Symetra is a financial services company offering annuities, life insurance and employee benefits that help people create secure retirements, protect their families and get benefits at work. We are headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, and have offices across the country.

Symetra has an exciting opportunity to join our Business and systems team as a Business Analyst !

About The Role

You Will be responsible for performing basic, cross functional and cross company business and process analysis. Scope of work includes understanding of standard business analysis techniques needed to effectively and efficiently analyze systems, extracts and interfaces. Understands the general concept of the interrelationships between systems and processes how simple changes impact each. Uses general understanding of enterprise systems relationships to help assess process and systems improvements to ensure alignment of current needs with desired future direction. Has basic understanding of Symetra’s business and systems domains as well as the industry in which we operate. Uses basic analysis tools proficiently and completes work assignments with only general direction.

What You'll Do In This Role

• Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring : How business analysts determine which activities are necessary in order to complete a business analysis effort.
• Stakeholder identification, selection of business analysis techniques, process that will be used to manage requirements, and how to access the progress of the work.
• Builds relationships with business partners including users, project team and management at all levels.
• Develops a communication plan to meet the needs of all business partners and can adapt communication style to different audiences.
• Utilizes basic techniques to measure quality of business analysis and helps to implement change based on the metrics. Requirements Management and Communications: How business analysts manage conflicts, issues and changes in order to ensure that stakeholders and the project team remain in agreement on the solution scope, how requirements are communicated to stakeholders, and how knowledge gained by the business analyst is maintained for future use.
• Manages changes to requirements and provide basic assessment of impact to scope of projects.
• Manage conflicts and collaborates with project team to gain consensus.
• Develops and maintains traceability of the requirements, on smaller projects, from planning through post-production phases of projects to ensure quality of delivery.
• Understands and can applies basic reuse standards for maintaining requirements.
• Creates comprehensive requirements artifacts at the level of details to support development of solution.
• Facilitates reviews of requirements using formal and informal techniques for small projects and mods.
• Elicitation: How business analysts work with stakeholders to identify and understand their needs and the environment in which they work.
• Ability to use the analysis techniques, identified in planning, to accurately flush out requirements.
• Helps other senior analysts determine when additional information is needed to discover requirements that the stakeholder is not aware of.
• Accurately documents the requirements so that the stakeholders understand and can review.
• Validates the requirements are what the stakeholders intended in order to meet their needs.
• Enterprise Analysis : Identify business needs, refine and clarify the definition of the needs and validate the solution meets the needs.
• Can provide basic problem definition and analysis, helps with business case development, feasibility and definition of the scope.
• Helps stakeholders identify areas of opportunity and facilitates exploration
• Has a good understanding of business functions such as Service and Operations, Sales and Distribution, Compliance etc.
• Understands organizational culture and uses relationships to influence decisions at a project level.
• Has a good understanding of the framework of the company (structure, people, processes and technology.
• Requirements Analysis: How business analysts prioritize and progressively elaborate stakeholder and solution requirements in order to enable the project team to implement a solution that will meet the needs of the organization and stakeholders.
• Ability to prioritize requirements based on cost, timelines and business value.
• Assess small or moderate amounts of information and can organize in ways that various stakeholders understand
• Leverages basic models to provide insight into opportunities for improvement.
• Develops abstract models that describe business domain, in order to elect requirements.
• Solution Assessment : Assess proposed solution to determine which solution best fits the business need, identify gaps in solution, and determine necessary workarounds or changes to the solution.
• Validates the solution meets the functionality that the business needs.
• Analyzes the impact to existing workflows, processes and procedures that will occur with the implementation of the solution.
• Helps more senior analysts to define the capabilities and requirements (transition of data, work in progress and training) needed to support the solution.
• Process Analysis : Utilize process modeling tools and techniques in order to identify and breakdown phases of a process in order to create an understanding of the inputs, outputs, and operations that take place during each phase
• . Assess the results of process analysis, on small projects, to determine potential targets for process improvement through removing waste and increasing efficiency.
• Create basic modeling diagrams that help define the requirements, identify gaps in requirements and workflows.
• Document changes and help to identify impact downstream to systems and workflows.
• User Acceptance : Develop acceptance criteria to ensure business needs are met. Facilitate user acceptance testing for medium to large projects.
• Begin to utilize automation tools to ensure quality and efficiency in testing.
• Analyze and document test plans, test cases and results

Who You Are

Analytical Thinking and Problem Solving

• Ability to take basic to moderately complex information that is abstract and ambiguous and organize into meaningful facts for business partners to understand.
• Understanding how a system change affects the whole system itself and all downstream systems, interfaces, workflow and processes.
• Ability to come up with new ideas and applying these to resolve existing problems or needs.
• Ability to identify moderately complex problems and can help identify possible solutions to ensure the objectives of the business partners are met. Business Knowledge
• Understanding of business environment, operations, process and practices relating to: basic business functions and operations, organization structure, regulatory, compliance and governance frameworks.
• Understanding of company products and business model, as well as some industry product knowledge.
• Good understanding of how products are supported by multiple systems and how simple changes in the product impact those systems. Communication Skills
• Excellent oral and written communication skills with the ability to adjust according to the audience
• Ability to facilitate large and small group sessions ensuring success through preparation and attention to detail.
• Verifies information communicated is understood and the person(s) receiving the information can apply what they have heard. Interaction Skills
• Ability to lead and influence team members and stakeholders.
• Fosters a collaborative working environment and builds trust with others. System and Software
• Ability to analyze and apply basic understanding of software applications to improve business analysis tasks and techniques.
• Moderate understanding of how systems, interfaces, extracts and processes interact with one another and can apply knowledge to analysis
• Ability to look holistically across all systems, interfaces, extracts and processes to determine potential impacts.
• High school diploma required College degree or equivalent experience preferred.