Pragmatic and results driven professional, experienced Business Analyst with BCS qualifications underpinned by significant academic achievements and 19+ years commercial experience, primarily in Financial Services. Broad experience in Risk, Finance and Enterprise-wide IT enabled change. Can offer a prospective employer an intuitive individual with a consistent, proven track record of development and delivery across the project lifecycle with a strong team ethic and desire to understand and improve processes.

SKILLS

• Strong examples of leading delivery of model change
• Extensive experience in shaping and incubating change
• Exceptional business process modelling skills
• Solving complex problems, issue resolution and root cause analysis
• Experience of data analysis, data warehouses, data mapping and interrogating data using SAS and SQL 
• Experience using agile and waterfall methodologies to implement successful change 
• Experience using Jira and Confluence to support delivery
• Ability to quickly understand and simplify technical concepts and complex processes at pace
• Highly experienced BA lead and mentor
• BCS qualified
   

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Lead Business Analyst, Risk Platform | Lloyds Banking Group, Leeds, UK | May 2019 - Present

Following a group-wide restructure, I moved to a new area within Group Transformation supporting Credit Risk, joining a cross-functional team to deliver Prudential Model Change. Working as a lead BA in an agile lab environment bringing together Risk business and IT colleagues.

Key Responsibilities:

• Guidance, support, supervision and mentoring of Business Analyst activity within a team. 
• Organising and prioritising business analysis work items on product backlogs
• Detailed interrogation of business needs and elicitation of functional and non-functional requirements
• Creating acceptance criteria and user stories
• Representing the business analysis function in all meetings and to stakeholders across all levels
• Identifying, developing and supporting business process change
• Working with Agile practices, participating in scrum events e.g. sprint planning, stand-ups, demos and retrospectives
• Working with onshore and offshore colleagues
• Performing data analysis and using SAS and SQL.

Key Achievements:

• Successful introduction of a new model execution system for forecasting models
• Led the shaping of Motor Finance model changes which became the standard for initiating new change
• Leading the Business Analysis work stream for Motor Finance within the regulatory CRDIV Programme.

Lead Business Analyst, Group Finance | Lloyds Banking Group, Halifax, UK | Oct 2016 - Apr 2019

Achieving promotion, I moved into a business focused role in Group Finance to focus on the business side of change and gain experience in a new area of the group.

Key Responsibilities:

• Guidance, support, supervision and mentoring of Business Analyst activity on Finance projects 
• Leading the business to define and shape project objectives, making goals, requirements and constraints unambiguous
• Leading requirements definition and scoping at idea/initiation/study 
• Direction and quality control of project analytical deliverables, driving the quality and delivery through to implementation, accountable for all BA deliverables
• Providing advice, expertise and experience to project leadership on issues of feasibility or alternatives 

Key Achievements:

• Lead BA for Retail Finance on the group’s ring-fencing programme to separate the bank’s retail elements from its investment arms:
  • Successful setup of separate visa membership for the Non-Ring-Fenced Bank (NRFB) ensuring no liability on the ring-fenced bank in the event of failure of the NRFB
  • successful closure of Bank of Scotland offshore branches and roll up to BoS UK
  • successful separation of Link settlement for the NRFB 
• Lead BA for Group Finance on the back book migration project, a multi-billion-pound mortgage migration to move mortgages from their legacy source system to the strategic mortgage platform. This was a complex project requiring analysis to understand and reconcile financial components of the legacy system, engaging and managing stakeholders across 17 key finance areas. 

Senior Business Analyst, Group IT | Lloyds Banking Group, Pudsey, West Yorkshire, UK | Feb 2010 - Sept 2016

Following the HBoS/LTSB merger, I moved into the newly formed group wide Business Analyst practice pool, achieving a promotion.

Key Responsibilities:

• Responsible for leading teams of BAs on multiple IT projects, including assignment management and mentoring
• Accountable for business analysis deliverables such as scope, requirements, traceability and solution feasibility
• Direction and quality control of deliverables, driving quality and delivery through to implementation
• Supporting executive level decision making through informed guidance.

Key Achievements:

• 2015-2016 Lead BA on the group’s Cyber Security Programme, leading the Information Asset Protection work stream responsible for a portfolio of five projects with a budget of £15m in 2016
• 2013-205 Lead BA on the Desktop Transformation Program to upgrade the group’s windows client estate (>100,000 clients) and infrastructure from XP to Windows 7:
  • managed requirements for vendor selection for a new User Environment Management solution
  • deployment infrastructure deployed and all colleagues successfully migrated - success rate of 97%
• 2011-2012 volunteered for line management responsibility to support the practice - line management of 4 BAs alongside project deliverables.

EDUCATION

Bachelor of Arts Joint Hons. in History and Politics | Keele University 1997-2000

Subsidiary courses in Computer Science and Philosophy.

CERTIFICATIONS 

BCS Diploma in Business Analysis (2010):

Business Analysis Essentials 

Requirements Engineering 

System Modelling Techniques (object oriented)

Foundation Certificate in IS Project Management 

PERSONAL INFORMATION

References: available upon request.  Driving License: Full, clean, UK.  Date of Birth: 25th June 1978