Senior Business Analyst - Maternity Cover (Fixed Term Contract)

Job Title:   Senior Business Analyst (Maternity Leave cover)

Location:   London, UK

We are looking for a talented and passionate Senior Business Analyst to join our SNAPP Communications team in SN Digital (SND), a technology division of Springer Nature. 

The SNAPP Communications team is a newly formed product team within the SNAPP Programme, focused on transforming how communications are managed across Springer Nature's peer review workflows.

The team is building a scalable communications platform that will become a strategic capability within the wider publishing ecosystem.

The platform will support key communication journeys across peer review, enabling consistent, trackable and efficient interactions between authors, editors and reviewers.

About Springer Nature  

Springer Nature is one of the leading publishers of research in the world. We publish the largest number of journals and books and are a pioneer in open research. Through our leading brands, trusted for more than 180 years, we provide technology-enabled products, platforms and services that help researchers to uncover new ideas and share their discoveries, health professionals to stay at the forefront of medical science, and educators to advance learning. We are proud to be part of progress, working together with the communities we serve to share knowledge and bring greater understanding to the world. For more information, please visit about.springernature.com and @SpringerNature.   

About Us 

SN Digital has 230 people based in London, Berlin, Lisbon, Pune, New York, Madrid, Dordrecht, and Heidelberg. We work in collaborative, multi-disciplinary delivery teams, developing digital products and services that answer user problems and support business goals. 

The work is exciting and meaningful. 

Our culture is collaborative and friendly. 

We encourage and support growth, both personal and professional. 

Having a good command of English is essential; collaboration is vital in our day to day work, so being able to communicate your ideas and understand others is critical. 

This role is a terrific opportunity for friendly, curious people who want to get involved in our work, who love to learn, who will embrace and develop our culture, and help make SND a place where people and ideas can thrive. 

We are intentionally looking to create teams that are diverse and inclusive. Diversity is the mix of culture, background, experience and personality that we all bring; inclusion is getting the mix to work better together. We want every team member to contribute to our shared goals while respecting each other's skills, knowledge and needs. 

The way we do business 

We build our software incrementally, iteratively, and continuously, so you’ll be able to see new work go live to over four million visitors around the globe every week. Our flavour of agile has been heavily influenced by XP and Kanban, and if something isn’t working, we change it. 

Our work delivers value to both the business and our customers, our teams are cross-discipline: business analysts and the user experience team work with stakeholders to coordinate research and understand requirements, whilst our frontend developers and software engineers pair with quality analysts to develop the most robust solutions, and our platform engineers work across the organisation to ensure our infrastructure never lets us down. 

We generally follow a mix of agile and lean practices with an overall philosophy towards continuous delivery. We’ll rely on each and everyone’s expertise to adapt and improve these processes to serve the team, project and company as best fit their current contexts. 

Visit sndigital.springernature.com to learn more about who we are and what we do. 

About the role 

We are looking for a skilled and passionate Business Analyst to help us build our communications capability within our crucial peer review system, known as SNAPP (Springer Nature Article Processing Platform). 

A user-centric approach plays a fundamental role in the way we work.

In this role, you will be part of a cross-functional agile delivery team, leveraging analysis tools to inform decisions that support both business objectives and user needs. You will collaborate closely with both your team and business stakeholders to understand complex business problems, define work and identify key opportunities. 

Our teams are diverse, with members from various backgrounds and nationalities. Together, we work to create solutions that not only meet the business goals of Springer Nature but also provide tangible value to our users. 

Responsibilities

• Work with stakeholders to understand our goals & vision, and identify business needs through strong business insight

• Orchestrate collaboration within the team and externally with business stakeholders while balancing competing stakeholder priorities

• Communicate to the development team how the requirements are aligned with the business needs and “big picture” goals and vision using clear storytelling techniques

• Collaborate and provide business analysis support to the product manager, business sponsors, SMEs and the team during development 

• Unearth the root cause(s) of pain points, and validate business opportunities and problems using data analytics and quantitative analysis where relevant as a tool

• Prioritise competing demands and obtaining buy-in from stakeholders 

• Map, analyse and validate information flows within a complex organisational setting and contribute to process and system design improvements 

• Plan, organise and lead workshops that generate ideas and resolve problems 

• Champion business analysis best practices and principles within the BA community  

• Challenge and influence decisions; focusing on customer and business value 

• Monitoring, tracking and communicating progress and issues relating to the project as a whole applying project management practices

• Capturing information in teams Jira and ensuring they are kept up to date what you will be doing 

• Develop an understanding of the technology stack, system capabilities and data landscape to support effective solution delivery

Within 3 Months, you will: 

• Strengthen team ceremonies conducted regularly, adding value to the delivery process. 

