Business Analyst / Scrum Master

Business Analyst

The Business Analyst (BA) will develop and document business and non-functional requirements as part of a software development team. The BA needs to understand business practices and will represent the interests of the business stakeholders to the team. The individual will be working with a team that is responsible for supporting a complex environment of interconnected systems and making changes and enhancements as new requests come in. The BA will work closely with product owner(s), systems architect, stakeholders, and development team to transform business needs into user stories and other requirements documents. The BA role requires excellent communication skills with experience conducting meetings and making presentations. The BA will act as Scrum Master, facilitating Agile meetings and processes, encouraging team improvements and furthering Agile process adoption of IT and business owners.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Manage relationships and communicates with the business owners, business stakeholders, software developers, and a wide range of project contributors.
• Understand the working of different systems and the information that is exchanged across systems. Act as subject-matter expert for the development team.
• Document business and non-functional requirements through a variety of techniques including user stories, use cases, story maps, data modeling, process flow modeling, screen mockups, report mockups etc. Document business rules.
• Act as Scrum Master, organizing daily standup and retrospectives.
• Work with team on continuous improvement, improved agile processes and best practices adoption.
• Facilitate requirements gathering meetings including kickoffs, story mapping sessions, software reviews and demos.
• Assist developers / product owners / senior management in estimating, managing, and prioritizing product backlog.
• Assist the product owner(s) in understanding the true need within a request.
• Help ensure common understanding within the team on business needs and goals and ensure the team's solutions address the core business needs.
• Lead or assist with acceptance testing and QA testing to ensure product meets requirements.
• Assist with documenting production issues and defects.

Education and/or Experience:

• 2+ years of experience as an IT business analyst
• Experience as a Scrum Master
• Experience working as a BA in an agile environment is preferred
• Certified Scrum Master a plus.

Software/Computer Skills:

• Agile Tools such as JIRA, Rally or Mingle (JIRA preferred), MS Excel, MS Word, MS SharePoint, Visio, PowerPoint.
• Past experience at eliciting and capturing requirements using various techniques, including but not limited to, user stories, use cases, story maps, data modeling, process flow modeling, screen mockups, report mockups.
• Prior experience with website development teams strongly preferred.
• Prior experience with mobile applications a plus.
• Some experience with UML or BPMN modeling is a plus.

Other Skills and Abilities:

• Excellent communication skills including listening, verbal, written, and presentation skills.
• Ability to demonstrate critical thinking skills while eliciting requirements to understand the real need for the request.
• Self-starter and team player.
• Organizational, planning, and multi-tasking skills.
• Demonstrated ethics and values to foster high team trust.