Business Analyst – Kings Cross, London

Music is Universal. It’s the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the world’s leading music company. From A&R to finance, legal to digital, sales to marketing, Universal Music is the place to grow and develop your career within a truly commercial and innovative business that leads in everything it does.

Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles, and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief, age, marital status, background, pregnancy, or caring responsibilities. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought within our teams and are fully committed to embracing the talents of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other forms of neurocognitive variation. We will always seek to make appropriate adjustments to recruitment, workplaces, and work processes to be fully inclusive to people with different needs and working styles. If you need us to make any reasonable adjustments for you from application onwards, including alternatives to the online form or to disclose a neurocognitive condition, please email UniversalMusicCareers@umusic.com.

The Department: With a global footprint, the Universal Music Group Royalty and Copyright Product Team designs, develops, delivers and maintains a number of technical solutions to calculate royalty accountings in a timely and accurate manner to our valued artists. We’re also providing them with an extent and detailed visibility of these earnings from various sources of digital incomes. The team continuously collaborates with our international business teams to deliver innovative solutions as well as supporting best practices and new processes for a better royalty flow.

The Role: The Business Analyst will be responsible for gathering the requirements from key business users, documenting the requirements, and ensuring that the software developed meets the requirements. You will be at ease and have experience in working with business owners and project managers alike to plan, analyse and highlight risks and issues, and to define accurate, meaningful and measurable business cases and define acceptance criteria. You will be expected to be a mentor and help other team members improve their technical skills and business understanding.

Key Responsibilities

• Be Technical

• Define the requirements (user stories) to build new functionality using, amongst others, BDD/Gherkin Style acceptance criteria.
• Perform detailed technical analysis & scoping of activities required to develop a new application capability.
• Attend workshop/agile ceremony with the development team in order to answer questions and resolve ambiguities that might rise during development.
• Ownership of requirements to be built by the team, presentation of the stories and journeys and facilitation of requirements workshops.
• Create application documentation for end-users and technical staff as needed including wireframes when needed.
• Identify and remove impediments, prevent distractions that interfere with the ability of the team to deliver the sprint goal.
• Develop a thorough understanding of the business need and related business processes.

• Work with other BAs and teams to understand and define end to end or integration requirements across more than one project team and systems as well as other systems within the client as required.
• Work with the QA and the project team to validate the acceptance criteria and modify and split requirements as appropriate and participate in estimation and iteration planning sessions.
• Support the Technical and Business Product Owners, Dev Leads and Project Manager as necessary.
• Assist with user acceptance testing as necessary and appropriate.
• Assist team with making appropriate commitments through story selection, task definition.
• Improve the productivity of the teams in any way possible.
• Receive demos from the developer working on each story to ensure the requirement has been met.

Skills and Experience required

• Must have

• Experience with most aspects of software delivery and life cycle, including gathering and developing detailed functional requirement, breaking down complex requirements into independent user stories, capturing detailed acceptance criteria, building a release plan with user stories in collaboration with the customer, managing the backlog, running showcases and incorporating user feedback and documenting system capabilities, business processes and support handover documentation.
• Have experience of systems integration and migration delivery.
• Have familiarity with the technical aspects of software development, including understanding the capabilities and limitations of programming languages, and a knowledge of testing (System, Unit, Integration, Interface).
• Have experience of APIs and the build approach in the context of micro systems and external clients.
• An understanding of business process modelling, data modelling, object modelling, and OO design principles.
• Be pro-active in exploring options and consensus, and to have their own opinions about how to build great software and be prepared to defend them.
• Successfully applied Agile/XP/Scrum practices.
• May have introduced Agile techniques and have coached teams to apply them effectively, thanks to their Agile expertise and outstanding communication skills.
• Flexible in working practices.
• Have exceptional interpersonal skills, including but not limited to, listening, written and verbal communication skills, exceptional client facing/consulting skills and managing stakeholders.
• Experienced in using Atlassian software (such as Jira for backlog management and Confluence for detailed product documentation) or equivalent tools.

• Music industry royalty/copyright or other entertainment industry participation experience.

Key Behavioural/Personality Traits

You will have a strong track record across the full lifecycle of projects, proving the ability to communicate with business stakeholders, understand business pain points, translate requirements into solutions, and transfer knowledge to an Agile project team for multiple IT products.

Just So You Know… The company presents this job description as a guide to the major areas and duties for which the jobholder is accountable. However, the business operates in an environment that demands change and the jobholder's specific responsibilities and activities will vary and develop. Therefore, the job description should be seen as indicative and not as a permanent, definitive, and exhaustive statement.