Business Analyst

Job details

Location: Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Watford

Capability: Technology & Engineering

Experience Level: Manager

Type: Full Time

Service Line: EWT (excl. PE & Ops)

Contract type: Permanent

Job Description

Business Analysis

As we experience unprecedented growth and change at KPMG, the Business analysis team plays a key change enabling role. The team is responsible for discovering and understanding the true business needs. We support and challenge the firm by ensuring consistent, compliant, validated and relevant requirements satisfy business need and any internal technology or process improvement solutions deliver value to the firm. To achieve this, the team offers a number of distinct services focusing on supporting the Project and Programme management teams on delivering both agile and waterfall initiatives.

The Role

Reporting into the Principal Business Analyst, your role as a Business Analyst is to act as a liaison between business and technology teams to ensure that stated and unstated business needs are discovered, defined, articulated & recorded, and that these needs are realised, validated and refined as a projects and programmes progress.

You will be responsible for the definition and management of all requirements throughout a project lifecycle, ensuring and validating all aspects of the delivered solutions, including, process, data and technology and confirming that the overall business outcomes meet the expected business needs.

You will also help the business to identify problems and opportunities and ensure these are clearly understood by conducting root cause analysis, feasibility, options analysis and supporting Proof of Concept and Pilot initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

• Definition, articulation and recording of stated and unstated business needs.
• Use a variety of techniques to understand business requirements and critical success factors, such as interviews, workshops, surveys, site visits, and storyboards.
• Shape business requirements by making recommendations and suggesting alternatives to proposed solutions.
• Manage requirements scoping throughout the delivery process and define the appropriate analysis approach and requirements architecture for each initiative
• Translate conceptual user requirements into clear, detailed functional and technical requirements and where appropriate user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Supporting discovery activities to determine drivers for change this may include root cause, problem and future opportunity analysis
• Create artefacts as appropriate, including business case documentation, scope documentation, current and future state processes and models to understand inefficiencies or gaps.
• Build working relationships with key delivery and business stakeholders and the Business Relationship Managers.
• Work with business and delivery teams to prioritise requirements and refinement of backlog items. Help resolve competing priorities between stakeholder groups by facilitating stakeholder discussions and escalate issues where appropriate.
• Ensure end-to-end traceability of requirements to delivered solution including high-level requirements to conceptual architecture & high-level design, low-level requirements to low level design and solution architecture.
• Solution Assessments and Validation, including supporting options assessments of proposed solutions, including working with 3rd party suppliers and vendors and internally developed solutions
• Support delivery teams as they develop, test, and deploy solutions. Review output to ensure requirements are correctly interpreted; define and execute test cases.
• Understand technical options, limitations, costs, and risks. Communicate trade-offs to business partners and work with them to shape requirements accordingly.
• Lead and provide oversight to a portfolio of projects where multiple BA’s are delivering work, including per reviewing deliverables and ensuring alignment to BA standards, providing guidance to junior members and ensuring appropriate analysis approach is adopted.
• Reporting progress of the project / workstream at regular intervals to the Portfolio Director and PMO
• Conducting benefits realisation of deployed solutions and effectiveness of delivered requirements
• Maintain a good level of technical knowledge incl. current, emerging and future technology market trends and their impact on the business such as AI and machine learning, data analytics and cloud technologies.
• Develop and maintain a knowledge of KPMG’s technology ecosystem, incl. the main applications and technologies that support KPMG’s Capabilities, e.g., Tax, Audit, etc
  
  
  

The Person

Knowledge, Skills And Experience

Essential (Business Analysis)

• Experience in delivering structured Business Analysis within end-to-end programme and project lifecycles
• Proven track record and experience of Business Analysis, incl. strategies, formal requirements definition, working with Project and Programme teams, including Business Architects, Data Analysts, Software Developers, Testers, Human-Centred Design teams and procurement
• An understanding of design thinking, value stream mapping, customer profiles and journeys, KPIs, risk and control frameworks, and KRIs
• Experience determining the explicit and implicit needs and requirements of various stakeholders.
• Ability to quickly learn the objectives, structures, operations, and policies of a new business area.
• A strong problem solver with a pragmatic and tenacious attitude to seek out resolutions, whilst demonstrating good negation and influencing skills.
• Demonstrated ability to engage both developers and business partners to achieve target outcomes.
• Proven interpersonal skills and an ability to influence senior leaders and peers.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical information in a condensed manner to various stakeholders verbally and in writing.
• Experience creating documentation such as business case documentation or business requirements summaries.
• Experience of formal requirements definition within highly regulated environments, ensuring strict compliance to technology policies and standards.
• Experience creating re-usable analysis templates to develop the BA Centre of Excellence
  
  
  

Essential (Other)

• Experience of working with Agile SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle Management) methods
• Able to explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience in a way that is relevant, easy to consume and compelling
• Experience of Business process analysis and a good understanding of process hierarchies
• Good understanding of project management concepts, incl. Gantt charts/plans, risks, assumptions & dependencies, etc.
• Good oral and written communication skills
• Good interpersonal and leadership skills
• Ability to leverage networks in KPMG, e.g., to tap into additional expertise if required
• Big picture thinking and comfortable working with ambiguity at the beginning of projects, with ability to provide clarity of direction despite this
• Adaptability and a willingness to learn new skills.
• Driven and enthusiastic with a ‘can-do’ attitude and a strong sense of ownership to get the job done in a practical and pragmatic fashion whilst maintaining strong relationships.
• Proven written and oral communications skills and strong interpersonal skills that can be executed credibly to inspire confidence in you and your deliverables
  
  
  

Desirable Skills And Experience

• A good level of general technical knowledge incl. current, emerging and future technology market trends and their impact on business
• An understanding of technical debt, incl. its causes, how to measure it, and remedial actions incl. decommissioning
• Knowledge of at least one technology domain, incl. Collaboration & Experience; Automation; Data Science & AI; Data; Integration; Infrastructure / Cloud; Security; and DevSecOps
• Professional certification in Business Analysis such as IIBA or BCS
• Experience of working with offshore teams
• Experience of using ARIS for Business Process Analysis
• Educated to degree level in a business-related subject or relevant experience in a business or IT environment
• A practical knowledge of ITIL 4 and its application
  
  
  

Why Technology & Engineering at KPMG?

Technology is at the heart of what we do and part of the very DNA of our business. That’s why we’ve invested in a single powerful team of connected technologists. 1,500 specialists, creating a step change in the way we work. Broader, deeper expertise, which is delivered to our clients faster than ever. Our connected solutions stretch across a range of specialisms too. From technology transformation, cyber and risk management through to security operations, data and analytics, automation, powered apps and Cloud. This is an opportunity to join a team that combines the entrepreneurial spirit and imagination of a start-up with the resources only a global network can provide. We’re committed to simplified structures and are investing in workplace tools that enable us to collaborate and innovate whether you’re working at home, in our office or at client sites.