Senior Business Analyst, OptiLink Solutions

Seeking Extraordinary Technology Talent
OptiLink Solutions, a division of The Advisory Board Company (NASDAQ: ABCO), specializes in vertical market products for healthcare management software. Strong demand for – and rapid expansion of -- Optilink Solutions offers a unique opportunity to join a high-growth, entrepreneurial division in a company with a nearly 30-year history of unparalleled service to the healthcare industry. Our technology team will have a direct role in continuous new product innovation and can expect broad and immediate application of their work at member institutions, including more than 2,500 of the country’s preeminent hospitals and healthcare systems.

We believe in rewarding and nurturing extraordinary talent. In addition to a competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits package, OptiLink employees work in an environment designed to foster creativity, continuous learning, and work-life balance. Among our unique benefits: training opportunities, tuition reimbursement, a daytime leave policy for community service, as well as corporate and computer discounts.

Senior Business Analyst and Solution Designer: Role in Brief
The Senior Business Analyst and Solution Designer is responsible for the design and interaction of our software product, including our applications’ conceptual model, user experience and business logic. This person works to understand the core business requirements of our customers and provides documentation to translate this information into meaningful market opportunities and designs for Product Development.

As a Solution Designer, this person works with the domain experts, technical writers and technology teams to conceptualize, develop and document the structure of the product. This includes defining and describing the information relationships and navigation models at the product, screen and module levels as well as printed and online reports.

The Senior Business Analyst participates in data and process design sessions to ensure that engineering fully understands the business problem to be solved, and works with the Quality Assurance to ensure that the delivered system actually meets the business requirements.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
•Become familiar with the subject domain by interviewing domain experts, studying industry documentation and reviewing competitive products.
•Interface with marketing, sales, and customers to capture and develop requirements that lead to technical specifications for products and features.
•Gather and translate user needs into functional and non-functional specifications for development. Analyze functional requirements for entire business domains as well as specific areas of implementation. Recognize and identify potential areas where the existing product requires change, or where new products or functionality need to be developed.
•Meet with customers to model business processes through interviews, documentation review, observation and flow diagramming. Document and describe business logic and processes, including rules and interactions. Work with customers to validate the recorded requirements and review design solutions for acceptance.
•Transform customer business needs into use cases, user stories, process models, product requirement documentation, and technical specifications to be used to develop architecture designs, application code, regression and interactive test cases, and end-user documentation. Create UML models of subject domains including state diagrams, state transition diagrams, interaction diagrams to adequately describe the business domain.
•Based upon the concept models, establish controlled vocabularies and document relationships between terms. Work with technical writing to create labels and language for online and offline content development. Coordinate with technical writers to develop application content (e.g., help screens, action descriptors, etc.).
•Employ user-centered design processes to ensure that the application is useful and usable. Diagram page flows and user interfaces using site maps and wire frame schematics documenting display fields and business logic. Design application interactions considering ergonomics, usage patterns and reduction of repetitive motion.
•Develop user personas as required for usability studies and user interface design and create user scenarios to demonstrate and test system functionality.
•Develop prototypes of user functionality and build prototype demos using paper, HTML, Photoshop, PDFs and other tools as appropriate.
•Establish, document, maintain and revise functional specifications. Document all levels of prototypes through final specifications to include UI behaviors, task flows, user interaction models, workflow, interaction requirements, etc.
•Interface with quality assurance to supply required information for accurate and complete development of test cases and test scenarios
•Create complete acceptance criteria for development incorporating appropriate use case and UML documentation, UI behaviors, task flows, user interaction models, workflow, interaction requirements, etc.
•Work with software engineers to ensure understanding of business requirements, be a resource throughout the engineering process to ensure accurate engineering interpretation of system design
REQUIREMENTS
Required Skills, Education and Experience:

•Bachelor's degree in information systems, business, analytical techniques or related field or equivalent experience, MBA preferred
•Minimum of 7-10 years experience as a Business Analyst.
•Experience analyzing, designing and building applications
•Experience working in a cross-functional, team-based environment; 5 years experience on products requiring direct interface with customers.
•Ability to properly scope requirements, identify tasks and determine level of effort.
•Proven track record of working with external customers to understand their needs and translate into specific, actionable, functional and non-functional requirements.
•Experience with user-centered design (UCD) including development of personas, prototype interfaces and usability testing. Experience observing user research and translating user research into design decisions.
•Detailed knowledge and experience of software development lifecycles (SLDC), Experience with Agile methods (e.g., SCRUM or Extreme programming) required.
•Commercial software development experience producing business requirements specifications and ability to clearly explain findings. Must communicate both orally and in writing, be able to lead effective meetings and be comfortable giving presentations.
•Experience interpreting entity-relationship diagrams and understanding of relational table models including key structures and foreign keys
•Experience with functional and technical requirements analysis (use case modeling and analysis, business process modeling). Ability to clearly document business processes, data flow and workflow using standard diagramming techniques such as UML, flowcharts and other industry standard techniques.

Personal Characteristics:

•Excellent written and oral communication skills. Proven ability to balance technical and business issues and communicate effectively with technical and business users.
•Strong work ethic; ability to follow through and multi-task to bring tasks to completion within established timeline. Highly detail-oriented, meticulous, organized and self-directed.
•Strong interpersonal skills. Ability to work independently, to be flexible and to work in a team environment
•Ability to grasp new concepts; solid analytical and logical skills with passion for problem solving and research. Able to conceptualize and think creatively.
•Ability to hold team members accountable to commitments

Desirable Skills:

•Startup company experience
•Knowledge of health care and hospital management system software

Qualified candidates should send their resume on-line via our on-line resume tool. Please apply for one position – you will be considered for every position for which you are qualified. Please indicate the advertisement to which you are responding. To access our on-line resume tool please use the following link:

www.advisoryboardcompany.com/public/careers/opportunities_frameset.html

An Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer