Senior Business Analyst
Springer Nature · London
Job Title: Senior Business Analyst
Location: London, UK
About US
The company
Springer Nature opens the doors to discovery for researchers, educators, clinicians, and other professionals. Every day, around the globe, our imprints, books, journals, platforms, and technology solutions reach millions of people. For over 175 years our brands and imprints have been a trusted source of knowledge to these communities and today, more than ever, we see it as our responsibility to ensure that fundamental knowledge can be found, verified, understood, and used by our communities – enabling them to improve outcomes, make progress, and benefit the generations that follow.
Visit https://group.springernature.com/ to learn more about who we are and what we do.
The Department
This role is in our Springer Nature Technology division - a diverse group of over 700 people across our main locations in Germany, India, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Part of the technology division, join Springer Nature Digital, home to over 300 people working in collaborative, multi-disciplinary, multi-location delivery teams. We are dedicated to developing digital products and services that answer user problems and support business goals. The work is exciting and meaningful, our culture is collaborative and friendly, and we encourage and support growth, both personal and professional.
This role is a terrific opportunity for friendly, curious people who want to get involved in our work, who love to learn, who will embrace and develop our culture, and help make SND a place where people and ideas can thrive.
We build our software incrementally, iteratively, and continuously, so you’ll be able to see new work go live to over four million visitors around the globe every week. Our flavour of agile has been heavily influenced by XP and Kanban, and if something isn’t working, we change it.
Our work delivers value to both the business and our customers, our teams are cross-discipline: business analysts and the user experience team work with stakeholders to coordinate research and understand requirements, whilst our frontend developers and software engineers pair with quality analysts to develop the most robust solutions, and our platform engineers work across the organisation to ensure our infrastructure never lets us down.
We generally follow a mix of agile and lean practices with an overall philosophy towards continuous delivery. We’ll rely on each and everyone’s expertise to adapt and improve these processes to serve the team, project and company as best fit their current contexts.
Visit sndigital.springernature.com to learn more about who we are and what we do.
The Team
We’re looking for a talented Senior Business Analyst to join our Screening Programme team. Working closely with product, programme, architecture, UX and engineering leaders, you’ll help shape the programme and deliver business analysis at scale. The programme is growing and currently spans four cross-functional teams across our global locations.
The Research Integrity and Manuscript Screening Programme is a strategic initiative focused on safeguarding the quality and integrity of published research. We deliver products and capabilities that identify potential research integrity concerns, automate and scale manuscript screening activities, and integrate actionable insights directly into editorial workflows. Working across complex business and technology domains, the programme aims to reduce operational burden, improve decision consistency, and ensure that research integrity threats are identified and addressed as early as possible in the publishing process
About the job
Job summary
In this role, you will play a leading role in a cross-functional programme team, leveraging analysis tools and expertise to inform decisions that support both business objectives and user needs. You will collaborate closely with both your team and business stakeholders to understand complex business problems, define work and identify key opportunities. Together, we work to create solutions that not only meet the business goals of Springer Nature but also provide tangible value to our users.
As a senior practitioner, you will influence stakeholders, facilitate effective decision-making, support and learn from colleagues and contribute to the continuous improvement of the Business Analysis discipline.
Key Responsibilities
BUSINESS ANALYSIS
- Lead collaborative discovery and requirements elicitation activities across the team, bringing structure and clarity to complex, ambiguous problems.
- Plan, organise and lead workshops that generate ideas and resolve problems.
- Unearth the root cause(s) of pain points and validate business opportunities and problems using data analytics and quantitative analysis where relevant as a tool.
- Define problem statements, desired outcomes and success measures.
- Map, analyse and validate information flows within a complex organisational setting and champion process and system design improvements.
- Communicate to the development team how the requirements are aligned with the business needs and “big picture” goals and vision using clear storytelling techniques.
- Collaborate and provide business analysis support to the product manager, business sponsors, SMEs and the team during development.
- Develop an understanding of the technology stack, system capabilities and data landscape to support effective solution delivery.
AGILE PRACTICES
- Monitoring, tracking and communicating progress and issues relating to the project, applying project management practices.
- Capturing information in team’s Jira and ensuring they are kept up to date with what you will be doing.
- Engage in and/or facilitate ceremonies such as our daily stand-ups, planning, prioritisation and steering sessions, story kick-offs, collaborative analysis and design workshops, showcases to internal customers and regular retrospectives.
