Hybrid Business Analyst

at Teachers' Retirement System of the State of Illinois

• Job title: Business Analyst
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: $76,050 - $118,639 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Springfield, United States

About the role

• Business Analyst facilitating strategy and process improvements for pension services with a focus on collaboration. Engaging with Agile Scrum teams to enhance business processes and meet stakeholder needs.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a Business Analyst (BA) on a cross-functional Agile Scrum team.
• Participate in daily stand-ups, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
• Communicate and collaborate with users to understand their business processes, workflows, and the overall vision for the product and/or project.
• Coordinate and facilitate business strategy and process improvement meetings with users capturing meeting minutes, specifications and documenting any key takeaways.
• Create user stories based on requirements from internal and external stakeholders, aligning product design and development efforts.
• Analyze business requests, determine feasibility, research areas for improvement, and identify the best options to meet business needs.
• Communicate plans effectively and conduct structured walkthroughs of requirements with cross-functional team members, business users, and leadership.
• Improve existing systems and processes while minimizing complexity by leveraging IT resource expertise, identifying automation opportunities and assisting in finding cost-effective solutions.
• Serve as a liaison between business users and Quality Engineering staff to discuss test considerations and scenarios.
• Coordinates with operational teams on testing strategies, planning and tracking, and keeping in alignment with requirements and solutions.
• Review manual and automated test plans, provide guidance on test scenarios, edge cases, non-functional requirements, and assist with testing as needed.
• Identify issues with new or improved functionality by participating in smoke testing, risk-based testing and user acceptance testing during each iteration cycle and communicate any potential impacts on daily operations.
• Actively support end users throughout the project lifecycle to ensure business needs and expectations are met.
• Coordinate research and resolution to questions pertaining to product backlog items, service tickets, and reports.
• Facilitate discussions and actively participate in data conversion and/or archiving activities.
• Perform research utilizing various repositories to extrapolate and analyze the data in order to provide solutions to the development team and business users.
• Write clear and concise functional documentation, technical reports, and system specifications to support the design of technical solutions.
• Work closely with the development team to convey user goals and needs, and to address any issues that arise to find innovative and efficient solutions.
• Investigate both functional and technical solutions. Present these options to business users, explaining the pros and cons of each to aid in decision-making.
• Integral in all phases of the system development life cycle including development of user stories and/or use cases and evaluation of potential software solutions.
• Provide production support that includes monitoring the ticketing system and support channels, triaging incoming tickets to determine functional area, provide ticket resolution and document the findings.
• Collaborates with operational teams to design, develop, and implement business process workflows, configuration changes and reports to provide additional functionality required by the System to meet operational needs.
• Identifies configuration strategies, risks, and options and recommend approaches and mitigations to meet functional requirements.
• Provides support and guidance for systems feature, version, and releases.
• Participates in technical research on upgrade/releases to determine feasibility, cost, time required, and compatibility with current systems.
• Conduct formal presentations to end users, stakeholders, and management, covering findings, issues, solutions, or facilitating functional demos.
• Conduct training and knowledge transfer sessions for other IT staff and/or business users.
• May participate in Change Management activities to facilitate awareness, knowledge, and adoption of impactful changes.
• May compile and draft release notes for upcoming production deployments.
• May participate in IT audit and compliance activities, including internal and external audit requests.
• Perform other duties as required or assigned.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Business Administration, Communications or related field or relative years of experience in lieu of a degree.
• 3+ years of relevant experience with pension administration or information technology including: 2+ years assisting with an IT project or implementation.
• Product Owner and Scrum Master certification preferred.
• A commitment to delivering high-quality, prompt and efficient service to the business.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills catering messages to both business and technical audiences.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving and planning skills.
• Knowledge and experience in Agile & Scrum methodologies preferred.

Benefits

• Medical, dental and vision coverage.
• Participation in the TRS retirement pension plan.
• Option to contribute to additional State of Illinois deferred compensation plans.