Lead Business Analyst

Lead Business Analyst Permanent Hybrid Working - Solihull Responsibilities

• Provide line management to the Business Analyst team, including workload allocation, performance management, coaching, and professional development.
• Deputise for the Project Director to represent Business Architecture & Business Analysis interests at senior stakeholder and governance forums.
• Build and lead a Business Analyst community of practice, establishing shared standards, tools, templates, and promoting best practice ways of working across the BA discipline.
• Oversee the Business Analysis artefacts for consistency and quality across the team, ensuring requirements and analysis outputs across the team meet agreed standards and quality expectations.
• Provide end-to-end business analysis support to strategy and target operating model (TOM) work, bringing BA rigour to business architecture activities and helping shape the future-state operating model.
• Lead the most strategic and complex Business Analysis assignments across projects and programmes, setting the standard for the wider BA team.
• Elicit, document, prioritise, validate, and communicate business, functional, and non-functional requirements, user stories and related acceptance criteria across projects and programmes.
• Perform gap analyses and contribute to business case development and benefit/value articulation.
• Maintain end to end traceability from business objectives and problem statements through to requirements (including regulatory requirements), solution design, testing and delivered outcomes.
• Support stakeholders in shaping business needs and future-state designs, identifying risks, constraints & dependencies.
• Lead discovery activities including current-/target-state analysis and feasibility assessment.
• Facilitate workshops for requirements gathering, problem-solving, and solution design.
• Work collaboratively with Solution Architects to support technology options evaluation.
• Liaise across business teams, delivery teams, and external suppliers. Specialist/Technical Expertise Essential
• Business analysis experience gained within a business architecture practice, with working knowledge of strategy and target operating model (TOM) concepts and frameworks (e.g. TOGAF, BIZBOK).
• Proven line management experience, with the ability to lead, coach and develop a team of Business Analysts.
• Experience building and leading a community of practice or centre of excellence.
• Experience in process modelling, data modelling, and requirements engineering.
• Ability to interpret, challenge, and validate complex business needs.
• Proficiency in business analysis toolsets and modelling notations (e.g., BPMN, UML).
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills with the ability to handle ambiguity.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including presenting complex information clearly and influencing senior stakeholders.
• Experience developing business cases and conducting options appraisals.
• Comfortable leading workshops and influencing stakeholders at all levels.
• Experience in agile and waterfall development methodologies and working in cross-functional delivery teams.
• Ability to work on a range of initiatives concurrently and comfortable managing competing priorities.
• Experience in highly regulated sectors. Desirable
• Previous experience in a Lead BA, BA Practice Lead, or similar Business Analysis leadership role.
• Professional Business Analysis qualifications (e.g. BCS International Diploma in Business Analysis; IIBA certifications).
• Business architecture qualification (e.g. TOGAF, BIZBOK, OMG-Certified).
• Experience supporting software procurement activities.
• Experience in utilities.