- Escalate issues, risks or blockers as needed.
- Support your team members in problem-solving activities to remove blockers and complete agreed-upon work.
- Prioritise competing demands and obtain buy-in from stakeholders.
- Focus on delivering value early and often, slicing work into lean, increments that enable rapid learning, validation, and continuous improvement.
- Challenge assumptions and influence team decisions to drive better outcomes.
STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT AND INFLUENCE
- Build trusted relationships with stakeholders across business and technology functions.
- Work with stakeholders to understand our goals and vision, and identify business needs through strong business insight.
- Orchestrate alignment and collaboration within the team and externally with business stakeholders while balancing competing stakeholder priorities.
- Work with our many and varied stakeholders to understand, analyse and scope complex new work.
- Challenge and influence decisions; focusing on customer and business value.
LEADERSHIP AND BUSINESS ANALYSIS PRACTICE
- Support Business Analysts through coaching, knowledge sharing and constructive feedback.
- Select and adapt business analysis techniques, models and facilitation methods based on context, complexity and stakeholder needs.
- Adapt to changing team needs and proactively contribute beyond traditional role boundaries to help overcome delivery challenges and maintain momentum.
- Contribute to the evolution of Business Analysis standards and capability development across the function, as an active member of the Business Analysis community.
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
First 3 Months — Learn and Contribute
- Strengthen team ceremonies conducted regularly, adding value to the delivery process.
- Have an understanding of the team’s context in the broader programme and business.
- Have developed relationships with team members and core stakeholders.
- Be familiar with the technology stack and data landscape.
- Co-plan, organise and lead group sessions that generate ideas and resolve problems.
- Can unearth the root cause(s) of pain points and validate business opportunities and problems.
- Be an active participant of the Business Analysis community.
First 6 Months — Build influence and Ownership
- Have a clear understanding of the team’s priorities and be able to communicate this to stakeholders.
- Build relationships with key providers and dependent teams.
- Be able to monitor, track and communicate progress, risks and issues to stakeholders.
- Be able to prioritise competing demands and obtain buy-in from stakeholders.
- Map, analyse and validate information flows and user journeys to and from the product/service digital estate.
- Gauge the complexity or scope of a piece of work, collaboratively breaking it into smaller pieces as appropriate.
- Contribute to blameless post-mortems.
- Set context with your team to ensure any solutions co-defined provide business value whilst solving customer problems.
- Expand your focus beyond the immediate team, proactively identifying future risks, dependencies, stakeholder needs and opportunities that may influence delivery.
First 12 Months — Deliver impactful value
- Onboard new members to the team.
- Lead the definition of the complexity or scope of a piece of work, breaking it into smaller pieces when appropriate.
- Ensure scoped work aligns with programme and company vision.
- Contribute to the design of the system architecture.
- Understand our customers’ needs, both internal and external, and how your work affects their experience.
- Give and receive constructive feedback within your team.
- Organise and run sessions with your discipline peers within the Business Analyst community.
- Influence the definition of the vision and strategy of your product or service in terms of business and customer outcomes.
- Influence planning and decision-making beyond your immediate team, building alignment across dependent teams, products and business areas.
- Define KPIs to measure product/service performance in terms of business and customer outcomes.
- Have a thorough understanding of the potential opportunities and limitations of your product/service offering.
- Instil a data-driven approach to current and future product/service development.
About You
YOUR EXPERIENCE
- Excellent English language skills, both written and verbal; collaboration is vital in our day-to-day work, so being able to communicate your ideas and understand others is critical.
- Extensive experience as a Business Analyst.
- A proactive and collaborative team player who takes ownership and gets things done.
- An excellent communicator, able to engage effectively with both technical and business stakeholders.
- Quick to understand products, users, and the wider business context.
- Comfortable leading analysis across both discovery and delivery, helping teams explore problems and opportunities, shape solutions, and support successful implementation.
- Experienced working in agile teams to deliver high-quality, customer-focused outcomes.
- Highly skilled at facilitating discussions, building consensus, and driving informed decisions using data and insight.
- Curious, adaptable, and experienced in driving continuous improvement and innovation in a fast-paced environment.
- Comfortable with ambiguity, shifting priorities and distributed, multi-time zone stakeholder groups.
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