and challenge business areas on assumptions; question and understand how they will successfully execute their plans related to the functionality requested.
• Analyze current business environment to detect deficiencies - identify improvement opportunities.
• Understand and apply high-level requirements and business processes.
• Translate into epic user stories/functional workflows – define the ‘what’ and ‘why/value’.
• Conduct backlog refinement and sizing with agile scrum team(s).
• Proactively communicate and collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to analyze information needs and functional requirements.
• Write and deliver functional/ detailed requirements and related workflows, use cases, Jira user stories, interface mock-ups/prototypes, screen designs and field definitions/rules.
• Collaborate with developers and subject matter experts to establish the technical vision and analyze tradeoffs between usability and performance needs.
• Deliver informative, well-organized presentations.
• Document and deliver training as needed.
• Participate in agile scrum team ceremonies; facilitate backlog refinement, facilitate sprint planning, attend daily standups, participate in sprint retrospective, receive sprint demos of working software.
• Liaison / conduit between the business (internal and external), technical organization, PMO, and operational areas. Obtain stakeholder buy-in and support for responsible initiatives.
• Facilitate agile scrum team, product, and/or member meetings when needed.
• Liaison to QA testers; review test plans/cases/scenarios and swarm on sprint testing activities when necessary.
• Design and manage user acceptance testing.
• Communicate and apply agile scrum methodologies; recommend and implement improvements in an iterative fashion.
• Serves as a primary resource to less experienced team members on complex or escalated issues.
• Review and provide input on peer [senior] business analysts’ work product to improve story quality.

Competencies:

• Strong knowledge of business process analysis, application development, and system administration.
• Familiarity with Appian or similar BPM platforms and understanding of Agile methodologies.
• Understanding of legacy systems such as SAMIS and CMCS- – NATURAL, COBOL, ADABAS, FOCUS.
• Experience with refactoring and modernization efforts.
• Ability to work in a cross-functional team.
• Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Ability to navigate BA Workflow, Agile Scrum, and Project Management tools (Jira, MS Project, Visio, Word, Excel, SharePoint, and Business Process / Rules repositories).
• Proven understanding and application of Waterfall, Agile Scrum, and Kanban software development methodologies.
• Proficiency with user interface design.
• Agile BA / Scrum Master certification is strongly preferred.
• Reports to the Modernization Lead.

Job Requirements:

• US Citizenship - candidates being considered for a Public Sector role must be a U.S. citizen
• Bachelor’s degree in business administration, Information Systems, or a related field.
• Minimum 5 years consulting and/or directly relevant industry experience.
• Experience working as a Business Systems Analyst, with a focus on working with development teams on refactoring and modernization efforts.

Work Environment:

This is a remote role with a preference for candidates based in Dayton, OH or the DC area. Occasional travel may be required for team meetings and training. The role requires collaboration with teams across different departments and locations.