Senior Business Project Lead

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Note: Applications will be accepted until 11:59 PM on the Posting End Date.

Job End Date

At UBC we believe that attracting and sustaining a diverse workforce is key to the successful pursuit of excellence in research innovation and learning for all faculty staff and students. Our commitment to employment equity helps achieve inclusion and fairness brings rich diversity to UBC as a workplace and creates the necessary conditions for a rewarding career.

Job Summary

UBC is undertaking a multi-year Student transformation project focused on improving specific priority functions that support the graduate student experience across UBC Vancouver and Okanagan campuses. This academically funded initiative seeks to modernize targeted business processes support effective decision-making and provide technologies to better support graduate students faculty and staff within UBCs complex operating model.

The Senior Business Project Lead is accountable for maximizing business value and outcomes for this major enterprise transformation initiative. The role focuses on business process transformation value realization and governance ensuring that every requirement and decision is anchored in measurable benefit and strategic this position partners closely with Enterprise Platforms (including Salesforce) its primary accountability is business leadership of the transformationensuring robust stakeholder engagement defining future-state processes and system requirements benefits scope boundaries and decision readiness to enable effective platform delivery.

Organizational Status

The Senior Business Project Lead works within a crossfunctional project team and reports directly to the Senior Manager Constituent Engagement Platforms. The role receives strategic business direction from the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS) and and College of Graduate Studies Business Leadership Team including the Assistant ViceProvost Strategic Academic Initiatives; Assistant Dean Strategic Technologies & Business Initiatives; and other designated senior academic and administrative leaders as appropriate.

The role operates within a matrix delivery environment collaborating closely with the Project Manager for tactical delivery coordination timelines and milestones. The Senior Business Project Lead also works in close partnership with other UBC IT enterprise teams including the Project Management Office (PMO) Integrations Enterprise Architecture Identity and Access Management Privacy and Security and Enterprise Data Governance teams to ensure business solutions are aligned with institutional standards regulatory requirements and longterm sustainability.

Work Performed

Specific Duties:

• Plan organize manage and oversee business transformation and analysis activities ensuring alignment to approved outcomes value realization goals and governance expectations.
• Plan organize manage monitor and be responsible for the business analysis activities of projects.
• Understand business context project justification business goals priorities and constraints and articulate these into clear value statements success metrics and decision artifacts for leadership review.
• Understand business context project justification business goals and priorities and update and maintain documentation on such.
• Lead Foundational Analysis for complex initiatives: Synthesize disparate data points from decentralized stakeholders to identify root causes data silos and process bottlenecks and material value gaps producing a clear decisionready problem statement prior to solution design.
• Understand and apply business architecture concepts to ensure strategic alignment with organizational goals outcomes and business value and to inform prioritization scope tradeoffs and sequencing decisions across phases.
• Recommend and support governance and stakeholder working group structures facilitating discovery analysis and consensusbuilding that informs futurestate design and executive decisionmaking.
• Lead currentstate assessment and futurestate design activities identifying transformation opportunities and gaps and advising on practical pathways to achieve the approved future state.
• Own and develop business requirements and decision frameworks that clearly articulate policy intent outcomes and constraints enabling downstream derivation of functional and technical requirements.
• Partner with and support architects to ensure architectural decisions align with approved business outcomes scope boundaries and value priorities.
• Guide the development and validation of process and data artifacts ensuring they accurately reflect approved business rules decisions and futurestate intent.
• Collaborate with integration architects to define business integration needs decision points and downstream impacts supporting coherent endtoend workflows.
• Lead preparation of business scope requirements and evaluation criteria for RFPs ensuring clarity of outcomes assumptions and boundaries.
• Participate in developing RFP scoring mechanisms and facilitating and managing the scoring processes.
• Develop and present options tradeoffs risks and benefits to support informed executive decisionmaking.
• Partner with Change Management resources to execute stakeholder engagement impact assessment and readiness activities ensuring business units are prepared for adoption.
• Provide. business leadership for user acceptance activities and accept delivered solutions as meeting approved business needs and readiness criteria.
• Lead and conduct workflow and gap analysis for operational support processes.
• Acquire and maintain a working knowledge of the universitys technical and business environment.
• Participate in the continuous improvement of the business analysis methodology via recommendations and suggestions lessons learned and working groups with a focus on improving value realization decision efficiency and stakeholder alignment.
• Lead mentor and coach other Business Analysts on process techniques and good practices and provide guidance on project specific situations.
• Actively seeks ongoing career development through self-motivated professional development in the field of business analysis.
• Act as a Business Value Gatekeeper: Lead valuebased fitgap analysis to ensure proposed solutions align with approved business outcomes and platform strategy. Challenge requirements that do not demonstrate measurable benefit or that introduce unnecessary complexity ensuring business needs are clearly articulated before downstream technical design.
• Create PersonaDriven artifacts: Develop Role & Persona Inventories and Journey Maps to inform business process redesign and futurestate decisionmaking ensuring solutions address the specific Jobs to be Done for students and staff rather than replicating legacy workflows.
• Lead the business scope and value definition for Requests for Proposals (RFPs) ensuring functional needs success criteria and decision boundaries are clearly articulated to support vendor accountability and reduce downstream change.
• Facilitate highstakes discovery and decision workshops with stakeholder groups (e.g. Faculty Central Admin Students). Synthesize competing priorities into decisionready options and a unified PLTapproved Future State vision that balances business value user needs and platform sustainability.
• Lead scope governance and MVP definition developing prioritization frameworks and valuegap analysis to recommend what is inscope for initial delivery versus future phases and presenting options for executive approval.
• Acts as primary business steward for stakeholder relationships proactively managing expectations around scope tradeoffs risks and outcomes to ensure alignment and sustained confidence in the transformation.
• Obtains through governance mechanisms business acceptance and signoff those delivered solutions are fit for purpose and achieve the approved business outcomes based on user acceptance testing and readiness criteria.
• Acts as custodian of the project governance framework preparing decision materials documenting outcomes and escalating decision packages to the Project Leadership Team and Steering Committee as required.
• Leads business engagement during postgolive hypercare and transition to sustainment acting as the primary functional escalation point coordinating with operational owners and ensuring business issues are identified prioritized and addressed to support a stable transition into steadystate operations.
• Owns postimplementation benefit realization including defining success measures supporting data collection and validation monitoring realized benefits against approved business cases and reporting outcomes and insights back to business leadership to inform ongoing optimization and future phases.

