Senior Business Analyst - 12 month FTC

Position summary

Reed Smith is seeking a Business Analyst to join its Global Program Managment and Change Leadership team.  This team is a key element of firm's broad and progressive Innovation group, which drives transformation and supports strategic business initiatives across the organization.

Business Analysts identify, define, refine, and document business processes across all areas of the law firm.  Areas of focus can include HR, Finance, Marketing, Operations, and IT, as well as our litigation and corporate legal practices globally.  Therefore, this role includes interpersonal investigory work to learn from dozens of people (ranging from technical to senior leadership), analysis work to understand and evolve the findings, and communications work to help others understand the results, including risk and gaps.  The results of this work are used to help our firm improve working practices, design software workflows, increase the completeness of our data, and other critical improvements. 

The role frequently serves as a liaison between business and IT teams, facilitating communication and determining software objectives that align with stated and unstated business needs.  As such, this role is to collaborate with stakeholders, developers, testers, and subject matter experts across the business.

Context for Business Analysis

Reed Smith has committed to an extended program of re-examining how it approaches traditional business operations and the provision of legal services.  The firm is creating a common global platform that provides its lawyers and clients with a competitive edge, in terms of intelligence, learning, collaboration, efficiencies, and risk management.  The firm has been undertaking an initial foundational phase which includes the provision of 22 new or improved business systems, the expansion of the firm's data framework to over 8 billion elements, and ongoing piloting of key Generative AI systems.  The firm invested in a data analytics COE, expanded programs in Client Value and Strategic Resourcing, and recently hired a Director of Applied AI. 

As we complete this initial work, we are able to expand the application of these systems to broader business uses across the firm.  We already have a significant queue of business leaders eager for results and our need for high quality data is boundless.  Thus, business analysis has become critical to our work. 

Team

This role is a member of the Global Program Managment and Change Leadership team.  While part of the broader Innovation team, its scope of work extends across the business.  The team includes expertise in change leadership, project management, and business analysis.  There are also complementary resources around the firm including our Innovation Lab, Applied AI, Change Leadership, Learning & Development, IT Transformation, and the Innovation and Strategy Committee.

Key responsibilities

• Conduct business analysis activities in collaboration with the key stakeholders, drawing out the level of detail required and timing of analysis work within the context of the overall change.
• Define plans and processes to identify, track, prioritise and manage requirements and designs.
• Identify the benefits of potential solutions, including costs or business improvements.
• Engage with stakeholders and wider teams to gather feedback and opinions, gain stakeholder commitment, and encourage participation, helping others to make the best decisions to deliver the required outcomes.
• Follow set standards to efficiently store/access information and to track decisions and actions.
• Assess performance measures to identify relevant trends, highlight risks, and ensure appropriate metrics are being used to identify and continuously improve, adapting to changing situations and circumstance as they are presented.
• Regularly monitor the impact of changes using historical data to evaluate the potential impact of proposed changes.
• Drive elicitation activity, selecting the appropriate techniques to scope, and prepare supporting materials for stakeholders in advance of key meetings.
• Communicate the appropriate level of detail to determine objectives and confirm the stakeholders have shared understanding, validating key information (e.g., scope and requirements) with stakeholders, confirming accuracy, consistency and where required reaching an amicable outcome. Encourage participation from all participants.
• Manage stakeholder expectations to ensure a common understanding and collaboratively work towards the common goal, ensuring requirements and designs align with one another.
• Maintain requirements, including attributes, throughout the change lifecycle so that they remain correct and current.
• Gain stakeholder commitment, guiding them through the process of prioritisation to evaluate requirements/designs based on the business value.
• Define business needs and when required perform gap analysis to understand missing or improved capabilities required for the change.
• Recommend an effective course of action based on business need, opportunities, risk, compliance, and ability, to achieve the desired outcome.
• Leverage templates to effectively analyse, synthesize, and refine elicitation results into requirements.
• Utilise quality checklists to ensure requirements and design specifications meet quality standards and are usable for the purpose they serve.
• Align technical and business requirements to ensure that they are complete, cohesive and tells the audience the full story.
• Document, track and communicate performance measures and the data collected to evaluate solution effectiveness including determine internal and external factors that restrict full realization of the solution's value.
• Capture and document the difference between potential value and actual value or proposed approaches or solutions.

Skills and competencies

• Business analysis planning and monitoring techniques, elicitation and collaboration techniques, requirements life cycle techniques, strategy analysis techniques, requirements analysis and design techniques and solution evaluation techniques.
• Competence in above skills in a professional services business, whereby the ‘products' of the company are the people providing its services
• Strong verbal, non-verbal and written communication skills.
• Strong interaction skills to facilitate stakeholder communication, provide leadership, encouraging comprehension of solution value, and promote stakeholder support of the proposed changes. Including teamwork, influencing, teaching, and negotiation and conflict resolution skills.
• Strong analytical thinking to rapidly assimilate various types of infSormation and identify which are relevant and quickly choose the most effective method to analyse information as each is encountered.
• Strong problem-solving skills and creative thinking skills to find new or different associations between existing ideas to help encourage innovation and propose alternatives.
• Conceptual thinking skills to connect seemingly abstract information into a larger picture.
• Ability to understand the organisation's nuances and how to get things done based on how people, processes, and technology interact from a holistic point of view.
• Ability to use active listening and discovery skills to understand the ‘real' issues/needs and build rapport.
• Demonstratable behavioural characteristics to gain the trust and respect of stakeholders, such as good work ethics, personal accountability, trustworthiness, adaptability, and good organizational and time management skills.
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• Ability to quickly absorb new information and adapt existing knowledge to rapidly changing environments.
• Ability to assist decision making by suggesting the most desirable option of a set of alternatives.
• Ability to communicate complex technical information in a condensed manner into understandable visual representations at the right level to engage stakeholders from breadth of backgrounds.

Requirements

Education:        

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field such as business, finance, economics, information technology

Experience:      

5+ years of experience in a BA role, preferably in a PMO environment

3+ years of experience in a professional services environment, preferably legal industry or Big 4 consultancy

Experience with agile development methodologies and agile planning tools such as Jira and Miro.