IT Business Analyst at Guinness Nigeria Plc

Context / Scope

• The Business Engagement & Transformation (BE&T) organization is accountable for business partnering, solution delivery and user experience management. BE&T works across the DBS portfolio of projects, transformations and service offerings to drive market performance and outcomes. BE&T Africa team has two functional domains: Commercial and Supply & Back Office, each headed by a Solution Delivery Lead.
• The Business Analyst role has a key part to play in developing process and technical solutions to business problems by defining, analysing and documenting requirements, shaping solutions via process improvement or farming out requests to product owners and COEs as appropriate. For effective impact across the BE&T, the role has been designed to focus on both functional and regional deliverables.
• The BA will support the Solution Leads in ensuring that we are completely aligned with our markets and delivering quality services and solutions through understanding and managing market’s needs, design and deliver solutions and ensure brilliant user experience that create value and support the markets business growth ambitions. Business analyst role includes three key elements:
  • Ensuring that business requirements are defined and addressed
  • Identifying and evaluating relevant solutions to business problems
  • Assuring the realisation of business benefits.

Dimensions
Financial:

• This role will have a degree of financial responsibility for identifying (in conjunction with other parts of DBS and the project teams) all DBS spend associated with any analysis or requirements within process and data areas. This role will also support project initiation and execution with key focus on requirement gathering and documentation.
• Additionally, the business analyst is responsible for identifying the cost impact of change requests that have been proposed within a project. The role also supports the Solution Delivery Lead in identifying and evaluating the financially measurable benefits in a project. Finally, the role supports project managers in certifying the delivery of information services provided by IS vendors in order for payments to be released to the vendor for project work.

Market Complexity:

• This is a functional role spanning across the Africa markets with accountability for embedding and leveraging a common framework and approach to solution development and business process optimisation
• Given the pan-African scope of the role, the holder of the role will require experience in working in multi-cultural teams. The Business Analyst is expected to leverage remote working tool to enable execution of work in virtual teams while exhibiting capacity to work with little or no direct supervision.
• In addition to dealing with a variety of Diageo business units, the role would also work closely directing and managing our third-party delivery partners.

Leadership Responsibilities:

• The role inspires, collaborates and aligns with market functional leadership teams, including DBS, to drive process improvement, consistency, transformational change, improved financial control and unlock business value for the markets.

Key Leadership
Generating Ideas/Finding Solutions:

• Strategic thinking, business insight , inquisitiveness, imagination, executional understanding

Emotional Energy (positive energy):

• Energising others, Making a difference, Driving change, Resilience, Confidence

People Performance:

• Being inclusive and leveraging diversity, Bridge building through influencing, Self-development, Valuing others and unleashing talent.

Living the Values/Behaviours:

• This includes ownership, integrity, celebrating success and passionate about customers.

Purpose of Role

• The primary purpose of this role is to support the Solution Delivery Leads in the area of transformational change and continuous process improvement.  Supporting the development of the market DBS strategic agenda, understanding the change required the value proposition associated and required development, deployment to realise the benefit.
• This role will support delivery of key strategic programs in the functional domains with projects and process/system improvement initiatives of varying levels of complexity. Projects will typically last 3 – 12 months for design and build with roll out/releases to other business units in subsequent financial cycles.

Accountabilities

• Possesses a good level of knowledge and understanding of DBS capabilities and services offered and available to the markets
• Leads ongoing reviews of business processes and develops continuous process improvement (CPI) and optimization strategies by leveraging existing assets, proposing enhancements or establishing need for new solutions.
• Develops continuous process improvement interventions and facilitates Lean projects to improve processes. Works with key business stakeholders, as multi-jurisdictional ‘LEAN champions’, to build a continuous improvement environment to support an ongoing program of change·
• Identifies local business demand and feeds through to Solution Delivery Lead, User Experience and Service COEs as appropriate
• Determines if/how business needs can be met through existing solutions across DBS service towers
• Assists the Solution Delivery Lead with development and documentation of the business case for portfolio and CPI projects
• Gathers detailed business requirements and documents how the business operates with a view to correctly translate business requirements into technical requirements. Requires working with a wide range of business stakeholders and users while taking a leading role in discovery and analysis workshops.
• Translated business needs into business requirements and guides this though prioritization and inclusion in Portfolio and CPI plans
• Drives the design and/or review of test cases, process change requests, and manage a project’s scope, acceptance, installation and deployment.
• Assesses and validates activities to determine if a solution has fulfilled the requirements.
• Identifies, screens and evaluates if a new solution is required to address customer needs
• Develops solution concepts and business cases for new investments
• Informs Solution Leads and Business Partners of solution trade-offs both within and between different solution platforms to help decision making.
• Identifies and facilitates process improvement projects, training/ workshops to drive cultural change
• For deployed solutions, prevents or corrects defects, making changes, enhancements and maintenance of the system to enhance the value of the system. Includes system validation reports and evaluating the system to find when the replacement or deactivation is needed.

Qualifications and Experience Required

• Specific Experience and credibility in given global process area / function.
• Bachelor's Degree required in a relevant field
• 3 - 5 years’ experience interpreting business requirements, recognizing impact on business processes, and making recommendations
• Experience in LEAN Six Sigma methodology
• Experience in Agile project delivery methodologies.
• Demonstrated capability to build and maintain good business relationships.
• Demonstrated capability to effectively work in cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrated ability to work independently

SA
Barriers to Success in Role:

• Poor engagement / communication skills in dealing with stakeholders
• Inability to work across cultures / geographies
• Unable to manage multiple concurrent activities and deadlines
• Dislike or discomfort with detail
• Low resilience and inability to operate in a fast moving and often pressurised environment
• Lack of insight and commercial instinct
• Inability to strike the right balance to align global and local requirements

Flexible Working options / Travel requirements:

• It is our goal to reach greater flexibility of resources, which we recognise, may require a greater level of mobility and travel.
• For this role we anticipate the percentage of travel to be between 20 - 25%, however, configuration of project portfolios and locations of key stakeholders mean that not everyone may be required to travel to deliver projects. Pattern of travel will be dependent on the needs of the project, region / process areas and pipeline of work.