Systems Business Analyst

Systems Business Analyst

As a Systems Business Analyst, you play a critical role in shaping clarity early in the delivery lifecycle. Your day to day work sits at the intersection of business needs, system behavior, and delivery execution. You are responsible not only for gathering and documenting requirements, but for ensuring that teams begin work with shared understanding, aligned intent, and clear outcomes. This role follows standard Business Analyst practices while operating within the Enterprise Business Analyst Community of Practice (EBACoP), which defines how requirements are discovered, structured, validated, and governed across the enterprise.

Driving clarity through stakeholder engagement and discovery Much of your daily work centers on close engagement with business stakeholders, product owners, IT partners, and delivery teams. You actively facilitate conversations that surface business goals, constraints, risks, and success criteria. These discussions are not limited to "what the system should do," but extend to why a capability is needed, who it serves, what outcomes matter, and what failure scenarios must be accounted for. You ask probing questions, challenge assumptions, and help stakeholders articulate their needs in a way that can be reliably translated into system behavior.

Starting with narrative and flow, not documents In alignment with EBACoP principles, you do not begin requirements work by writing documents in isolation. Instead, you start with story mapping or process flows that establish a shared narrative of the end to end experience. These artifacts are persona driven and outcome focused, helping teams visualize how work gets done today and how it should work in the future. By making both happy paths and unhappy paths explicit, you help uncover gaps early, reduce ambiguity, and align teams before detailed requirements are written.

Translating understanding into standard EBACoP artifacts Once alignment is established through story maps or process flows, you are responsible for translating that shared understanding into EBACoP standard artifacts. This typically begins with a User Requirements Specification (URS), which captures the business "what" and is reviewed and signed off by business stakeholders. From there, you produce a Functional Requirements Specification (FRS) that describes how systems must behave to meet those business needs. These artifacts are kept in sync with one another and serve as the authoritative reference for delivery teams.

Enabling agile delivery with high quality backlog items A core part of your day to day work is transforming requirements into Jira ready epics and stories. You ensure that backlog items are clearly written, testable, and explicitly tied to business value and personas. Acceptance criteria are defined carefully so that engineers and testers share a common understanding of what "done" means. You actively participate in backlog refinement, sprint planning, and ongoing delivery conversations, answering questions and clarifying intent as work progresses.

Managing change without losing control You recognize that requirements evolve. When changes are proposed, you assess their impact thoughtfully rather than allowing scope drift to occur silently. You update story maps, URS, FRS, and backlog items as needed, ensuring traceability remains intact from business intent through implementation and testing. By doing so, you help the organization adapt while preserving alignment and predictability.

Applying quality gates and lightweight governance As part of the EBACoP, you are accountable for applying quality checks to requirements artifacts before work advances. You use agreed upon scorecards and peer reviews to verify completeness, clarity, and consistency. This governance is intentionally lightweight: its purpose is not to slow teams down, but to reduce downstream rework, late surprises, and delivery risk. You help teams experience governance as an enabler, not a barrier.

Supporting validation, testing, and adoption Your responsibilities extend into validation and readiness activities. You support user acceptance testing by ensuring test scenarios align with documented requirements and real business workflows. You help business users confirm that solutions meet their needs and raise gaps early when they do not. Where appropriate, you assist with change enablement by helping teams understand new processes, system behaviors, and impacts to day to day work.

Operating at a Staff level: raising the bar for others At the Staff level, your impact goes beyond individual projects. You act as a steward of EBACoP standards, modeling what "good" looks like in real delivery settings. You coach peers and partner teams on effective requirements practices, help resolve role or ownership ambiguities, and share exemplar artifacts that others can learn from. You think in terms of reuse, scalability, and long term maintainability of knowledge, not just short term project success.

Contributing to the BA community and continuous improvement You actively participate in the Enterprise Business Analyst Community of Practice by sharing lessons learned, improving templates and standards, and contributing to the evolution of how business analysis is practiced across the organization. You help ensure that requirements artifacts are stored in agreed upon repositories and are accessible, discoverable, and reusable. Through this contribution, you help strengthen the organization's overall ability to deliver complex initiatives with confidence.

In summary In this role, success is measured less by how many documents you produce and more by the clarity you create. A Staff Systems Business Analyst following EBACoP principles helps teams start aligned, stay aligned, and deliver outcomes that genuinely reflect business intent. Your day to day work reduces ambiguity, enables faster and more predictable delivery, and establishes a foundation for scalable, enterprise level execution.

EEO: "Mindlance is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate in employment on the basis of – Minority/Gender/Disability/Religion/LGBTQI/Age/Veterans."