Functional Analyst, Senior

Functional Analyst, Senior

The Functional Analyst, Senior is responsible for gathering, analyzing, and documenting business or system processes and requirements for NJM's applications. This role will work closely with all Project, Business team members and Solution Owners throughout the project lifecycle. This role may be required to lead other team members and coordinate work efforts, assist in problem and solution scoping, effectively communicate requirements, and may get involved in quality assurance.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

Strategy Analysis:

• Consistently support the alignment of business strategy with system implementations by assisting in the support of the FA team and engaging in the following:
• Collaborating with SO, BPU, and stakeholders to analyze business needs, ensuring that the intent and outcomes are clearly defined and can be translated into requirements that are clear, concise, and complete and achieve desired business outcomes.
• Collaborating with SO, BPU, stakeholders, and the technical teams to identify/propose the best solution approach that meets business needs, mitigates potential risks to other functionalities, and ensures regulatory compliance.
• With guidance from FA leadership, understand the features, functions, and capabilities of package and custom-developed solutions to effectively guide the stakeholders. Support SO team in the structuring of incremental values (IVs for delivery planning).
• Analyze and identify impacts within and across products, applications, integrations, and reporting and highlight any gaps with support as needed.
• Identifying potential gaps in existing system implementations and bring to business attention working with SO/BPU to prioritize requests and address these issues with support as needed.

Business Analysis/Elicitation Skills:

• Consistently ensure that the business need is understood and articulated clearly by performing, and assist in supporting the FA team members in:
• Analyzing and documenting the current state system processes and functionality to ensure the project stakeholders understand the context and implications of changes.
• Collaborating with applicable stakeholders to understand and diagram existing or new business processes using a variety of modeling techniques.
• Understanding and demonstrating expertise in applying appropriate requirements elicitation techniques (interviews, surveys, brainstorming sessions, etc.).
• Preparing high level specifications to document key functionality and impacted process and systems and obtains high level estimates from delivery teams for new projects and/or initiatives, as required.
• Facilitating story mapping sessions with portfolio leads and delivery teams to ensure features and epics are broken down into small, independent stories using INVEST criteria. Help identify both functional and technical stories. Collaborate with the team to identify dependencies and work together to sequence features and stories.
• Eliciting, capturing, and documenting requirements through refinement sessions with SO/BPU to prepare and maintain documentation utilizing user stories, and other analysis assets, such as, use cases, diagrams, process flows and mock-ups, as needed. Captures Acceptance criteria to confirm agreement on system expectations with entire team.

Requirements Life Cycle Management:

• Consistently achieving deliveries that reflect business outcomes by collaborating with the portfolio manager and delivery team by performing and assisting in supporting the FA team members through the following activities:
• Coordinate requirements planning & monitoring and dependencies for project delivery, working closely with portfolio managers and other delivery leaders.
• Facilitate Definition of Ready (DoR) sessions to ensure a mutual understanding among Solution owner teams, delivery teams, BPU, and stakeholders by reviewing acceptance criteria and functional specification, and obtaining estimates using Planning Poker technique. Encourages strong collaboration amongst delivery teams to capture collaborative notes for story development and delivery.
• Confirm expectations for self and team members; proactively provide due dates for assignments, review artifacts produced by team members and provide constructive feedback.
• Communicate status of assignments, identify gaps/issues which will impact targeted timeframes for deliverables, and communicate potential solutions for successful delivery.
• Supports delivery team on requirements by participating in daily stand ups, defect triage, three amigos and other events/ceremonies.
• Produce quality artifacts with a minimal level of re-work to ensure the accuracy of deliverables while adhering to requirement standards.
• Participates in testing activities and Demos, as required, and provides feedback on test cases/scenarios and the application.
• Provide status and feedback in release planning sessions, requirement ceremonies, and retrospectives.
• Assist in the investigation and resolution of incidents as needed.

Leadership and Core Competencies:

• Consistently demonstrates strong commitment to continuous development, and the ability to assist in supporting the FA Team within and outside the project context and demonstrates the core competencies through the following actions:
• Lead by example in actions, attitude, and work ethic; influences through credibility rather than position.
• Motivate and influence others to act in ways that enable them to work together to achieve shared goals and objectives. Build consensus and encourage support and collaboration.
• Enable others to grow and succeed through support and opportunities. Provide necessary feedback and coaching for continued growth.
• Guide and support others to enhance their skills and performance. Coach others on improving their active listening and emotional intelligence skills.
• Build and maintain positive and productive relationships.
• Supporting organizational changes effectively through extensive communication.
• Making informed and effective decisions based on analysis and judgment.
• Understand the key aspects of the business and industry to better engage with stakeholders and improve elicitation processes.
• Promote and support Functional Analysis and SA&E department best practices and standards.
• Support process improvement initiatives for the individual, functional group/team, department or organization and drive implementation to increase effectiveness and efficiency.
• Through self-study remain informed of industry wide trends and departmental/company strategic initiatives.
• Evaluate information critically to identify solutions. Knowledge of techniques and tools that promote effective analysis; ability to determine the root cause of organizational problems and create alternative solutions that resolve these problems.
• Adapts to changing business needs, conditions, and work responsibilities and working with a variety of situations, individuals, groups, and varying customer needs. Ability to adapt to shifting priorities, demands and timelines.
• Demonstrate a strong work-ethic through their ownership and accountability, taking pride in their deliverables, managing their priorities effectively, and supporting their teams' interests more than their own.
• Maintain and improve business analysis, functional, technical, and professional skills and knowledge through continuous learning based on industry standards.
• Build strong knowledge of products offered in respective portfolio and corresponding features and functionality and proactively contribute to design of solutions, by providing support. Evaluate effectiveness and completeness of proposed solutions.
• Able to grasp and apply new concepts, knowledge, and skills to perform job duties, effectively conveying information and ideas clearly and concisely both verbally and written and embraces feedback and seeks to always improve self.

Required Education, Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Good knowledge and experience of different requirements gathering tools and techniques (use cases, diagramming, process modeling, interviews, workshops, etc.).
• Good knowledge and experience working in Agile delivery methodology (SAFE etc.).
• Hands-on experience with insurance policy administration platforms and integration with telephony systems, including IVR, CTI, call routing, and contact center solutions (e.g., Genesys, NICE, or Avaya).
• Preferred experience in Personal Lines and/or Commercial Insurance, supporting telephony-enabled business processes such as customer service, claims intake, and agent call workflows.
• Ability to analyze and modernize IVR experiences into customer-centric, adaptive conversational journeys, translating business needs into clear functional designs.
• Experience designing speech user interfaces, including dialog structures, prompts, grammar and supporting logic aligned with business requirements.
• Proficiency with Ring Central, NICE CXone, JIRA and Confluence for documenting user stories.
• Lead and coordinate requirements planning & monitoring activities for project delivery.
• Ability to learn quickly in a fast-paced environment and adapt to change.
• Ability to work both independently and in a team-oriented, collaborative environment is essential.
• Ability to adapt to shifting priorities, demands and timelines.
• Strong verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.

Required Length