Business Analyst III (Fin Ser VAS) at Shoprite Group of Companies

Purpose of the Job    

The purpose of the Business Analyst III role is to strategize and facilitate effective and competitive business processes by eliciting, analysing, validating, and documenting business organisational and/or operational requirements, providing cost-benefit analysis, suitable alternatives and recommendations. The role conducts market analyses, analysing both product lines and the overall profitability of the business while developing and monitoring data quality metrics, ensuring business data and reporting needs are met. The role also provides technical leadership on the improvement of quality, standards, and processes by ensuring that efficient and cost-effective business solutions and processes are in place to address current to long term (>1 year) business needs/requirements. Business decisions in this space will come to fruition within 1-3 years. This role plays an instrumental role across business and delivery teams to ensure that solutions are delivered according to the business requirements considering cost, user and organization benefit. The nature of projects in this role are generally across domains, high profile and complex in nature demanding expert business, process and technology perspectives and recommendations.

Job Objectives    

• Understand, analyse and identify areas for improvement in the current business environment and across other shared process/system business environments.
• Operate confidently within and make contributions where appropriate to business strategy, current trends and developments in the retail industry.
• Operate confidently within the multiple domains, integrated systems and operational processes and make relevant connections across domains.
• Consider the enterprise wide solutions and impacts. Handle new domains with the same confidence as familiar domains.
• Operate confidently within multiple current and potential integrated systems and E2E business processes.
• Analyse, understand and take a new perspective on customers (Internal and external) and multiple domain impacts through the use of user journeys, research and/or spending time in the various operational areas.
• Collaborate with user stakeholders in the identification and documentation of user requirements.
• Assess and document the business implication of user requirements to the business process involved.
• Propose and document process improvements where appropriate and provide alternatives / options.
• Assess risks, costs and potential benefits of alternative business process designs.
• Define business rules and guide the implementation of these rules in the development of the various application systems.
• Taking ownership to provide knowledge within specific area and identify possible improvement within the team. This includes interviews, presentations and workshop facilitations with both business & IT.
• Works closely with Architects, Designers and Business stakeholders to evaluate suggested solutions.
• Advise on alternatives presented by the technical designers and providing recommendations regarding the business design.
• Lead others to advance objectives of the organisation. 
• Influencing stakeholders (within IT and Business) to consider solutions which will work best for the business. 
• Persuade stakeholders to change practises and consider other alternatives
• Coaching and mentoring for the BA I and BA II in BA tools and processes and delivery.
• To build and maintain a trust relationship with business users and IT stakeholders by ensuring solutions are delivered as promised and providing the necessary support and making recommendations. 
• Liaising with business stakeholders, IT disciplines and the delivery teams.
• Collaborating with all disciplines and benchmarking value adding solutions.
• Evaluate and improve solution assessment and validation.
• Eliciting and analysing cultural, business and organisational constraints effecting options for change.
• Continuously support the business environment and provide recommendations for improvement
• Thinking partner and ambassador for the business. 
• Lead multiple stakeholders across several departments.
• Able to manage vendor relationships where projects involve third parties.
• Strong commitment to organisational objectives and ensuring high quality delivery on work.
• Ensuring costs are monitored and users and the organisation benefit.
• Qualifications    
• Degree or Diploma in Information Technology or a related field. 
• Business Analysis certification at Advanced level (ECBA, CCBA), FTI certification or similar. 

Experience    

• +6 years’ experience in a Business Analyst role with a strong technical background, proven track record of successful delivery in a BA environment and extensive experience working within all aspects of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). 
• Experience should include one or more of the following functional areas.
• Human Resources
• OK Franchise Division 
• Financial Services 
• ECommerce 
• Utilities 
• Platform and Engineering 
• Stores 
• Contact Centre 
• Information Security Defence
• Strong IT and process modelling skills.
• Strong understanding of agile development, servers, databases and networkin.
• Exposure to SAP and relevant modules (per functional areas).
• Good business acumen along with strong business understanding of the broader retail industry

Knowledge and Skills    

• Expert business analysis skills - enabling change by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.
• Decisive with strong problem-solving skills – Integrates multiple and complex data sources to apply sound judgment; applies retail insights and knowledge to manage the division in a competitive, volatile trading and shopper landscape. 
• Good business acumen and enterprising thinking, able to operate comfortably within business strategy, current trends and developments in the retail industry, whilst identifying and understanding key business and commercial issues impacting on and contributing to the success, profitability or improvement of the organization. 
• Leadership skills - Natural leader with the ability to easily establish trust-based relationships; coaching, mentoring and directing others to reach individual and team goals, delivering end-to-end business solutions in a collaborative and professional manner. 
• Efficiently planning, organising and coordinating – Able to timeously and efficiently prioritise and execute multiple and competing demands in a fast-paced environment, whilst coordinating people to ensure best use of time and resources to manage deliverables and deadlines.
• Ability to work in a high-volume, high-pressured environment and deliver high productivity, organising, prioritising, and reordering workload, implementing change in a fast-moving environment.
• Strong technical aptitude with a passion and excitement for applying IT systems or tools, new technologies and solutions and its range of possibilities to increase effectiveness within a functional area and derive value for the business. 
• Team player and collaborative partner – Builds strong relationships with stakeholders while working collaboratively across work teams and projects. Open, honest and direct, comfortable giving and receiving constructive feedback. Thinks and acts independently as well as collaboratively.  
• Is customer focused and understands customers and how best to serve them; committed to providing high-quality customer service and ensuring customer needs and expectations are met.  
• Results-driven and quality focused – Efficiently executes tasks and priorities, setting stretch goals for self, while remaining focused and working tenaciously towards meeting and exceeding expectations within quality standards. Strong commitment to quality and delivering a thorough approach to work.