Exp'd Business Analyst job #235691

Business Analyst The position is located in Northbrook, IL

The purpose of the department is To support Allstate's mission to become better, bigger, and broader, by delivering and supporting call center applications and technologies that enable our clients to achieve their growth initiatives and improve operational efficiencies. 

The scope of this job is Apply business analysis techniques and business knowledge to gather and define business needs that can be met through process and technology initiatives.  Synthesize business needs to validate vision, solution requirements, solution options and delivery estimates to facilitate approval and delivery of new technology initiatives.  Build valuable and trusted relationships with call center business and technology leaders and their teams to achieve stategic goals.  Critical business analysis competencies include: Business Requirements Definition, Business Knowledge, Facilitation, Business Analysis, Change Management, and Internal Consulting.

The individual will be responsible for

1. Primary Responsibilities:  Provides business expertise through the interpretation, synthesis, and translation of business requirements throughout the systems development lifecycle.  Gathers and synthesizes business requirements and translates into functional requirements to be used as input to the design (e.g., screen design, report design, use cases and process flows).  Provides input into detailed project estimates and workplan, including the identification of appropriate project phases or releases.  Organizes and manages business and functional requirements and design review sessions. Supports and contributes to functional testing.  Facilitates the change analysis process for business and functional requirements .  Gathers training and user documentation requirements.
2. Specific Responsibilities:  Provides expertise for multiple areas of the business. Demonstrates a broad knowledge of the business area's processes and best practices. Provides business knowledge and support for resolving technology issues across multiple areas of the business and across multiple projects.  Develops, creates and analyzes business and functional requirements and designs the application functionality.  Identifies gaps and potential issues. Creates the functional design, leveraging more advanced technical skills,  to address a more complex business issue or process or to address requirements across several projects.Develops design for application prototypes.Contributes to developing the high level technical design documents across multiple areas of the business and across multiple projects.
3. Specific Responsibilities:  Assists with overall project planning by contributing to/creating project definition documents for intermediate projects in their area of responsibility. Assists with preparing project initiation documents including timelines, resource requirements, hardware and software requirements, and project risks.Participates in demand management pursuits in their areas of expertise. Organizes, leads and finalizes design review sessions for intermediate to moderately complex business and functional requirements and documents resulting decisions. Obtains sign-off of requirements documents and functional design with business clients. Schedules and conducts user acceptance demonstrations prior to implementation.  Consults on the content of functional test conditions for assigned applications/projects. Identifies testable business requirements. Supports the conduct of functional test plan inspections.  Supports data analysis and validation from functional tests. Serves as testing liaison with the Quality Control team.
4. Specific Responsibilities:  Partners with the business clients across multiple areas of the business and across multiple projects to ensure new/revised business and functional requirements are defined and documented.  Ensures all relevant documentation has been updated to reflect the decisions. Provides change request direction for their multiple areas of expertise. Manages the issues log across multiple projects for changes/additions to requirements definition or functional design.  Consults with appropriate groups concerning user training and documentation requirements in accordance with the project schedule. Reviews and edits prepared training and user documentation. 
5. Other Responsibilities:  Facilitates interviews, workshops, and other information gathering sessions. Mentors and coaches peers and colleagues.  Builds and sustains relationships. Supports process improvements. Supports corporate strategy.  Leads information gathering sessions in their area of expertise.  For example, plans, conducts and documents the results of Discovery Workshops. Documents results of information gathering sessions. Provides informal training to specialists and other professionals on the team. Builds, cultivates, and maintains long term relationships.  Manages the expectations of customers.  Assists in maintaining contact with software vendors and other groups external to the Allstate organization. Identifies and implements improvements to internal team processes or to supported business's processes, products, or services.  Supports and identifies opportunities to achieve the APT and corporate strategy.

The skills required are:

Business Requirements Definition
Business Knowledge 
Business Analysis
Change Management
Internal Consulting and Facilitation. 

Experience Required:
2-4 years Business Analysis experience within a technical or Sales and Marketing envt. Requirements for business programs / projects  Insurance industry experience a plus.

Computer Proficiency:
A strong understanding of insurance and/or call center technology topologies; particularly sales and marketing systems.  Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio).  MS Project a plus. 

Education:
College Degree  - Preferred
Major preference: Computer Science, Business Administration, or instructional design preferred but not required.

Job # 235691