Lead Business Analyst

This is a hybrid work opportunity for candidates based in Nova Scotia. You would be a homeworker with occasional travel to the customer site (Halifax) required.

Kainos is a consultancy that delivers end-to-end, tailored and innovative digital services and software platform solutions for customers in an agile environment – experience in working in a similar environment is a must-have.

As a Lead Business Analyst (Product Consultant) in Kainos, you will be responsible for your teams' backlog maturity, taking ownership of features from inception through to delivery. You will drive MVP thinking and communicating the value of it with those in your team, the wider project team and relevant stakeholders.

You will be a leader in your team, comfortable running agile ceremonies and encouraging engagement and discussion. You will plan and run workshops, engaging with a variety of stakeholders to facilitate consensus in areas of uncertainty. You will actively participate within the Product capability, supporting the delivery of initiatives. You will also manage, coach and develop a small number of staff, with a focus on managing employee performance.

Essential Requirements:

• Experience of the software development lifecycle, involved from analysis through to acceptance, launch and live operations.
• Excellent facilitator of workshops, able to lead stakeholder groups to achieve focused outcomes.
• Accomplished at modelling As-is and To-be business processes, able to present these to stakeholders and the team to ensure understanding and to achieve buy-in.
• Experience in stakeholder management, comfortable challenging decisions when appropriate and tailoring collaboration and communication styles where necessary.
• Responsible for the breakdown of an area of work from inception through to delivery, managing the team's backlog ensuring quality and maturity.
• Responsible for the elicitation of functional, technical and non-functional requirements, translating these into user stories so they are easily understood across the whole team.
• Ability to use prioritization techniques to refine the backlog and manage dependencies.
• Proven ability to manage scope to meet the required MVP, ensuring value is delivered.
• Ability to work within commercial constraints for example cost restrictions and project deadlines.
• Excellent user story writing skills, ensuring quality and consistency of stories across the project.
• Proven ability to build trusted relationships both inside and outside of the delivery team, comfortable collaborating on the breakdown of an area into deliverable pieces of work.
• Experience working in a client/supplier relationship, sensitive to their needs.
• Experience contributing to sales activities (e.g. working on bids, writing sales proposals etc.).
• Experienced in Agile methodologies and able to mentor those in your team as well as coaching our clients.
• We are passionate about developing people – a demonstrated ability in managing, coaching and developing junior members of your team and wider community.
• Experience of explaining technical jargon to non-technical/commercial teams.

Desirable:

• Ability to participate in technical discussions with a broad understanding of technical terms.
• Experience working closely with clients on-site day-to-day.
• Active participation in communities of interest, for example, online groups, meetups and speaking at conferences.