The Technical Business Analyst is responsible for analyzing business processes and business requirements for initiatives that support Farmer Mac’s strategic objectives. The technical analyst in this position partners with business analysts from the Business Transformation team and the business organization to communicate and clarify business needs for development and implementation by the Information Technology team(s), contribute to the development of Day in the Life Use Case definitions, business requirements and business rules, current and future state technical / workflow / data diagrams, define data conversion mappings, data integrations and data quality standards to ensure IT services are aligned with business needs. The technical analyst collaborates with business transformation business analysts to provide process analysis, needs assessments, and preliminary cost-versus-benefit assessment; brokers other IT services; and communicates trends and requirements with business and IT staff. The technical analyst defines the technical requirements via industry-standard, model-driven analysis techniques and documents and manages requirements via approved processes, templates, and tools throughout the software development life cycle. Incumbents in this position are challenged to develop and maintain effective working relationships with both business and IT in a way that demonstrates an understanding of business problems as well as IT strategies, issues, and priorities. This position requires extensive interaction with members of the IT team, including the Enterprise Architect, Enterprise Data Architect, Database Administrators, and technical delivery teams, other Farmer Mac business units, and occasionally external stakeholders.
The People You Will Work With
The position will report directly to the Director of Loan Operations and Data Systems Delivery and will be part of Farmer Mac’s Information Technology Loan Operations and Data System Delivery team, directly liaising with members of the Farmer Mac IT and other departments. Occasionally, the position will serve as a liaison with external stakeholders and implementation partners.
Where and When You Will Work
The position will be based in Farmer Mac’s headquarters located at 2150 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC. Farmer Mac embraces a Presence with Purpose work environment, which allows for flexibility of work location while providing the opportunity for teams to come together in the office with purpose. Core business hours are Monday through Friday 8:30 am to 5:30 p.m. eastern time. Work outside of these times may be required for planned and unplanned activities to complete time sensitive projects or to attend off-site meetings or events. Periodic travel is expected of this position.
Primary Responsibilities and Duties
- Serve as technical business analyst for the implementation of the Loan Operations and Servicing systems.
- Work with Enterprise Data Architect to automate the flow of data from internal and external data sources to consumers in an automated, controlled, and auditable manner
- Collaborate with business stakeholders and IT management to continually improve the technical business analysis framework
- Collaborate with stakeholders from multiple disciplines to create alignment on how their objectives are enabled through technology solutions
- Translate requirements into clearly defined and easily understood documents such as use cases, data flows, testing strategy and test case definition and process flows
- Assess current and future state business processes and suggest areas of improvement for identified inefficiencies and/or potential risks
- Work with stakeholders to identify required changes or enhancements to existing software
- Lead testing efforts by creating initial test plans and conducting initial testing before User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
- Provide guidance on UAT to ensure optimal test coverage
- Ensure that issues are tracked, reported on, and resolved in a timely manner
- Assist in the enforcement of project deadlines and schedules
- Communicate and apply technical business analysis best practices
- Lead regular technical business analysis sessions to facilitate collaboration of cross-functional teams and deliver technical business analysis artifacts (use cases, reporting requirements, business requirements and business rules, data flow diagrams, data conversion maps, data integration definitions and data quality standards.
- Analyze and effectively communicate technical concepts to a non-technical audience
- Push creative thinking beyond the boundaries of existing industry practices and stakeholder/colleague mindsets
- Partner with leadership to manage the process of innovative change across the organization
- Manage and mentor junior project staff and contractors within the Information Technology team
Desired Skills and Qualifications
- Demonstrated technical business analysis experience
- Demonstrated knowledge of the software development lifecycle and systems analysis required
- Experience in data architecture, and data analysis
- Experience in loan operations and loan servicing
- Demonstrated ability to reach consensus and signoff on requirements gathering deliverables
- Demonstrated ability to work in Agile environments for software development
- Excellent oral and written communication skills to make effective presentations and interact effectively in a team setting as well as cross-team and cross-organization setting (involving external business partners and vendors)
- Natural team player, collaborating with peers and project teams to achieve company objectives
- Demonstrated ability to manage and collaborate with external vendors in the consulting space
- Proven self-starter with ability to operate with limited supervision
Education and Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Finance, Mathematics, Statistics, Management Information Systems or similar discipline
- Minimum of three years of related experience
- Experience with flowcharting tools and techniques such as Lucid
- Experience working in the financial services industry
- Experience working with a broad range of technologies and enterprise systems
- Experience working with the Salesforce platform a plus
- Experience in the secondary mortgage industry a plus
- Technical / Business Analysis certification a plus
- Previous consulting experience a plus
- Experience with Microsoft Azure DevOps or JIRA a plus
- Experience with project management tools a plus
Our compensation philosophy is targeted pay positioning relative to peers, our industry, and external markets. Farmer Mac is committed to a compensation program that will enable the organization to attract, motivate, reward, and retain highly skilled and creative talent to maintain sustained long-term performance and achieve the organization’s strategic business objectives. The typical base pay range for this role is $110,000 to $130,000 per year. Compensation will vary based on experience and geographic work location.