Core Duties:

• Analyzes business needs utilizing a structured requirements process (gathering analyzing documenting and managing changes).
• Develops overall strategies and provides advice on options risks and costs versus benefits.
• Communicates with stakeholders of varying technical ability and subject matter expertise and explains services to clients of all management levels to ensure they have a clear understanding of IT roles processes and activities.
• Manages liaison relationship with clients to ensure technical solutions meet user needs.
• Conducts feasibility studies and drafts proposals for evaluation by appropriate users and managers.
• Develops and assists in the presentation of business cases.
• Leads short and long-term planning sessions to implement integrated business process improvements.
• Identifies elicits and documents business requirements defines business rules and communicates requirements for the implementation of business solutions.
• Prepares functional system and program specifications bridging multiple projects.
• Reviews test plans and monitors the testing process to ensure that business results are adequately tested with minimal risk.
• Procures technical assistance to help in problem resolution.
• Provides technical leadership coaching and mentoring to less-experienced individuals.
• Maintains appropriate professional designations and up-to-date knowledge of current information technology techniques and tools.
• Performs other related duties as required.

Consequence of Error/Judgement

Information Technology plays a key role in enabling the University to achieve its goal of becoming one of the worlds leading universities. The Senior Business Project Lead plays a significant role in the implementation of enterprise-wide systems and processes. Should these projects not be completed successfully or the results not support the activities of the University this would compromise the Universitys ability to achieve its strategic goals and vision. Inability of systems and processes to support the Universitys needs could seriously compromise daily business and activities at the University.

This position must assume responsibility for project decisions that could have significant financial impact on the University. This position must be able to foresee potential problems before they occur and take corrective action.

Supervision Received

The Senior Business Project Lead works within the project team that consists of Developers functional experts and other project specialists and reports directly to the Senior Project Manager while working closely with senior leadership and staff in other administrative and academic units.

Supervision Given

Plans directs and supervises work of project team members such as other business analysts consultants quality assurance analysts and other staff assigned to the project.

Minimum Qualifications

Undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline. Minimum of eight years of related experience including at least two years of managerial experience or the equivalent combination of education and experience.

- Willingness to respect diverse perspectives including perspectives in conflict with ones own.

- Demonstrates a commitment to enhancing ones own awareness knowledge and skills related to equity diversity and inclusion.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven experience leading business process redesign scope definition and value articulation for enterprisescale initiatives.
• Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in ambiguous complex environments synthesizing diverse inputs into clear decisionready recommendations for senior leadership.
• Strong facilitation stakeholder engagement and governance skills with experience working across multiple organizational units with competing priorities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to translate complex business concepts for a wide range of audiences including senior academic and administrative leaders.
• Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) is an asset. AND Salesforce Certification (Administrator Education Cloud Consultant or Service Cloud Consultant) is also an asset.
• Experience working with enterprise CRM platform strategy (e.g. Salesforce Education Cloud) particularly in complex public sector or highereducation environments with decentralized stakeholder groups.
• Demonstrated experience in Foundational Analysis: ability to enter an ambiguous environment map the As-Is landscape and produce a clear data-backed Problem Statement and Solution Blueprint.
• Degree in an IT or Business Administration related discipline preferred.
• Project Management professional designation is an asset.
• Change Management professional designation is an asset.
• Business Analysis professional designation is an asset.
• Experience providing functional leadership or mentoring is an asset. Experience supporting or leading business aspects of enterprise system implementations such as CRM recruitment systems Student Information Systems Workday APIs or other offtheshelf COTS.
• Project experience in a higher-education environment policy and regulatory compliance situations is an asset.
• Experience demonstrates progressive responsibility preferably in a University or other public sector environment.
• Experience with preparing RFPs managing RFIs/RFPs for evaluation selection and procurement of products and/or services from vendors.
• Experience in change management data management and solution and enterprise architecture.
• Experience supporting largescale offtheshelf COTS initiatives including business process change data migration systems integration and coordination with technical delivery teams.
• Effectively manage multiple tasks and priorities work in a fast-paced environment and manage responsibilities and tasks to meet time sensitive critical deadlines.
• Intermediate knowledge of applications development methodologies as well as development and implementation best practices rules of thumb and benchmarks.
• An understanding of key trends and players in the IT industry.
• Effective leadership consulting consensus building conflict resolution and negotiation and team-building skills are an asset.

Collaboration - Identifies and improves communication to bring conflict within the team into the open and facilitate resolution. Openly shares credit for team accomplishment. Monitors individual and team effectiveness and recommends improvement to facilitate collaboration. Considered a role model as a team player. Demonstrates high level of enthusiasm and commitment to team goals under difficult or adverse situations; encourages others to respond similarly. Strongly influences team strategy and processes.

Communication for Results - Converses with writes strategic documents for and creates/delivers presentations to internal business leaders as well as external groups. Leads discussions with senior leaders and external partners in ways that support strategic planning and decision-making. Seeks a consensus with business leaders. Debates opinions tests understanding and clarifies judgments. Identifies underlying differences and resolves conflict openly and empathetically. Explains the context of multiple complex interrelated situations. Asks searching probing questions plays devils advocate and solicits authoritative perspectives and advice prior to approving plans and recommendations.

Problem Solving - Diagnoses problems using formal problem-solving tools and techniques from multiple angles and probes underlying issues to generate multiple potential solutions. Proactively anticipates and prevents problems. Devises facilitates buy-in makes recommendations and guides implementation of corrective and/or preventive actions for complex issues that cross organizational boundaries and are unclear in nature. Identifies potential consequences and risk levels. Seeks support and buy-in for problem definition methods of resolution and accountability.

Accountability - Sets enhanced objectives for self and others. Monitors performance trends and identifies opportunities to improve standards. Provides regular feedback and suggests alternative approaches necessary to ensure that organizational objectives and superior standards are achieved. Delegates responsibility and reallocates resources as needed to ensure that priorities are met for initiatives within area of responsibility.

Analytical Thinking - Determines criteria for assessing issues and opportunities. Establishes clear goals and priorities needed to assess performance. Identifies relationships and linkages between different information sources. Anticipates issues that are not readily apparent on the surface. Identifies root causes and effects. Establishes clear goals and priorities. Anticipates potential problems and develops solutions needed to resolve them. Systemically analyzes relationships between apparently independent problems and issues. Reviews and cross-reviews reports. Identifies trends as well as isolated events. Translates analytical reports into management presentations and provides guidance to resolve issues. Anticipates the possible outcome of potential solutions. Identifies areas of significant concern or opportunity. Probes and initiates research to identify critical problems.

Business Enterprise Knowledge - Directs and coordinates the development and implementation of process-based solutions that cross organizational lines. Creates business case for investment in process and technological enhancements. Sets clear explanations for the integration and alignment of technology and business functions focusing on the strategic value provided.