The Business Analyst at Finalyse:

• Assists with the Business Case,
• Assists in the high level feasibility studies,
• Gathers the business requirements,
• Designs and/or reviews business test cases,
• Validates the design in 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 maps 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 Analysts can also play the role of Business Experts. The Business Expert is the person with in-depth knowledge of particular business items, business processes or specific software applications.

The Business Expert at Finalyse:

• Has the vision about what the business solution needs to provide to the business,
• Knows what the business need is that the deliverable satisfies,
• Plays an important role in the development process - but is not part of the permanent development team,
• 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,
• Is able to integrate business requirements into the context (process and/or data) of the enterprise,
• Conceives and designs the business architecture,
• Conveys the goals of the business to project team members,
• Is the expert 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.

The Business Analyst can also be the (Business) Process Analyst whose 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.

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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.

A Finalyse functional analyst also often play the role of Functional Designer who:

• Focuses 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,
• 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.

A Finalyse functional analyst can also regularly act as Test Analyst who is responsible for executing product reviews and testing throughout the project. This includes participation in walkthrough and inspection reviews of products developed earlier in the project (e.g., requirements specification), as well as unit, integration, and system testing of software.

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A Quantitative Analyst (QA) is able to develop and adapt mathematical methods applicable to problems in Finance. It is his/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.

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At Finalyse the role of Technical Analyst primarily covers the following responsibilities:

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

The Developer:

• Participates in the design, creation, and testing of software application components. He writes software program code to realise the functionality defined in the functional specifications created by the architects,
• Creates and performs after writing the code, develops the related unit tests to verify the quality and performance of the code,
• Is typically a member of a distributed development team in an enterprise, working with other developers, architects, project managers, business analysts, and quality assurance engineers,
• Is an expert in the latest software development technologies.

In addition, Technical Analysts and Developers often also play the role of Testers. The Tester:

• 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 execution errors and proposes appropriate corrections,
• Produces several deliverables:
• The Test Plan,
• The Test Evaluation Report,
• The Test cases,
• The Test results (containing defects or bugs, failed and passed tests.

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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 standards 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 initiating corrective action where necessary,
• Directing and motivating 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.

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