Senior Automation Business Analyst

Pay Range: $47.00hr - $52.00hr Job Overview: The Automation Analyst is responsible for supporting the end-to-end lifecycle of enterprise automation initiatives as a subject matter expert for the automation solution, from initial project intake and business process Client through requirements definition, development coordination, testing, implementation, and operational handoff. The Automation Analyst is responsible for understanding business processes and objectives, translating stakeholder needs into clear and actionable requirements, identifying process and data dependencies, and ensuring development teams have the information necessary to design and deliver effective automation solutions. The role also serves as the primary liaison between business stakeholders, automation development teams, technical teams, project leadership, and support organizations by becoming a subject matter expert of the automation's capabilities and value to the business. The Automation Analyst will manage multiple automation initiatives concurrently and is expected to proactively drive requirements, stakeholder decisions, documentation, testing readiness, and delivery dependencies rather than functioning solely as a documentation resource. The successful candidate will demonstrate strong business analysis, process improvement, stakeholder management, facilitation, data analysis, testing, and delivery coordination capabilities. Automation Intake & Opportunity Assessment: Coordinate intake of new automation opportunities with business and technology stakeholders. Facilitate Client sessions to understand the business problem, current process, expected outcomes, scope, stakeholders, and dependencies. Evaluate business processes to determine automation readiness and identify process gaps requiring clarification or redesign. Document current-state and future-state processes, including but not limited to workflow diagrams, data flow diagrams, and step-by-step procedure documentation. Identify process volumes, transaction characteristics, exception scenarios, manual effort, error rates, and other information required to support automation evaluation. Assist with quantifying expected automation benefits, including efficiency, capacity, quality, accuracy, risk reduction, and other measurable business outcomes. Identify systems, applications, data sources, interfaces, access requirements, and technology dependencies during intake. Identify assumptions, constraints, risks, and unresolved questions early in the lifecycle. Support estimation activities by ensuring technical teams receive complete business and process information. Requirements Gathering & Process Documentation: Lead requirements elicitation sessions with business stakeholders, subject matter experts, developers, architects, and other technical teams. Elicit, analyze, document, and validate business, user, functional, and non-functional requirements. Develop detailed Process Definition Documents (PDDs) and other required business/process documentation. Document current-state and future-state workflows, business rules, decision points, process exceptions, data inputs and outputs, system interactions, user roles, volumes and frequency, dependencies, error and exception handling, and acceptance criteria. Develop process maps, workflow diagrams, use cases, user stories, and supporting documentation as appropriate. Establish and enforce traceability between business requirements, solution functionality, testing, and acceptance criteria. Obtain and document stakeholder validation and approval of requirements before development proceeds. Maintain requirements and process documentation as scope or business processes change. Stakeholder Management & Facilitation: Serve as a primary point of coordination between business stakeholders and automation delivery teams. Establish productive working relationships with business, operational, technical, and project stakeholders. Facilitate requirements workshops, process walkthroughs, solution reviews, testing discussions, and stakeholder decision sessions. Proactively follow up on open requirements, decisions, dependencies, and action items via messaging and meetings. Communicate project status, requirements gaps, risks, dependencies, and decisions clearly to stakeholders. Manage stakeholder expectations regarding scope, requirements, timelines, and delivery dependencies. Identify conflicting stakeholder requirements and facilitate resolution. Escalate unresolved decisions or dependencies that could affect delivery commitments. Ensure appropriate stakeholders remain engaged throughout the automation lifecycle. Development Team Coordination: Serve as the functional bridge between business stakeholders and automation developers. Conduct requirements and process walkthroughs with development teams. Lead backlog refinement sessions with developers to ensure they have sufficient business context and detailed requirements before development begins. Respond to functional questions and coordinate business clarification during development. Work with developers and solution architects to identify requirement gaps, technical constraints, and solution dependencies. Coordinate stakeholder decisions when technical findings require changes to requirements or process design. Participate in sprint planning, solution design sessions, and other delivery activities as required. Identify and communicate scope changes that could affect estimates, timelines, resources, or solution design using a standardized change management template. QA Testing & Business Validation: Review QA test scenarios to ensure alignment to approved requirements and acceptance criteria, including but not limited to business rules, exceptions, negative scenarios, and critical edge cases. Review QA execution results, including defects for accuracy against the requirements. Support development and QA teams with functional validation during system and integration testing. Coordinate User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with business stakeholders. Ensure appropriate test data, environments, access, and stakeholder participation are available for testing. Track defects, questions from QA testers, and required requirements corrections through resolution. Coordinate business approval/sign-off prior to production implementation. Document and publish evidence of testing and business acceptance to technical and business stakeholders. Implementation & Operational Handoff: Support implementation planning and production-readiness activities. Ensure requirements, testing, stakeholder approvals, and documentation are complete before implementation. Develop or coordinate operational documentation required for production support. Facilitate knowledge-transfer sessions with operational/support teams. Ensure operations support teams understand automation purpose and business process, expected processing, business and system dependencies, common exceptions, escalation paths, business contacts, and known limitations. Support post-production validation and stabilization activities. Ensure open issues are documented and transitioned appropriately before project closure. Facilitate formal handoff from project delivery to the appropriate operational support organization. Data Analysis & Reporting: Analyze operational and process data to support automation opportunity assessment and requirements development. Define detailed data dictionary, data mapping, data relationship diagram or similar artifacts to support requirement elicitation and approval. Establish baseline measures before automation implementation where appropriate. Analyze process volumes, cycle times, exception rates, error rates, and other relevant metrics. Use data to identify process variations and automation opportunities. Discover and recommend measurable success criteria and KPIs for automation initiatives as appropriate. Compare post-implementation results against expected business outcomes when requested. Elicit reporting dashboard requirements that communicates KPIs to business and technology stakeholders.