Location: London – 2/3 days per week in office
Start Date: ASAP
Duration: 3-month contract with extension
Daily Rate: £450 - £500 per day Inside IR35
Summary
As a Business Analyst working on the Post-Award Services Transformation, you will play a pivotal role in optimizing our clients’ research administration and post-award systems and services. Sitting at the intersection of Finance, IT, and Research and Innovation Services, you will analyse, map, and help transform the processes that support our clients’ academic community after external research funding has been secured.
Purpose of the Role
To work with a broad range of stakeholders – including RIS Post Award team and relevant delivery & technical colleagues – to deliver the following across a range of service processes:
- End to end ‘as is’ process maps
- Pain points analysis
- Solutions options papers
- Target operational models
- Collecting and validating user & business requirements
- Reviewing our process for paying external organisations that are delivering part of a funded research project (partner payments).
- Reviewing our process for recruiting, appointing, extending or changing staff whose salaries are funded by a research award.
- A digital timesheets solution to make funder compliance more efficient & assured,
- Digital dashboards with improved service management information.
You will also be key to supporting development of a multiyear transformation business case which will include some elements of service redesign.
You will be responsible for engaging with key stakeholders across the institution to understand the processes and data that feed into the above, including colleagues at departmental and faculty level if appropriate, as well as central teams including Finance, Research and Innovation Services and other contributors if needed.
Requirements
- Experience working as a business analyst within a project environment, delivering IT enabled change
- Understanding of the full project delivery life cycle and experience of delivery across different phases of the project
- Experience of applying various techniques and delivering analysis outputs, including:
- Requirements elicitation and documentation
- Business process modelling
- Workflow / scenario / use case modelling
- Data and system analysis and documentation
- Experience in workshop facilitation and conducting stakeholder interviews to extract relevant information
- Experience in managing own time effectively in an environment of competing end-user demands and time-critical schedules, prioritising simultaneous project work and rapidly evaluating alternate action plans
- Strong interpersonal and stakeholder management skills
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills: Ability to clearly define and articulate business process concepts to the end users and communicate with colleagues at all levels within the organisation
- Adaptability and flexibility – evidence of applying different analysis approaches relevant to the particular initiative and the business need
- Ability to work effectively in a team environment, sharing knowledge and skills, and developing productive working relationships
- Motivated and driven by continuous change
- Experience in working within a similar Higher Education institution or within an Information Services division, preferable knowledge of the Higher Education Business and Community Interactions (HEBCI) survey
Project Assignment
- Work with key stakeholders and the project team to fully understand the project scope and objectives, owning delivery of the project within the timeframe provided.
- Advise on the most suitable methods and levels of analysis, and level of stakeholder engagement required.
- Explore how the relevant processes described above work currently through interviews and research, looking at the current business goals, performance, operational design, organisational structure and use of technologies.
- Agree and document definitions of business domain terminology.
- Identify reported business problems and their impacts.
- Use process models to represent to stakeholders how the service operates. Models will be drawn to show different levels of detail as required.
- Work with various stakeholders to establish underlying causes of business problems and the desired target business process model.
- Facilitate workshops and stakeholder discussions to identify process inefficiencies, service pain points, risks, bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement.
- Assess the impact of identified issues on service performance, compliance, user experience and operational effectiveness.
- Work with stakeholders to develop and assess options for addressing business problems, considering people, process, policy, data and technology impacts.
- Support the evaluation of options by identifying benefits, risks, dependencies, costs and implementation considerations.
- Define and document ‘to-be’ business processes that support desired service outcomes and strategic objectives.
- Develop target operating model artefacts to describe future ways of working, including roles and responsibilities, governance, processes, technologies and service interactions.
- Facilitate stakeholder review and agreement of future-state designs, ensuring alignment with organisational strategy and operational requirements.
- Identify and document transition requirements, business change impacts and key dependencies required to move from the current to future state.
- Work with key stakeholders to define business requirements.
- Ensure requirements are documented at a suitable level of detail based on project stages and objectives (from initial high level through to detail required to design a solution).
- Document, publish and communicate recommendations for process improvements, highlighting existing and potential risks, inefficiencies and pain points and identifying potential solutions and mitigations to be taken.
