Senior Business Analyst (Guidewire) - open to remote

At American Family Insurance, we believe people are an organization's most valuable asset, and their ideas and experiences matter. From our CEO to our agency force, we're committed to growing a diverse and inclusive culture that empowers innovation that will inspire, protect, and restore our customers' dreams in ways never imagined.

• Participates with the business in the creation/completion of project charters for automation projects. Gains an understanding of the business problem and helps define the problem. Validates project scope and leverages validated scope to maintain project focus.
• Determines how to capture and document requirements based on the development methodology used for the business system.
• Meets with stakeholders, subject matter experts, process owners and users to elicit and document needs, expectations, constraints and external interfaces using various methods (e.g., brainstorming, document analysis, facilitated meetings, focus groups, interface analysis, interviews, observation, prototyping, requirements workshops, reverse engineering, survey questionnaire). Asks the right questions to surface essential requirements information.
• Defines constraints for verification and validation.
• Builds consensus among stakeholder group regarding the true business issue and requirements.
• Develops the business requirements by translating the needs, expectations, constraints and interfaces into a format understandable to both clients and technologists.
• Completes activities according to best practices and standard operating procedures consistently meeting quality standards and striving to add value in each activity.

• Develops requirements for solution and solution component design.
• Derives requirements that result from architectural/design decisions.
• Defines quality attributes, constraints and other non-functional requirements.
• Collaborates with developers and business subject matter experts to analyze requirements and design tradeoffs and priorities.
• Establishes and maintains relationship between requirements for consideration during change management and requirements allocation.
• Allocates solution component requirements.
• Documents relationship among allocated requirements.
• Identifies and develops requirements for interfaces.
• Acts as a knowledge source for architects, developers and testers.

• Establishes criteria for evaluation and acceptance of requirements.
• Obtains commitment to the requirements from the project participants, including the elicitation of requirements prioritization.
• Manages requirements scope.
• Manages requirement changes as they evolve during the project.
• Maintains traceability from requirements through testing.
• Identifies project work and requirements inconsistencies.
• Assesses change requests as either expanded scope or missed requirements and places them in the change control process.

• Evaluates information gathered from multiple sources, reconciles conflicts, decompose high-level information into details, abstract up from low-level information to a general understanding, and distinguish user requests from the underlying true needs.
• Analyzes requirements to determine whether they satisfy the objectives of higher level requirements.
• Analyzes requirements to ensure that they are complete, feasible, realizable and verifiable.
• Identifies key requirements that have a strong influence on cost, schedule, functionality, risk, or performance.
• Represents requirements textually as well as via visual models and graphical form, in order to communicate the requirements effectively to the required audience.
• Analyzes operational concepts and scenarios to refine the business needs, constraints, and interfaces and to discover new requirements.

• Collaborates with testing lead to develop requirements-based testing considerations and strategies that will validate resolution of the business problem and realization of business requirements.
• Manages defects by assessing their disposition and assigning them to the appropriate process for resolution.

• Leads the establishment and implementation of a standard set of operating procedures for effective requirements engineering, including use and continuous improvement of a requirements process.
• Engages the business as a center of excellence stakeholder.
• Brings focus and attention to business analysis center of excellence across all I/S solution delivery teams.
• Recommends tools and processes to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of all Business Analysts.
• Implements ways to reuse requirements across projects.
• Leads peer reviews and other governance activities to assure ongoing consistency in requirements work product.
• Mentors less experienced business analysts to drive consistency and growth within the COE.
• Acts as a team lead when multiple business analysts are involved in a project. Sets the direction for requirements elicitation and documentation.
• Determines the metrics for monitoring business analysis work.

• Builds trustworthy business relationships with stakeholders and business management.
• Partners with the clients on business case preparation, project prioritization process, and technology road map.
• Facilitates discussions between the business and technologists in order to identify potential technical alternatives and innovative solutions to meet the business needs.
• Resolves problems as needed to ensure that clients receive prompt and efficient service.
• Maintains awareness of technology trends and vendor applications in the market.
• Identifies stakeholders and plan communications with those stakeholders.
• Defines roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in the business analysis effort.
• Develops estimates for business analysis tasks.
• Plans how requirements will be approached, traced, and prioritized.
• Remains an active participant on assigned projects all the way to closure.

• Demonstrated experience providing customer-driven solutions, support or service
• Demonstrated experience analyzing and defining technical SDLC requirements for moderately complex IT projects using a variety of graphical and textual techniques.
• Demonstrated experience consulting on the development of test strategies and plans for medium to large IT projects.
• Demonstrated experience using multiple facilitation techniques and other methods to elicit and document requirements and resolve conflicts among project stakeholders.
• Demonstrated experience with multiple modeling techniques/tools used to convey and gain agreement regarding requirements.
• Extensive knowledge and understanding of system development life cycle (SDLC) methodologies. (e.g. Waterfall, Iterative, Agile).
• Solid knowledge and understanding of system architecture and system engineering processes and procedures.
• Solid knowledge and understanding of infrastructure technologies, operating systems, and the interconnectivity between infrastructure platforms and software tools.
• Solid knowledge of general business operations, objectives, and strategies.

• This position requires travel up to 5% of the time

• Top candidates will have experience with Guidewire
• Offer to selected candidate will be made contingent on the results of applicable background checks
• Offer to selected candidate is contingent on signing a non-disclosure agreement for proprietary information, trade secrets, and inventions