Senior Business Analyst – B&SD

The role

The purpose of the Senior Business Analyst at DLA Piper will be to drive and support large complex initiatives that enhance operational efficiency, streamline processes, and align business functions with the firm’s strategic objectives. This role is essential in identifying and implementing improvements that increase value for our internal teams and therefore our clients.

By acting as a key liaison between business units, IT, and stakeholders, the Senior Business Analyst ensures that solutions are effectively defined, meet compliance and regulatory requirements, and are tailored to the specific needs of a legal environment.

As part of the Business Improvement Team within Business Services, the Senior Business Analyst will play a key role in establishing and promoting best practices in business analysis. By delivering a consistent, high-quality service across the firm, they will set a standard for effective business analysis and demonstrate to the business what excellence in this field looks like.

The Senior Business Analyst will be expected to be agile and adaptable working to support multiple requirements when required.

This presents a compelling and hands-on opportunity to contribute to one of the world’s premier international law firms, working to improve key customer journeys that impact the operational performance of the firm.

While the preferred location for this role is in London, the Senior Business Analyst may be required to travel as part of their responsibilities.

MAIN DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Analysis Leadership and Ownership

• Own and drive the analysis on complex, cross functional initiatives within the business
• Shape and define the plan to support with completing all business analysis required activities
• Apply proven communication, analytical and problem-solving skills to ensure that the team’s plans and objectives are achieved
• Proactively identify and address risks, issues and dependencies that could impact project outcomes

Research and Analysis

• Undertake research and analysis to understand how a business or business area works, considering the people, organisation, processes, information, data and technology
• Investigate and articulate business and user problems using relevant investigative techniques
• Identify areas for improvement, explore feasible options, analyse the effects of change and define success measures
• Conduct impact assessments to understand how proposed changes may affect different business areas

Requirements Gathering and Management

• Gather requirements using relevant techniques from impacted stakeholders, documenting them in required form (Waterfall/Agile methodology) and ensuring they are signed off
• Conduct gap analysis to determine difference between current and target state
• Managing requirements through the entire delivery and operational life cycle

Stakeholder Engagement and Communication

• Act as the link between business stakeholders, IT, and development teams, ensuring alignment throughout the project
• Create high quality material to support communicating relevant project information to stakeholders of all levels (Exec and below)
• Communicate project updates, milestones, and risks to stakeholders effectively
• Build and maintain strong relationships with business stakeholders, acting as a trusted advisor and point of contact for any business analysis need
• Facilitate discussions with cross-functional teams to drive consensus and clarify conflicting requirements

Best Practice Development and Mentorship

• Support in the development of best practice business analysis capabilities that can be leveraged by the team to support in ensuring a consistent service is provided to the business
• Provide mentorship and guidance to junior analysts to support skill development and quality output.
• Stay updated on industry trends, methodologies, and tools to ensure best practices align with current standards

ABOUT YOU
Planning, Shaping and Problem Solving:

• Experience in shaping the BA approach to deliver complex initiatives
• Ability to provide relevant insight to inform project timelines and resource requirements
• Ability to absorb business information and define the problem statement(s) that need to be addressed

Problem Solving and Analysis

• Uses enhanced problem-solving skills to analyse complex business issues
• Able to use relevant investigation techniques to understand issues/problems
• Has significant experience in using relevant BA tools and techniques to complete root cause/impact analysis

Requirements Gathering and Management:

• Experience using relevant requirement elicitation techniques to unearth pain points and business requirements
• Planning and leading workshops with large groups of stakeholders
• Documenting business requirement documents or when using agile Epics/user stories
• Able to track business requirements against IT requirements/user stories where applicable

Methodologies/Ways of Working:

• Significant experience working in both Waterfall and Agile/Scrum projects
• Firm understanding of concepts of Agile/Scrum projects and how it can be used to manage BA tasks/activities

Business Process Modelling:

• Experience in mapping AS IS and TO BE business processes using Visio or other process mapping tools
• Familiarity with BPMN 2.0 and notation usage
• Capable of analysing complex processes using Lean/Six Sigma tools, identifying bottlenecks, and proposing solutions.

Communication, Collaboration and Stakeholder Management:

• Able to clearly communicate verbally with stakeholders across the business at varying levels with the right level of detail
• Can produce high quality written presentations to support presenting findings and messages for senior management
• Works effectively with cross-functional teams and diverse stakeholders
• Builds strong relationships to drive collaboration
• Supports, guides and influences stakeholders in decision making
• Experience in resolving conflicting needs and asks from stakeholders, whilst navigating a complex stakeholder landscape

System, Data Modelling and Analysis:

• Comfortable in identifying and completing high level analysis of impacted systems part of an initiative
• Understands concepts of data models and produce simple representations to support requirements definition
• Comfortable working with large sets of data to unearth trends and create
• Significant experience in using Excel to complete data analysis
• Comfortable in analysing data and metrics to find insightful trends

Additional Experience/Qualifications:

• A legal or consultancy background is desirable.
• Minimum 7 years’ experience in business analysis
• Certification in business analysis e.g. BCS or IIBA (CCBA, CBATL, PMI-PBA)
• Experience in mentoring junior analysts
• Experience in developing customer journeys or other Design Thinking tools
• Experience in client onboarding

ABOUT US
DLA Piper is a global law firm with lawyers and business service professionals located in more than 40 countries throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific. Our global reach ensures that we can help businesses with their legal needs anywhere in the world. We strive to be the leading global business law firm by delivering quality, service excellence and value to our clients and offering practical and innovative legal solutions to help them succeed. Our clients range from multinational, Global 1000, and Fortune 500 enterprises to emerging companies developing industry-leading technologies, as well as government and public sector bodies.

OUR VALUES
In everything we do connected with our People, our Clients and our Communities, we live by these values:

• Be Supportive – we are compassionate and inclusive, valuing diversity and acting thoughtfully
• Be Collaborative – we are proactive, passionate team players investing in our relationships
• Be Bold – we are fearless and inquisitive, challenging ourselves to think big and find creative new solutions
• Be Exceptional – we are strategic and driven, exceeding standards and expectations

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
At DLA Piper, diversity and inclusion underpins how we live our values and everything we do. We believe that everyone has a voice, and that everyone’s voice counts. We know that the rich diversity across our firm makes us stronger, more innovative and creative, which helps us to better serve our clients and communities. We are committed to providing an inclusive working environment and culture across our global firm, where everyone can bring their authentic self to work.
Diversity of perspective, thought, background and culture combine to make us the leading global law firm; that’s why we actively seek to build balanced teams. We welcome the unique contribution that you will bring to our firm and actively encourage applications from all talented people – however your talent is packaged, whatever your background or circumstance and regardless of how you identify.

HYBRID WORKING
We recognise that people have responsibilities and interests outside of their career and that as a business, we all benefit from working flexibly. That’s why we are open to discussing with candidates the different ways in which we are able to support requests for agile working arrangements.

PRE-ENGAGEMENT SCREENING
In the event that we make an offer to you, and where local legislation permits and where relevant, we will conduct pre-engagement screening checks that may include but are not limited to your professional and academic qualifications, your eligibility to work in the relevant jurisdiction, any criminal records, your financial stability and work-related references.