Business Analyst

Message Systems is a global leader in messaging, with a global customer base including tier-1 telecommunications carriers, email service providers and online enterprises. Our technologies help transmit billions of messages per day for customers worldwide, while offering unmatched flexibility and architectural clarity. The company combines the best aspects of Open Source, startup, and established company in our business goals and corporate culture.

The Business Analyst has the primary responsibility to elicit, analyze, validate, specify, verify, and manage the real needs of the project stakeholders including internal and external consumers. The Requirements/Business Analyst serves as the conduit between the customer community and the software development team through which requirements flow.

A requirements analyst is involved at some level throughout the entire system or software development life cycle. Upon establishment of the requirements baseline, the focus is shifted towards the management of the requirements specification and verifying the fulfillment of all requirements.

Required Skills:

• Strong interviewing skills to talk with individuals and groups about their needs and ask the right questions to surface essential requirements information.
• Listening skills, to understand what people say and to detect what they might be hesitant to say.
• Analytical skills, to critically evaluate the information gathered from multiple sources, reconcile conflicts, decompose high-level information into details, abstract up from low-level information to a more general understanding, distinguish presented user requests from the underlying true needs, and distinguish solution ideas from requirements.
• Facilitation skills, to lead requirements elicitation workshops.
• Observational skills, to validate data obtained via other techniques and expose new areas for elicitation.
• Writing skills, to communicate information effectively to customers, marketing, managers, and technical staff.
• Organizational skills, to work with the vast array of information gathered during elicitation and analysis and to cope with rapidly changing information.
• Interpersonal skills, to help negotiate priorities and to resolve conflicts among project stakeholders (such as customers, product management, and engineering).
• Modeling skills, to represent requirements information in graphical forms that augment textual representations in natural language, including using modeling languages already established in the development organization.
• An understanding of contemporary requirements elicitation, analysis, specification, verification, and management practices and the ability to apply them in practice; familiarity with requirements engineering books and resources.
• An understanding of how to practice requirements engineering in iterative and agile software development programs.

Responsibilities:

• Work with the product managers and project sponsors to document the product’s vision and the project’s scope.
• Elicit requirements using interviews, document analysis, requirements workshops, storyboards, surveys, site visits, business process descriptions, use cases, scenarios, event lists, business analysis, competitive product analysis, task and workflow analysis, and/or viewpoints.
• Write requirements specifications according to standard templates, using natural language simply, clearly, unambiguously, and concisely.
• Decompose high-level business and user requirements into functional requirements specified in an appropriate level of detail suitable for use by those must base their work on the requirements.
• Represent requirements using alternative views, such as analysis models (diagrams), prototypes, or scenarios, where appropriate.
• Lead requirements analysis and verification, ensuring that requirement statements are complete, consistent, concise, comprehensible, traceable, feasible, unambiguous, and verifiable, and that they conform to standards.
• Participate in requirements prioritization.
• Participate in peer reviews and inspections of requirements documents. Participate in peer reviews of work products derived from requirements specifications to ensure that the requirements were interpreted correctly.
• Manage requirements traceability information and track requirements status throughout the project.
• Identify requirements errors and defects, and write requirements defect identification and notification reports.
• Implement ways to reuse requirements across projects.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years as senior business analyst in a software development organization.
• Strong knowledge and use of development analysis methodologies, standards and procedures.
• Able to provide fast turnaround for each deliverable in order to meet key project deadlines.
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills.
• Excellent team work and communication skills.
• Excellent teamwork and communication skills.
• Bachelor's degree preferred.
• Familiarity with large-scale infrastructure systems supporting high performance, high availability messaging platforms preferred.
• Understanding of messaging protocols, systems, and concepts including SMTP, SMS/MMS, etc preferred.
• Experience with user interface design and human computer interaction standards preferred.

This position is full-time in our Columbia, MD office. We're only considering candidates with existing US work eligibility.

Send applications to jobs@messagesystems.com.