Senior Business Analyst - AI & XR Portfolio in Crawley

As a Senior Business Analyst in the AI Team, you will be key in shaping and refining our digital solutions that drive efficiency and innovation across Rentokil Initial. You will act as a primary subject matter expert within your designated business domain, leveraging your advanced, specialized knowledge and detailed technical understanding to drive and contribute to complex initiatives, influence strategic direction, and define innovative business and technology solutions relevant to that area. You will achieve this by closely collaborating with Solution Architects to define optimal solutions and by engaging with BAs in other domain areas where your work intersects.

You will:

• Champion business value: Lead the definition and justification of strategic application projects specific to your business domain. You proactively identify opportunities, build comprehensive business cases from the ground up, and ensure alignment with high-level organizational objectives for your area, often presenting to senior leadership.
• Translate vision into actionable requirements: Gather, refine, and engineer detailed requirements, defining future-state processes across relevant sub-domains. This will often involve deep analysis of current operations, specific system interactions and complex integrations, translating these insights into clear, actionable User Stories that guide our development teams.
• Cross-Domain Coordination & Influence: Engage in close discussion and collaboration with Business Analysts in other domain areas that your projects or solutions touch, ensuring seamless integration and identifying interdependencies. You will actively influence outcomes across these connected domains.
• Support quality assurance: Provide expertise to ensure robust acceptance testing within your area. You will implement and recommend best practices for UAT, guide on test scenario development, and ensure comprehensive validation across complex solutions, potentially influencing overall quality assurance processes.
• Facilitate successful adoption: Provide essential input and expert guidance to comprehensive change management and transition planning for major organizational shifts impacting your primary business domain. You will contribute to the development of business readiness plans and actively support stakeholder engagement to ensure the maximization of realized business benefits within your area of expertise.

As a Senior Business Analyst in our Group IT Digital Products and AI team, you will be a pivotal force in shaping and delivering innovative solutions that drive Rentokil Initial forward, with a primary focus on your designated business domain (e.g., Operations, Sales, or back-office functions). You will act as a true subject matter expert for this domain, providing deep insights and driving critical initiatives within it. Your primary responsibilities will include:

• Strategic Investigation & Opportunity Identification: Lead investigative work to pinpoint significant business opportunities and define effective new or improved business processes through emerging AI capabilities. Specify how these improvements can be realized through advancements in AI, across information systems, data management, and operational practices.
• High-Level Collaboration & Stakeholder Management: Collaborate extensively with senior business stakeholders and IT staff on strategic studies, detailed requirements specifications, and feasibility analyses. Leverage industry advancements and opportunities to shape clients' strategic direction. Ensure all stakeholder perspectives are thoroughly considered, verified, and validated, and that priorities align with overarching business objectives. Build and maintain internal and external stakeholder relationships to manage scope, delivery, budgets, and expectations.
• Bridging Business & Technology: Champion solutions through ML & AI evangelism. Leverage your business acumen to assess and advise on the practicality of different innovative solutions, skillfully integrating technical feasibility with operational needs. Take the lead in the detailed specification and modeling of recommended solutions, applying relevant resources, standards, methods, and tools. Oversee the development of visualisation and user experience elements of solution design. Maintain strong relationships with software engineering and service delivery teams, playing a full part in bringing systems to successful implementation.
• Documentation & Agile Delivery: Elicit, analyse, and document detailed functional and non-functional requirements. Craft clear, concise, and actionable User Stories and acceptance criteria that accurately represent business needs and guide our development teams. Analyse current and future state business processes, identifying gaps, and proposing optimisations. Apply established standards, methods, and tools effectively to produce consistently high-quality documentation, covering both technical details and descriptive aspects. Actively participate in planning and facilitating meetings, workshops, and stakeholder engagement throughout system investigations and subsequent development work. Work closely with Product Owners to refine and groom the product backlog, ensuring user stories are well-defined, prioritised, and ready for development. Where required and directed, act as proxy Product Owner. Participate actively in agile ceremonies (e.g., sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives) to provide clarity and context to the development team.
• Business Readiness & Change Management: Conduct comprehensive business impact assessments to understand how proposed changes will affect business units and individual roles. Provide ongoing clarification to development and testing teams during sprints to ensure solutions align with business intent. Develop and execute business readiness plans, encompassing IT deployment, data migration, capability development (training and engagement), and all necessary activities to integrate new processes or roles into daily operations. Assess the readiness levels of business users for upcoming changes, identify any gaps, and create and implement action plans to close these gaps before go-live. Assist the user community with transition support and change planning, working closely with the project team. Track and report on progress against business readiness targets, business engagement activities, training design and deployment, key operational metrics, and measures of return to productivity. Support the business in defining and preparing user acceptance test scenarios, ensuring they can effectively validate solutions against their needs, providing essential support as they take responsibility for test execution.
• Leadership: Mentor and guide more junior Business Analysts who may be working on initiatives within or related to your domain, fostering their development and sharing specialized best practices. Lead requirements management and analysis on larger projects in your domain area.

Requirements:

• Has achieved proficiency in the tasks of business analysis with 6+ years of experience as a Business Analyst across multiple domains.
• Experience working with Data reliant projects, with ML & AI technologies.
• Proven ability to lead complex projects across teams.
• Demonstrated ability to manage the technical, financial, and quality aspects of projects.
• In depth domain level knowledge in the relevant area.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional qualification in a relevant field (e.g., Business, IT, Computer Science) preferred.
• Extensive knowledge of Agile frameworks and scaling methodologies.
• Proficient understanding of the interdependencies of business processes and information systems.
• Has achieved proficiency in the task of Requirements engineering and management.
• Experienced in senior stakeholder management of both IT and business stakeholders.

Knowledge & Skills:

• Analytical Thinking
• Commercial Orientation
• Customer Focus
• Creativity
• Organisational Awareness
• Oral Expression
• Influence, Persuasion and Personal Impact
• Business Analysis Techniques
• Test Management Techniques
• Proof Of Concept and prototyping
• Business Process Improvement Techniques
• Presentation Techniques
• Business Proposals
• Training Techniques
• Stakeholder Analysis

Benefits:

• Competitive salary and bonus scheme
• Hybrid working
• Rentokil Initial Reward Scheme
• 23 days holiday, plus 8 bank holidays
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Death in service benefit
• Healthcare
• Free parking

At Rentokil Initial, our customers and colleagues represent diverse backgrounds and experiences. We take pride in being an equal opportunity employer, actively encouraging applications from individuals from all walks of life. Our belief is that everyone irrespective of age, gender, gender identity, gender expression, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabilities, religion, or beliefs, has the potential to thrive and contribute. We embrace the differences that make each of our colleagues unique, fostering an inclusive environment where everyone can be their authentic selves and feel a sense of belonging. To ensure that your journey with us is accessible if you have any individual requirements we invite you to communicate any specific needs or preferences you may have during any stage of the recruitment process. Our team is available to support you; feel free to reach out to (joanna.sharpe@rentokil-initial.com) if you need anything.

Be Yourself in Your Application! At Rentokil Initial, we value innovation, but we want to see the real you! While AI can help with structure and grammar, make sure your application shows your true passion and understanding of the role. A personal touch will help you stand out.