Role: Business Analyst - Technical

Location: UK Flexible

Salary range: £50,000 - £60,000

Role ID: 2023-1694

Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world

Ricardo plc is a global strategic, environmental, and engineering consulting company, listed on the London Stock Exchange. With over 100 years of engineering excellence and employing close to 3,000 employees in more than 20 countries, we provide exceptional levels of expertise in delivering leading-edge and innovative cross-sector sustainable products and solutions. Every day, we enable our customers to solve the most complex and dynamic challenges to help achieve a safe and sustainable world.

Energy & Environment, one of Ricardo plc’s five operating business units, is a leader in sustainability consultancy, solving complex environmental challenges through industry-leading analysis, advice and data. With more than 40 years of heritage in addressing air quality, environmental and sustainability issues, our customers value us for our deep understanding and breadth of services covering the entire value chain from evidence, policy & strategy to implementation.

We are currently looking for a Business Analyst with a broad range of experience in getting to the root of complex data management processes, detailing requirements and translating those into solid user stories from which the development team can understand and develop code from.  

You’ll understand the changing business needs, evaluate the impact of these changes, identify and analyse requirements, document them and facilitate communication among a range of stakeholders.

The role will include working closely with environmental specialists and project managers to firstly gain an understanding of the overall service and solution needs, before formulating improved business processes where identified, and detailing requirements through user stories that will help the developers to create software as efficiently as possible.

The role will also require successful relationship building across the business and flexible working across multiple projects. The successful candidate will be used to working in agile scrum-based project teams with strong client facing experience.  The ideal candidate will be very strong technically and may have a software development background.

The successful candidate will have experience developing requirements for web solutions, desktop applications and mobile apps.  The ideal candidate will exhibit excellent organisational skills and be comfortable in flexibly working across projects against challenging deadlines. Our ideal candidate will be adept at facilitating the capture of customer requirements in order to formulate the right solution, ideally with experience in the development of technical documents.  Some travel nationally and internationally may be required for the purpose of meeting with clients, stakeholders, or off-site personnel/management.

As a Digital Business Analyst, you will be responsible for discovery activities and defining and validating User Stories. Working closely with the Product Owner and environmental specialists, you will help define and deliver the Product Backlogs.

The Business Analyst will be responsible for:

• Designing and facilitating workshops, stakeholder interviews, and discovery activities to elicit requirements/ user stories from stakeholders.
• Analysis of issues, finding root cause, agreeing solutions and providing correct information into the tickets
• Validate technical and business suitability of proposed requirements with relevant stakeholders and provide recommendations.
• Define and document solutions and changes, producing comprehensive documentation, aided by structured analysis techniques and methodologies.
• Drive the delivery of functionality agreed with business representatives by liaising with developers and testers, creating user stories in the process.
• Active involvement in system design, ensuring applications are efficient, usable and streamlined taking into account the underlying Business Processes.
• Production of accurate estimates and impact assessment.
• Effectively manage stakeholder expectations based on their requirements.
• Highlight dependencies, risks, issues, assumptions and changes to the scrum teams and delivery manager.
• Support stakeholders in the UAT to ensure that requirements are satisfied.
• Produce documentation consistent with IT standards which are fit for purpose.
• Keep up to date with emerging technologies in area of expertise.
• Report progress, risks and issues effectively in line with agreed team process.
• Validate user stories using research, data, and customer insight to make informed decisions on priorities and focus.
• Support the Product Owner in identifying the EPIC User Stories and building and prioritizing the product backlogs.
• Work closely with UX Designers to translate user stories into viable product designs and deliver wireframes and working prototypes.
• Managing and influencing senior stakeholder alignment and communication at various levels across multiple business areas and divisions.
• Scope and shape the analysis approach from EPIC-level information at the Product Level.
• Support product managers across Digital Operations and business units.
• Evaluating existing business processes, identifying improvements, and helping to design solutions.
• Staying updated on the latest technologies to automate processes and improve efficiency.
• Analysing business processes and communicating feedback to other team members and management.
• Budgeting and forecasting time needed for BA activities.
• Managing competing resources and priorities with regular check-in on deliverables.

The Ideal candidate will have:

• Strong knowledge of backlog definition and prioritisation techniques as well as an understanding of JIRA, Confluence, Miro, Azure DevOps and customer-centric design techniques.
• Extensive background as a Business Analyst within an Agile Scrum team and portfolio software development environment.
• Strong experience working as part of a development team.
• Experience in conceptual modelling and the ability to see the big picture and envision possible solutions.

Essential skills:

• A higher education qualification in a computer related discipline and/or demonstrable sound experience within a software development business.
• Prior experience of process modelling and systems design tools.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to communicate in a format that is meaningful to all parties.
• Experience of effective relationship building.
• Ability to identify, record and track change management.

Working here

Ricardo is an exciting and rewarding place to work and you have the opportunity to make a difference. You will work with teams of talented, dedicated, and supportive individuals. Alongside having a fantastic opportunity to develop your career with us through our broad range of projects, mentoring opportunities and a personalised approach to your learning and development. We are always keen to hear from people who have driven, ambition and a flair for innovative thinking.

Wellbeing and work life balance

We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that's working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential. Our People are important to us, and we take pride in our wellbeing programmes and policies that support individuals including flexible working, carers policy, mental health first aiders and readily available support through our extensive Employee Assistance programme.

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion statement

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, we believe in each person's potential, and we'll help you reach yours. We have an ambitious diversity, equality, and inclusion approach as explained here. We value diversity; recognising that a more diverse workforce creates a richer and more varied working environment. Diversity also drives innovation, by allowing us to offer our clients the best consultancy service that we can. As part of our commitment to engage positively and pro-actively with all our employees  to ensure an inclusive culture, we are a recognised as a 'disability confident' employer.

Benefits

Our core benefits include 25 days' annual leave, plus 8 flexible bank holidays, a competitive company pension scheme, life assurance and professional subscriptions reimbursement. We also offer a wide range of flexible benefits to suit your lifestyle.

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date.