Position Summary: Tackling the most complex, high priority, and high risk projects, the Senior Systems Analyst collaborates with stakeholders—product managers, developers, content experts—to ensure that requirements are aligned to fulfill value models and value stories for the business, customers, and users. This individual drives the assessment and elaboration of these requirements to reduce speculation in the appropriate solutions to address them. In addition, the Senior System Analyst focuses on the ‘big picture,’ understanding and solving process and project issues across teams while assisting the functional manager in mentoring and managing less experienced team members to ensure high velocity. Essential Duties/Responsibilities: · Collaborate with product owners to identify and quantify project value, prioritizing high-level requirements accordingly. · Collaborate with cross-functional teams comprised of product management, content, and technology stakeholders to establish project requirements using a variety of techniques (e.g. sponsor/customer/user interview, customer/user tests, data analysis, user observation/contextual inquiry). · Detail requirements of the user experience and user- system/system-system interactions through discussion as well as narrative and pictorial artifacts, driving speculation about the stability and accuracy of requirements out of the development process. · Work with stakeholders and the technology team to evaluate and prioritize requirements to ensure end-to-end alignment and traceability to value stories and the enterprise value model, within and across projects. · Mock-up, review, recommend changes to, and approve user interface design to ensure compliance with requirements, functional specifications, and technical design. · Propose, facilitate and drive the development of solutions to the problems posed by requirements. · Work with content and engineering teams to analyze and document content structure and system logic necessary to support requirements. · Review and recommend changes to system design and architecture as described verbally or through written artifacts (e.g. sequence/activity diagrams, pseudo-code) to ensure completeness of design-to-requirements traceability. · Collaborate with team delivery lead to identify, assess impact of, and track change requests throughout project life cycle. · Review and approve system test plans and test cases. · Assist with development integration and quality assurance testing as needed. · Estimate project analysis resource needs and provide input into project planning. · Perform analysis for complex, high stakes, and enterprise-wide projects. · Provide process and business domain guidance to less experienced team members. · Breakdown, assign, guide, and track work for team members working on larger projects. · Collaborate with team members, functional managers, product managers, and/or executive management to understand and address inter-project dependencies. Skills/Knowledge/Experience: Basic (Required) · Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Business Administration, or related field, or equivalent combination of education and recent, relevant work experience · Minimum of three (3) to five (5) years experience in systems analysis and/or business analysis · Familiarity with analysis within one or more software development methodologies (e.g. Agile, Scrum, Lean, Rational Unified Process, CMMi, Six Sigma). · Experience with managing the work of peer team members · Ability to think logically, critically, and constructively about complex problems and propose solutions that address expressed needs · Ability to facilitate negotiation and build consensus amongst competing parties, ultimately driving teams to decision · Ability to glean organizational strategy and work with stakeholders to identify and define priorities appropriately · Possess outstanding leadership skills · Possess outstanding oral and written communication skills, capable of addressing both technical and non-technical audiences · Experience (1 year or more) with analysis in Agile, Scrum, Lean, and/or XP development environments · Experience (1 year or more) in analysis for web applications in an n-tier architecture · Experience (1 year or more) with data mark-up syntax (e.g. XML, HTML) and/or relational data modeling · Ability to operate independently and effectively, making progress on tasks while dealing with process and project ambiguity Preferred • Domain experience in the publishing industry, education, or Gale/Cengage Learning businesses strongly preferred • Experience with story- or behavior-driven development and associated tools (e.g. FitNesse, easyb, jBehave, Cucumber) strongly preferred • Experience with XML/XSD schema development strongly preferred • Experience in product management or marketing strongly preferred • Experience with usability/HCI assessment methodology and/or for web-based applications strongly preferred • Experience with principles of usability for the web (e.g. W3C’s Content Accessibility Guidelines, Neilsen/Norman Group guidelines) strongly preferred • Experience in object oriented, test-driven development preferred • Experience with graphic design or web development in CSS/XHTML/JavaScript preferred • Experience with requirements management tools (e.g. JIRA/Greenhopper, Rally, VersionOne) preferred Keywords: Business Analysis