Finance and Administration is seeking up to 3 Business Analysts. These are full-time (1.0 FTE ),12-month, professional faculty positions.

Oregon State University is actively engaged in several strategic initiatives, including projects that support business process, information technology and teaching/research activities. As a member of the Business Analyst Pool reporting to the Executive Director of the Enterprise Project Portfolio Management Office, the Business Analyst (BA) works within the Enterprise Project Portfolio Management Office’s (EPPMO) guidance within the scope of assigned projects to engage with diverse groups of project stakeholders, subject matter experts, and process users to identify, define, and document business needs in order to find solutions, make process and technology performance improvements, and enact organizational change. The BA will be able to understand and identify the business problems and opportunities, assess the capabilities to carry out change, determine feasible solutions/approaches, define the scope of the solution, and prepare appropriate documentation to present findings.

This position will play a pivotal role in ensuring understanding of business requirements. The BA will elicit, analyze, specify, and validate the business needs of stakeholders. This includes interviewing stakeholders, facilitating process improvement through the eyes of the customer, and gathering and compiling user requirements to understand where, if and how technology, digitalized processes, and data solutions are needed. The BA will apply proven communication, facilitation, and analytical problem-solving skills to help the unit, or college make informed decisions. This position will also be proactive about working with university leaders and partners to look for innovation, technologies, and processes to help create agility at OSU.

The BA will perform analytical services pertaining to business, technology, data, and research/teaching focused projects with the purpose of developing solutions that may be technical, business/operational, and/or research/teaching-oriented. The BA will serve as a leader of quantitative and qualitative analyses, to include external industry research and will meet and collaborate with teams across the university to gather data/information. This position will work closely with Project Managers, IT partners, business owners to monitor deliverables and user acceptance (UA) test output and lead internal system quality assurance (QA) testing and user acceptance sign-off processes.

The BA will participate as an active member of the EPPMO team to collaboratively design, update and test techniques, tools, processes and templates, ensuring continuous innovation and improvement. Working within the EPPMO processes, the BA will use data gathered from stakeholder groups, schools, colleges, and departments, and help move the proposed changes through the enterprise change management process.

OSU IT has a commitment to deliver data as a strategic working asset and to enable data informed decision making across OSU. Leaders and staff will lead by example and use data to inform decision making at all levels in the organization. Persons in technology roles are also expected to design systems with data portability in mind and work within enterprise architecture and privacy guidelines.

UIT has a deep commitment to and belief in the strength and value of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) both throughout our team and as an intentional and active practice to advance the vision, mission, and strategic efforts of the entire university. As a member of the UIT community, the person in this position is expected to foster and promote the values of DEI and demonstrate a commitment to inclusive excellence in their work.

Proactively securing and protecting OSU’s digital assets and information systems is crucial to our missions of teaching and learning, research, and outreach and engagement. All OSU IT professionals have a direct responsibility to provision high quality and secure IT systems and services. Persons in technology roles are expected to be responsive to security related actions and requirements, and to collaborate to find secure ways to support the OSU community.

Working for Oregon State University is so much more than a job!

Oregon State University is a dynamic community of dreamers, doers, problem-solvers and change-makers. We don’t wait for challenges to present themselves — we seek them out and take them on. We welcome students, faculty and staff from every background and perspective into a community where everyone feels seen and heard. We have deep-rooted mindfulness for the natural world and all who depend on it, and together, we apply knowledge, tools and skills to build a better future for all.

FACTS :

• Top 1.4% university in the world
• More research funding than all public universities in Oregon combined
• 1 of 3 land, sea, space and sun grant universities in the U.S.
• 2 campuses, 11 colleges, 12 experiment stations, and Extension programs in all 36 counties
• 7 cultural resource centers that offer education, celebration and belonging for everyone
• 100+ undergraduate degree programs, 80+ graduate degrees plus hundreds of minor options and certificates
• 35k+ students including more than 2.3k international students and 10k students of color
• 217k+ alumni worldwide
• For more interesting facts about OSU visit: https://oregonstate.edu/about

Locations:

Oregon State has a statewide presence with campuses in Corvallis and Bend, the OSU Portland Center and the Hatfield Marine Science Center on the Pacific Coast in Newport.
Oregon State’s beautiful, historic and state-of-the-art main campus is located in one of America’s best college towns. Corvallis is located close to the Pacific Ocean, the Cascade mountains and Oregon wine county. Nestled in the heart of the Willamette Valley, this beautiful city offers miles of mountain biking and hiking trails, a river perfect for boating or kayaking and an eclectic downtown featuring local cuisine, popular events and performances.

