Roles

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The Business Analyst

The Business analyst at Finalyse:

  • Assists with the Business case,
  • Assists in the high level feasibility studies,
  • Gathers of the (change) business requirements,
  • Designs and/or reviewing business test cases,
  • Validates the design in the light of business requirements
  • (Re-)Defines the scope,
  • Acts as a representative of end-users during the whole project cycle,
  • Provides guidance to stakeholders on devising effective and efficient approaches to achieve the project objectives,
  • Identifies and suggests ways to address business issues and risks (within and between projects) in close collaboration with the Project Manager(s),
  • Suggests business processes improvements.
  • Analyzes and map business processes (current state/future state)
  • Analyzes data (high level) (current state/future state)
  • Assists the Project Manager(s) as business ambassador,
  • Reports to the Project Manager(s).

Our Finalyse Business Analyst plays also the role of Business Expert. The business expert is the person with indepth knowledge of particular business items, business processes or a software application. The Business expert at Finalyse is : 

  • the consultant who has the vision about what the business solution needs to provide to the business.
  • the one who knows what the business need is that the deliverable satisfies.
  • the consultant who plays an important role in the development process – but are not part of the permanent development team.
    As well, as the role of the Business Architect
  • the profesionnal who understands businesses, business processes and information needs of the organization. Understands the enterprise nature of the Enterprise Information Platform (EIP) environment and focuses on ensuring that the data used to populate the strategic data environment is enterprise in nature and has integrity, quality and consistency.
  • able to integrate business requirements into the context (process and/or data) of the enterprise.
  • the one who conceives and designs the business architecture.
  • the consultant who conveys the goals of the business to project team members.
  • responsible for validating that the design is in conformance with the strategic direction of the business and is consistent with short- and long-term objectives.

But also the (Business) Process Analyst's role is to analyse, map out and design business process requirements for all IT-related, business, financial and operations’systems within an organisation. This includes researching and analyzing data in support of business functions and system requirements.

The Functional Analyst

At Finalyse the Functional Analyst :

  • Captures, consolidates, and communicates the information from the business expert to the rest of the team.
  • Acts as a facilitator and creates the link between the business analyst, providing the business requirements, and the rest of the team trying to construct the solution.
  •  Transforms the input from the business analyst into functional specifications that the technical team can understand.
  • Identifies, investigates and escalates conflicting requirements.
  • Describes, analyses process and data flows.

The functional consultants of Finalyse are regularly also playing the role of The Functional Designer who

  • is Focused on the goals and needs of the user as part of the team - whilst being sympathetic to the needs of the brand, business and technical team.
  • Is expected to be able to act as a conduit between technical and creative providing interpretation and advice to both functions.
  • Is expected to maintain a focus on user information goals, usability and accessibility.
  • Is expected to produce deliverables that may include proposals, rationalization perspectives, site maps, schemas and build documentation.
    As well as the role of The Functional Architect
    Understands web-enabled applications, service-oriented architectures, business process modelling and technologies, business object modelling, relational data base modelling and design including ODS, data warehousing, and data mart schemas, and data interface design and technologies.
  • Understands the software development lifecycle process including route maps for specific implementation patterns.
  • Designs solution-level architectures that encompass systems integration in multi-user, multi-tier, multi-tasking operating environments.

Without forgetting the role of the Test Analyst. He Is responsible for executing product reviews and testing throughout the project. This includes participation in Walkthrough and Inspection Reviews of products developed early in the project (e.g., a requirements specification), as well as unit, integration, and system testing of software

The Quantitative Analyst

A quantitative analyst (QA) is able of developing and adapting mathematical methods applicable to problems in Finance. It is her role to identify the right model for a particular context and to describe in detail how it should be calibrated and used, what sort of data it requires and how the outputs should be interpreted. The QA will also define the specific numerical test cases that are used at module test level to ensure that the calculations have been correctly implemented.
 
The QA must have well-developed communication skills in order to explain models to non-mathematicians and must, moreover, have a very good sense of the pragmatic since it is the practical application and not the theoretical beauty of the models that the client is interested in.
 

The QA is typically a mathematician, statistician, actuary, engineer or scientist by training with strong mathematical skills and a thorough knowledge of their application in Finance in areas such as derivative pricing, risk analysis, and econometrics.
 
A QA should also be able to implement calculations in the form of spreadsheets or computer programs which requires some technical skills, for pilot projects or in relation with proofs of concept.
 
Frequently the QA profile also overlaps with that of the Functional Analyst as it may be necessary for the QA to analyse how existing data must be transformed and where in the logical/functional sequence the various calculations should be executed. In the case where the end user is also quantitative – e.g. in the case of the implementation of a pricing model for a trading desk – the QA may equally overlap roles with the Business Requirements Analyst, within structured IT development for production environment.

The Technical Analyst and developer

At Finalyse the Technical Analyst and developer regroups the following responsibilities

  • Translation of the functional specifications into technical specifications and writes the use case specifications.
  • Bringing best practices in using the tools and applying the architecture principles in real system design and development.

Besides at Finalyse we have the Tester who :

  • Identifies the most appropriate implementation approach for a given test
  • Plans, designs, executes and evaluates tests (from Unit Tests, System Tests, Users Acceptance Tests to Production Acceptance Tests)
    Logging outcomes and verifying test execution 
  • Analyses and recoveris from execution errors
  • Produces several artefacts :
    • The Test Plan,
    • The Test Evaluation Report,
    • The Test cases,
    • The Test results (containing defects or bugs, failed and passed tests

Last but not least Finalyse has Developers who mainly :

  • participate in the design, creation, and testing of software application components. They write software program code to realize the functionality defined in the functional specifications created by the architects.   
  • create and perform after writing the code, developers the related unit tests to verify the quality and performance of the code. They are typically members of distributed development teams in an enterprise, working with other developers, architects, project managers, business analysts, and quality assurance engineers.
  • are experts in the latest software development technologies

The Project Manager

The Project Manager has the authority to run the project on a day-to-day basis on behalf of the Project Board within the constraints laid down by the Board.The Project Manager's prime responsibility is to ensure that the project produces the required products to the required standard of quality and within the specified constraints of time and cost. The Project Manager is also responsible for the project producing a result capable of achieving the benefits defined in the Business Case. 

The Project Manager's responsibilities include:

  • Taking responsibility for overall progress and use of resources and initiate corrective action where necessary;
  •  Direct and motivate the project team;
  • Managing, co-coordinating, planning, resourcing, and controlling all project activities;
  • Managing the risks (for which he is the risk owner), including the development of contingency plans;
  • Liaising with programme/cluster management if the project is part of a programme/cluster;
  • Ensuring that key members of the project team and stakeholders are adequately involved in the project;
  • Acting as the focal point for all project issues and problems and escalating issues;
  • Organising production of the Quality Plan and ensuring the specified quality of all deliverables;
  • Agreeing any delegation and use of Project Assurance roles required by the Project Board; 
  • Organising production of all project internal plans (e.g. test plans)
  • Liaising with and managing expectations of the Executive, users, suppliers and Project Board;
  • Monitoring and controlling project expenditure;
  • Ensuring correct project reporting is carried out according to global, regional or local communication guidelines and metrics captured.
 
Finalyse