Business Analyst

It is the people at Shakespeare Martineau that make us so special.  By understanding what our people want, giving them the support they need, recognising everyone’s contribution and realising the unique power of teams; together we win.  As a firm, we are focused on proactively building and developing diverse teams, bringing different backgrounds, personalities and perspectives together.  We play to our strengths, pushing ourselves to be consistently better than yesterday and deliver amazing solutions for our clients.  We empower our teams with a high degree of individual responsibility; we self-manage and encourage everyone to be responsible for their own learning, knowing it makes us even better at what we do!   

We believe in trusting our people to make the right decisions for themselves from how you dress, to how, when and where you work – we focus on outputs. 

Want to find more about our amazing benefits?

Our Solutions Development team is responsible for producing the requirements, developing, delivering and supporting innovative solutions to the Business – In a nutshell – full end to end lifecycle of applications. 

Based mainly in the Birmingham office, we are a diverse team with outsourced development and testing operations in Moldova, Romania and India. We use all the latest tools and methodologies like Agile, Azure DevOps and Jira to work remotely and collaboratively and deliver applications which give out business a unique differentiator in the market.

As part of our team expansion, we are looking for an experienced Business Analyst to join our team. 

The Business Analyst’s remit is to take ownership and responsibility for eliciting; documenting and managing ambiguous and often contradictory business requirements; owning the business requirement management process from inception through construction, test and transition back into business.

The Business Analyst is primarily a business-facing role and so both strong technical and ‘soft’ skills are essential; as is the ability to work in a sometimes less than structured environment with continually changing stakeholder requirements.

Your key duties will be:

• refining baseline business requirements, transposing said requirements into new or existing business processes
• developing a strong understanding of how the business and legal teams operate to understand how things can be changed to make a positive difference
• serving as the conduit between the business stakeholder community (internal and external), the internal or supplier led development teams
• acting as a product owner to write the user stories, maintain the story boards, manage the scrum calls and prioritise the backlog for the development teams
• leading requirement workshops as necessary, eliciting, documenting and validating the requirements ensuring that all aspects of the problem domain are within scope, complete, and deliverable
• being responsible for critically evaluating information consumed from varying sources, reconciling conflicts
• proactively communicating and collaborating with external and internal stakeholders to analyse information needs and functional requirements with a view to delivering the following artefacts as deemed appropriate: Business Requirements, Use Case contextual model, Process Designs and where applicable User Interfaces

Skills and experience you will have:

• a minimum of 3-5 years’ business analysis / partnering experience 
• familiar with working in an agile development environment and developing / maintaining user stories
• an analytical approach to problem solving, combined with a creative flair and commercial awareness
• the ability to negotiate desired outcomes from stakeholders at all levels, and customer relationship building
• strong analytical and product management skills required, including a thorough understanding of how to interpret customer business needs and translate them into application and operational requirements
• the ability to pull data from various sources and to design, construct and execute complex analyses to finally come up with data, reports and proposals that support solving business problems
• strong visual design skills used in creating information sense, easy to understand reports and dashboards
• experience working on multiple data transformation projects

We embrace agile working and offer a blended approach to where and how we work.

We appreciate that people have different needs and preferences and we’re keen to be flexible, after all, we value what you do, not where you do it.

We have hubs in Birmingham, Leicester, London, Milton Keynes, Nottingham, Solihull, Stratford-upon-Avon and Sheffield.  This role can be predominantly home based with occasional travel into our Birmingham hub, as required. 

Please be aware, for some vacancies, where we receive high numbers of applications we may need to bring the close date forward.

Due to the nature of the work undertaken, confirmation of employment will be subject to a variety of checks which will be carried out once an offer of employment is accepted. Details of the checks can be found here.

Shakespeare Martineau is a committed equal opportunities employer. We seek to attract, develop and retain talented people from a diverse range of backgrounds and cultures. We value and respect individuality and encourage a culture within our business where people can be themselves and be valued for their strengths and experiences. Everyone who either applies to or works for the firm is treated equally, regardless of their gender, age, ethnic origin, nationality, marital status, sexual orientation or religious beliefs.