Total Rewards Package:
Oregon State University offers a comprehensive benefits package with benefits eligible positions that is designed to meet the needs of employees and their families including:

• Medical, Dental, Vision and Basic Life. OSU pays 95% of premiums for you and your eligible dependents.
• Retirement savings paid by the university.
• A generous paid leave package, including holidays, vacation and sick leave.
• Tuition reduction benefits for you or your qualifying dependents at OSU or the additional six Oregon Public Universities.
• Robust Work Life programs including Dual Career assistance resources, flexible work arrangements, a Family Resource Center, Affinity Groups and an Employee Assistance Program.

Future and current OSU employees can use the Benefits Calculator to learn more about the full value of the benefits provided at OSU.

Business Analysis and Process Design Facilitation (55%)

• Conduct workflow analysis, needs assessments, and preliminary cost/benefit analysis to identify and recommend improvements to business processes to improve innovation, digitalization, efficiency, and reduce operational costs and redundancies, or to provide new operational capabilities
• Facilitate teams in the design/redesign of business processes through the lens of the customer using journey mapping and other process improvement techniques and practices
• Conduct interviews with university stakeholders to assimilate knowledge and understanding of business problems, operational and technology requirements to document business needs, use cases, processes, user stories, and business system requirements.
• Document detailed business requirements developed from analyses.
• Translate process and technical specifications/requirements into informative, user-friendly documentation, guides, and end-user navigation aids.
• Assist with the interpretation of user requirements into feasible options and communicate these back to the business stakeholders.
• Define, develop, and implement quality assurance (QA) practices and procedures, end-user validation plans, and other QA assessments throughout the university.
• Work with OSU teams and stakeholders to gather business requirements from users and create functional requirements as necessary to support project requirements and to enhance services.
• Analyze current solutions/processes and identify improvement opportunities that increase efficiencies and effectiveness.
• Analyze current state, perform gap analysis, identify opportunities and efficiencies, and establish future state to align with business needs.
• Analyze and verify requirements for completeness, consistency, comprehensibility, feasibility, and conformity to EPPMO standards.
• Define current and future state business models and build strong, working rapport with customers.
• Identify and track escalating issues and risks to project stakeholders in a timely manner.
• Create process models, specifications, diagrams, and charts to clarify business processes, identify issues, and provide direction to developers and/or the project team.
• Communicate changes, enhancements, and modifications of business requirements, verbally or through written documentation, to project managers, sponsors, and other stakeholders so that issues and solutions are understood.

Quality Assurance/User Acceptance (20%)

• Translate business requirements into use-cases and testing scenarios.
• Track deliverables and system feature sets against original business requirements to ensure project meets business needs and documented success criteria.
• Facilitate user acceptance process, roles, and responsibilities.
• Document user acceptance plans and results.
• Share lessons-learned to continually improve each test cycle.
• Assist stakeholders to document and diagnose issues and develop remediation plans.

External/Internal Collaboration (20%)

• Communicate with internal stakeholders using data- and process-models to clarify and validate requirements of project: models include, but are not limited to, use-case diagrams, activity diagrams, and data-flow diagrams using tools such as Visio and Miro.
• Assist in conducting research on technical and other business or research/teaching related solutions to meet agreed-upon requirements and to support purchasing efforts.
• Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to develop and maintain relationships that support the University and EPPMO.
• Work collaboratively with EPPMO, Project Managers, sponsors, and other members of the project team to ensure objectives within each phase of the project are met.
• Assist users and key stakeholders with understanding various tools and support processes to facilitate acquisition decisions with feasibility/cost-benefit analysis.

Other Duties as Assigned (5%)

• Participate in appropriate activities that enhance continuous development of general knowledge of or ability to do assigned work.
• Participate in departmental processes and initiatives, including Change Management, Incident Management, etc.
• Other duties as assigned.

This position, with director approval, is open to fully remote or hybrid work arrangements utilizing online team collaboration tools. Occasional travel may be required.