• Have an understanding of the team’s context in the broader programme and business. 

• Have developed relationships with team members and core stakeholders. 

• Be familiar with the technology stack and data landscape 

• Can co-plan, organise and lead group sessions that generate ideas and resolve problems. 

• Can unearth the root cause(s) of pain points and validate business opportunities and problems. 

• Be an active participant of the Business Analyst communities. 

By 3-6 months, you will: 

• Have a clear understanding of the team’s priorities and be able to communicate this to stakeholders. 

• Build relationships with key providers and dependent teams. 

• Be able to monitor, track and communicate progress, risks and issues to stakeholders. 

• Be able to prioritise competing demands and obtain buy-in from stakeholders. 

• Map, analyse and validate information flows and user journeys to and from the product/service digital estate. 

• Gauge the complexity or scope of a piece of work, collaboratively breaking it into smaller pieces as appropriate. 

• Contribute to blameless post-mortems. 

• Set context with your team to ensure any solutions co-defined provide business value whilst solving customer problems 

By 6-12 months, you will: 

• Onboard new members to the team 

• Co-define the complexity or scope of a piece of work, breaking it into smaller pieces when appropriate. 

• Ensure scoped work aligns with programme and company vision 

• Contribute to the design of the system architecture. 

• Understand our customers’ needs, both internal and external, and how your work affects their experience. 

• Give and receive constructive feedback within your team. 

• Organise and run sessions with your discipline peers within the Business Analyst community. 

• Actively work alongside your team to define the vision and strategy of your product or service in terms of business and customer outcomes. 

• Define KPIs to measure product/service performance in terms of business and customer outcomes. 

• Have a thorough understanding of the potential opportunities and limitations of your product/service offering 

• Instil a data-driven approach to current and future product/service development. 

Day to day responsibilities  

As part of an Agile product team, day-to-day, you will: 

• Engage in and/or facilitate ceremonies such as our daily stand-ups, planning, prioritisation and steering sessions, story kick-offs, collaborative analysis and design workshops, showcases to internal customers and regular retrospectives. 

• Work with our many and varied stakeholders to understand, analyse and scope new work. 

• Support your team members in problem-solving activities to remove blockers and complete agreed-upon work.  

About You: 

• You are able to quickly gain context of your product and user space and how it fits into the bigger picture of the programme landscape. 

• You are proactive, self driven, make yourself useful, pull information and don't wait to be asked, seek advice when unsure.  

• You like working in a collaborative team where there is collective responsibility for the product. 

• You can demonstrate experience in working successfully with teams to deliver software in an agile manner. 

• You can demonstrate your experience in facilitating groups to achieve defined goals and outcomes using various facilitation tools and techniques. 

• You will have excellent communication skills and articulate concepts and ideas from technical and functional business perspectives effectively. 

• You have proven experience in managing and resolving conflict with stakeholders. 

• You can use available data to inform decisions, and build better products. 

• You will have a strong focus on high-quality customer experience and sustainable solutions. 

• You proactively identify pain points and openly address any form of gaps.

• You can demonstrate the outstanding analytical ability to solve complex problems. 

• Have experience working in a dynamic and collaborative environment. 

• You use your drive, creativity and initiative to move the team forward. 

• You have experience in driving continuous improvement and innovation across teams.  

• You are intellectually curious and motivated - constantly looking for more context. 

At Springer Nature, our mission is to be part of progress – and that begins with inclusion: of people, perspectives, and ideas. We believe that diverse perspectives drive progress, and we are committed to creating an environment where people and ideas can flourish. If you have any access needs related to disability, neurodivergence or a chronic condition, please contact us so we can make all necessary accommodation. Find out more about our DEI work here https://group.springernature.com/gp/group/taking-responsibility/diversity-equity-inclusion 

For more information about career opportunities in Springer Nature please visit https://springernature.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/SpringerNatureCareers/