THE ROLE

Kaleida are looking for a talented and passionate Business Analysts to join our team and become part of a well-established bespoke software house

This is an exciting opportunity to join a focused, enthusiastic team working in a high-paced environment with exposure to the full development lifecycle

You will be a key part of our design and development team, focused on designing and delivering customer solutions using ASP.NET MVC, C#, WebApi, MS SQL, Angular, HTML5, CSS3

You will pride yourself on quality and you will strive to design and deliver testable, bug-free and scalable solutions by following SOLID principles and software coding best practices

You will be responsible for designing and delivering specified software to agreed quality and time-scales

You will be a team player who is friendly, positive and enthusiastic with a track record developing in high pressure rapidly changing environments

You will be office based with the option of home working 1 day/week with some travel to customer sites

OUR CORE VALUES

OUR GOALS

We are a software development house priding ourselves on delivering high quality software that users love and that empowers businesses to fulfil their goals. We aspire to become one of the leading development houses for business software in the North West, employing enthusiastic, driven and highly skilled individuals who are passionate about using the latest technologies to design and build best of breed business solutions.

Our customers are diverse, ambitious, growing businesses who understand the benefits of investing in software. Working together in a dynamic and collaborative way ensures that our software is delivered to the highest standards without surprises. We are committed to developing long term strategic partnerships where our wealth of experience provides invaluable insights into how software can aid and accelerate business processes and improve the bottom line.

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

You will be involved with:

• Initial scoping meeting with new prospects (add and existing customers for the 2nd role)
• High-level estimating using story points to provide ball-park budgets
• Proposal writing
• Design workshop detailed requirements gathering
• Low-level design artefact production (interactive wireframes, activity diagrams, user stories, user acceptance test etc.)
• Liaise with the solution architects and development leads ensuring the proposed solution and delivered solution are aligned
• Design costing, liaising with the solution architects and development leads to ensure costing are accurate and timescales are feasible
• Design handover to development team ensuring the design is sufficiently understood to enable effective development delivery in an iterative approach
• Project design lead and project delivery management monitoring progress and quality
• Project risk evaluation and predict potential problems
• Project change management traceability and estimating
• Stakeholder liaison
• Stakeholder review meeting facilitation
• Stakeholder UAT facilitation
• Project wrap up and lessons learned facilitation

EXPERIENCE

At least 5 years of business and/or systems analysis on a range of diverse projects ideally across different industries

CORE SKILLS

Communication Skills

• You will be a great communicator
• facilitating initial scoping meetings, design workshops, planning & review meetings
• asking good questions, listening to the answers and absorbing what’s being said
• able to be a strong communicator in a virtual setting (via conference calls or web meetings)

Problem-Solving Skills

• Our projects are solutions to problems
• facilitating a shared understanding of the problem, the possible solutions, and determine the scope of the project
• facilitating teams to solve technical challenges, especially when they involve negotiation between multiple business or technical stakeholders – by analysing the business process

Critical Thinking Skills

• responsibility for evaluating multiple options before helping a team settle on a solution
• discovering the problem to be solved
• listening to stakeholder needs and critically considering those needs and asking probing questions until the real need is surfaced and understood

Business Analysis Skills

Documentation and Specification Skills

• ability to create clear and concise documentation at a level appropriate to the recipient

Analysis Skills

• using a variety of techniques to conduct analysis and deconstruct the problem or solution
• Business-Level – how the business work flows operationally, often completed by analysing the business process
• Software-Level – how the software system supports the business workflows, often completed through functional requirements models like use cases or user stories
• Information-Level – how data and information is stored and maintained by an organisation, completed using a variety of data modelling techniques

Visual Modelling

• creating visual models that support your analysis, such as work-flow diagrams and wireframe prototypes

Facilitation and Elicitation Skills

• Initial high-level scoping meetings
• Design workshop meetings
• Review meetings

Project Delivery Skills

Leadership

• Good leadership skills are essential in getting your team on board to get a project delivered on time

Team Management

• promote teamwork
• delegate tasks
• resolve conflict
• set goals
• evaluate performance

Time Management

• excellent time management skills to ensure that work is completed on time and the project does not fall behind schedule. Multi-tasking is an important skill, you must also be able to prioritise activities – understanding which are more critical than others – and concentrate on them. You will also need to manage other people’s time if you are dependent on them for information.

Stakeholder Management

• you must know how to manage all of you stakeholders
• know how much power and influence they have on the project
• you will analyse how much management each stakeholder needs and how they should be individually managed deciding whether face to face meetings, detailed information or high-level reports

Negotiation

• use of resources
• budgets
• schedules
• scope creep

Risk Management

• you will predict and create solutions to issues before they arise
• assess the urgency of the risk and act appropriately

Key Soft Skills for Hybrid Business Analysts/Project Delivery

Relationship-Building Skills

• you will forge strong stakeholder relationships
• build trust with the project team and the stakeholders

Self-Managing

• be proactive and dependency-aware
• manage commitments and deadlines by using influence, delegation, and issue management

Thick Skinned

• you will be able to separate feedback on your documents and ideas from feedback on you personally

Attention To Detail

• you will continually refine the scope to avoid ambiguity that will lead to unnecessary defects

Miscellaneous

• be an ambassador for Kaleida.
• attend training, meetings and other events as requested by direct manager or senior management.
• assist colleagues by completing tasks outside of own job role when requested.
• maintain own working area in a professional and organised manner.
• always strive to improve Kaleida’s operation and increase knowledge of own and related job functions.