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 team as Senior Business Analyst! About the role

You will be responsible for performing moderately complex, cross-functional and cross-company business and process analysis. Scope of work includes understanding of business analysis techniques needed to analyze enterprise-wide systems, extracts and interfaces effectively and efficiently. You will maintain a good understanding of the interrelationships between systems and processes with those of the overall enterprise and can identify possible impacts because as a result of complex changes. Use understanding of enterprise systems relationships to assess process and systems improvements to ensure alignment of current needs with desired future direction. You will demonstrate understanding of Symetra’s business and systems domains as well as the industry in which we operate, including experience with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and/or working with a sales organization. You will also learn how to teach and coach other business analysts on basic skills.

What You'll Do In This Role

• Stakeholder identification, selection of business analysis techniques, identification of processes that will be used to manage requirements, and assess the progress of the work.
• Evaluate project complexity of all domains (Business, IT, Vendor)
• Build relationships with business partners including users, vendors, project team and management at all levels.
• Develop a communication plan to meet the needs of all business partners and adapt communication style to different audiences.
• Utilize some advanced techniques to measure quality of business analysis and can implement appropriate change based on the metrics.
• Manage changes to requirements and assesses impact to scope of moderate to complex projects.
• Develop and maintain traceability of the requirements from planning through post-production phases of projects to ensure quality of delivery.
• Create comprehensive requirements artifacts at the level of detail to support development of solution.
• Facilitate reviews of requirements using formal and informal techniques for large projects.
• Determine when additional information is needed to discover requirements that the stakeholder is not aware of.
• Accurately document the requirements so that the stakeholders understand and can review
• Validate that requirements are what the stakeholders intended in order to meet their needs.
• Assist with problem definition and analysis, business case development, feasibility and definition of the scope.
• Help stakeholders identify areas of opportunity and facilitate exploration
• Develop broad understanding of business functions such as Service and Operations, Sales and Distribution, Compliance etc.
• Understand organizational culture and use relationships to influence decisions at project, business and management levels.
• Develop understanding of the framework of the company (structure, people, processes and technology.)
• Prioritize requirements based on cost, timelines, and business value.

Leverages models to provide insight into opportunities for improvement.

• Develops abstract models that describe business domain, to elicit requirements.
• Utilizes matrices to organize and show relationships between requirements.
• Validates the solution meets the business functionality as well as business goals.
• Analyzes the impact to existing workflows, processes and procedures that will occur with the implementation of the solution.
• Helps the Product Owner define the capabilities and requirements (transition of data, work in progress and training) needed to support the solution.
• Assesses the results of process analysis, on large projects, to determine potential targets for process improvement through removing waste and increasing efficiency.
• Create modeling diagrams, for larger projects, that help define the requirements, identify gaps in requirements and workflows.
• Analyze and document changes and how they impact downstream systems and workflows.
• Develop acceptance criteria to ensure business needs are met.

Facilitate user acceptance testing for large to complex projects.

• Analyze and document test plans, test cases and results.
• Can provide some basic coaching on systems, processes, business analysis techniques and products to junior business analysts.
• Ability to customize coaching approach based on the experience and learning style of the other analyst.

Facilitate Training

• Assist with assembling training materials including but not limited to training videos, collateral, FAQs, cheat sheets, etc.
• Assist with developing, planning, and scheduling training sessions
• Collaborate on change management activities

Who You Are

• Analytical Thinking and Problem Solving
• Ability to take moderately complex abstract and ambiguous information 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 contribute to new ideas and applying these to resolve existing problems or needs.
• Ability to solve more complex issues, to ensure that the solutions meet the objectives of the business partners. Business Knowledge
• Strong understanding of business environment, operations, process and practices relating to: complex business functions and operations, organization structure, regulatory, compliance and governance frameworks.
• Product knowledge within the company as well as in the industry
• Good understanding of how products are supported by multiple systems and how changes in the product impact those systems.
• Excellent documentation skills to build vision and scope, BRS, UAT, Communication plans, Training plans and presentations.
• Strong Initiative/program management skills deploying IT systems implementations within the Software Development Process (SDLC) with an ability to manage and deliver multiple Initiatives or releases at the same time. 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 begins to expand their influence to others outside the department
• Fosters a collaborative working environment and builds trust within the team as well as others outside the department. System and Software
• Ability to analyze and apply understanding of software applications to improve business analysis tasks and techniques.
• Strong 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 feasibility of needs and solutions.