At McMaster University, our people are our most valuable asset. We strive to attract, develop, and retain talented faculty and staff, and to foster inclusive excellence which values the strengths, perspectives, and contributions of each individual. McMaster’s profile and stature has evolved to one of the Top 70 Universities in the World and we are recognized as Canada’s Most Research Intensive University. McMaster is also recognized as one of the top employers in the Hamilton/Niagara region and has been recognized as one of Canada’s Top Diversity employers in each of 2019, 2020 and 2021.
As a member of our University Technology Services (UTS) team you will be expected to support our mission to provide exceptional customer service and a high level of IT support to the McMaster community. Critical to the success of this role we stand by and value integrity, mutual respect, collaboration and cooperation in support of McMaster’s Institutional Priorities and Strategic Framework.
University Advancement (UA) at McMaster University is an integrated department that encompasses the areas of Development, Alumni Engagement, Stewardship, and Advancement Services & Operations, working collaboratively with McMaster’s Faculties and units across campus to build relationships and resources on behalf of the University.
Advancement Services & Operations is a service-oriented and collaborative team that helps enable UA’s mission by providing high-quality, client-focused support and tools to all our stakeholders in the areas of human resources; budgeting/finance; gift processing and biographical records; IT and systems; research and prospect analytics; and administration for the Office of the Vice-President.
About the Project
UA is embarking on a project to transform from its current alumni/donor database (Ellucian Advance Web) to a SAAS-based CRM solution. This project will be multi-year implementation to onboard and support development (fundraising), alumni engagement and stewardship teams within UA, along with partners from across campus.
About the position
The Business Analyst is a member of the IT Strategic Implementation Team within the office of the Assistant Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, as well as the Advancement Services & Operations team within UA. The role reports to and works closely with the Senior Manager, Strategic IT Portfolio Management within UTS, with a dotted line to the Director, Advancement Services & Operations within UA. The Business Analyst will support the implementation of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) project for Advancement.
The Business Analyst will actively support all phases of the CRM project, providing requirements elicitation, uncovering areas of process improvement, as well as updating, implementing, and maintaining procedures.
Are you the right candidate?
This role requires a professional with a demonstrated record of solid Business Analyst experience and skills set and will be responsible for analysis for strategic enterprise level projects identified during the McMaster IT strategic plan and approved through the IT Governance process. The IT Governance process is a framework for aligning IT resources with the strategic direction of the University; ensuring that projects are evaluated against a common framework, a broad group of stakeholders are involved in the proposal and evaluation process and that projects are monitored and measured.
Experience with complex enterprise-wide technology projects, working alongside vendors, and implementing CRM Solutions is required. Experience specifically implementing CRM solutions within a Higher Education or not-for-profit environment is an asset.
Key Responsibilities:
Analysis and Solution Definition
- Work closely with business owners to determine business requirements; eliciting requirements through interviews, document analysis, workshops, surveys, use cases.
- Analyze and critically evaluate information gathered from multiples sources, reconciling conflicts, and deconstructing high-level information into details.
- Current state, future state gap analysis
- Develop and document business requirements according to standard templates.
- Document business process descriptions and analysis including business rules and workflow.
- Leading ongoing reviews of business processes and developing optimization strategies.
- Serving as a liaison between stakeholders and users.
- Providing leadership, training, coaching, and guidance to junior staff.
- Updating, implementing, and maintaining procedures.
- Assisting with user acceptance testing.
Manage Relationships
- Collaborate with project manager, project team members and sponsor to determine the scope and vision of the project.
- Liaise with vendor in assessing best practice for product within the UA environment.
- BA acts as the conduit between the client community and the vendor through which requirements flow.
- Provide expertise to clients with respect to the objectives of business process design.
Organizational Responsibilities
- Help identify project stakeholders and establish user classes and their characteristics.
- Identify and establish the scope and parameters of requirements analysis to define project impact, outcome criteria, and metrics.
- Work with stakeholders and the project team to prioritize collected requirements.
- Review and analyze the effectiveness and efficiency of existing requirement gathering processes.
- Translate and promote conceptual user requirements into functional requirements that are comprehensible to the vendor and the project team.
- Communicate changes, enhancements, and modifications of business requirements to project managers, sponsors, and other stakeholders.
- Complete estimates of time and resources required for the implementation and analysis of new processes.
- Conduct cost-benefit analysis which may involve complex calculations of service levels and benefits including present value calculations, mean and standard deviation, and estimating business volumes.
Technical Recommendations, Training and Systems Testing
- Develop and conduct peer reviews of business requirements to ensure that the requirement specifications are correctly interpreted.
- Gather and compile information on hardware and software products that meet predetermined specifications. Analyze and verify requirements for completeness, consistency, comprehensibility, feasibility, and conformity to standards.
- Lead and develop transition plans, training plans and provide training to others when new business processes are implemented.
- Develop prototypes of interfaces and attributes based on user requirements.
- Remain current with frequent updates and changes to technology.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Sciences, Business or a related field of study or experience
- Preferred: Certifications – CCBA, CBAP in addition to technical certifications from vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle or Cisco, and ITIL
- 10 years of relevant experience
- In depth understanding of business process and practice
- Experience in facilitating discussions, presentations collaborating with cross functional teams
- Strong technical writing skills to develop thorough and informative business process documents
- Experience with vendor management
- Working knowledge of project management methodology
- Detailed understanding of one or more institutional level applications and /or major business unit operations/requirements
- Knowledge of commercial information technology standards
- Use standard analysis techniques for future state, current state and gap analysis
- Use of testing methodologies (trace, usability) from the business perspective
- Experience using Microsoft products such as Teams, Office 365, Visio and other project software such as Jira
