Lead Business Analyst

From day one, our mission has been to create an independent business with a unique culture – one that is controlled by the people who work for it. Finding the most talented and entrepreneurial people has always been key to our success. 

People come to Howden for lots of different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture. That’s what sets us apart, and why we nurture and retain the best talent in the market. Whatever your priorities – work/life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering - you’ll find like-minded people driving change at Howden.

We are looking for an experienced Business Analyst to manage, lead and develop a small team, taking responsibility for BA delivery across multiple workstreams, both product and project. The successful candidate will be pragmatic, comfortable working with ambiguity and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment. The ability to context-switch and oversee a varied workload is essential.

• Work closely with Head of Change, Head of Architecture/engineering and Head of Product to understand the strategy and priorities, in order to plan analysis in line with delivery milestones
• Responsible for overseeing and coordinating the efforts of multiple business analysts on Change initiatives/Product enhancements, whilst also leading and/or contributing towards analysis
• Understand the big picture, know when a requirement in one area impacts another and manage this accordingly
• Lead the BA effort on a project, determining how the requirements will be managed, reviewing analysis deliverables for quality assurance
• Establishing a Business Analysis framework to ensure best practice within the team
• Ensure projects are resourced sufficiently, dividing work amongst the BA team, in line with priorities
• Be responsible for the HL / strategic business analysis activities, including collaborating with stakeholders and defining the business needs. Then managing the Business analyst team for the lower-level activities (e.g. defining the detailed requirements, analysing the business processes, defining the functional requirements, analysing the data requirements)
• Coach, support and mentor team of BAs. Escalating/resolving blockers where necessary
• Understand Agile and Waterfall methodologies and be equally comfortable writing business requirements and User stories
• Support scrum masters and change team with day to day product or backlog queries, prioritisation of tickets and readiness for sprint planning, ensuring dependencies are tracked (between dev squads and externally) and sprint/release scope is well understood
• Ensure features and stories are well-defined, consistently written to a high standard and communicated clearly to development and QA teams
• Establish a standard for producing and publishing product and project requirements documentation so that it is well-organised and accessible to key stakeholders
• Support BA team by escalating blockers, flagging concerns to leadership when required
• Ensure good cross-functional collaboration including stakeholders in data, analytics, architecture, reporting, integration, partnerships and underwriting.

You will be joining the Rethink Business Analysis Team and will be key to ensuring that requirements are understood, easily translated into outcomes, and met by our technology delivery.  You will need strong communication and stakeholder management skills, as you will work closely with our underwriters, as well as internal and external partners.  You will be technically astute and enjoy being the bridge between technical teams, user groups and senior stakeholders.

Our Culture: People First

We’ve travelled far since opening our first office in 1994. Back then we were local experts – based in London, with direct access to the world’s biggest insurance market. We’re still locals, and we still deliver the right advice and the right insurance to our clients. But now, we’re local all over the world. With 15,000 global colleagues and a partner network spanning more than 100 territories, we are the largest independent insurance broker in the world. But our values haven’t changed since day one, when we set out to create a company grounded in:

•    An employee-ownership model 
•    Aligned external investors
•    The trust and integrity born of friendship
•   Expertise
•    Independence

Our focus on being a people-first business has always been at the very heart of Howden. Our vision was to create an independent business with a unique culture; one that would survive and thrive as a business controlled by the people working for it. Our employee ownership model sets us apart in the market. It’s created a culture of collaboration and innovation, where we’re driven to think bigger and empowered to challenge convention. 

Our flat structure and entrepreneurial spirit help us attract the best people and empower them to be the best version of themselves. And when we bring in and nurture great talent, more follows. That makes us better – and that’s better for everyone. 

Diversity & Inclusion

At Howden we consider our people our chief competitive advantage and as such we treat colleagues, candidates, clients, and business partners with equality, fairness and respect, regardless of their age, disability, race, religion or belief, gender, sexual orientation, marital status or family circumstances.