Graduate BA Review

Generally, I do basic BA roles and other Admin related roles such as minutes, meetings, excel, MI data and other small things. Also, feedback to my manager as well as work on documents for my portfolio and the apprenticeship itself, or attend a training course run by the training provider occasionally.

The typical workflow can be broadly grouped into four stages. First is elicitation which involves extracting and anticipating requirements by uncovering the underlying business issues that need to be addressed. A BA will need to adapt to rapid changes in the financial and technology sector as baseline plans often need to be iteratively modified depending on changes in demand, regulation and budgets. Anticipating future requirements or ones that have not yet been considered will be essential to successful outcomes. Second is requirement analysis, which involves constraining, organising and translating the business requirements to technical requirements, often an iterative process to ensure completeness. Constraining is important as in an ideal world, a complete requirement list that is essential to a business should be considered, but realistically, the focus must remain on core business needs, and a BA needs to recognise and constrain the scope of a project to these guidelines. This prevents project requirements being overlooked, as well as increase efficiency and leads to optimum use of time and budgets. Modelling tools are then used to match strategic business objectives with practical technical solutions. Following this stage is requirements specification, ensuring that the requirements are documented and presented in a manner which can easily be shared and understood by stakeholders, other team members and sometimes the client test base. This includes safeguarding the requirements through verifying functionality, accuracy and completeness of the requirements which minimises risk and ensuring requirements are met before investing further in system and product development. The final step is validating and verifying the requirements, rejecting implementations that do not advance business objectives. This ensures that the requirements are in line with the business needs being addressed, that they are approved by the appropriate stakeholders and that they meet the relevant quality standards. Once all requirements are met and the technology or solution is delivered, a BA might be shifted to another project. However, if a BA remains on the project, the role shifts to maintenance, prevention and correction of defects, as well as enhancements and analysis of the system to determine when deactivation, replacement or updating is required.

Overall, it is OK. The main role of the project is about protecting Santander’s customers, shareholders and communities. Within such a complex environment and with so much at stake, simply adhering to established legal controls and regulations is no longer sufficient. Therefore the role of a BA in this sector will be to work with financial crime and surveillance investigators to understand their problems and manage changes to their systems.

It is somewhat well organised however, there are certain last minute aspects like moving course dates, moving training dates, a lack of communication, inconsistent marking and similar things like this. The rotations are also ad hoc and not all placements are giving the relevant experience or doing what they initially said they would.

Generally, on a day to day basis, a decent amount of support is received and the employer is fairly understanding and is happy to be accomodating or changing things if required. Although, going back to the structure, everything is pretty much ad hoc so the onus is on you to seek support.

The training course provider does not provide very much support outside of the digitial and internet learning platforms. There is a meeting set up between a member of the training company and us every 6 to 8 weeks but it is not actually that useful in the long run and only covers topics previously covered.

The qualification has helped with the core business skills and specialised knowledge that will contribute towards a firm’s objectives, but more importantly, a willingness to learn, adapt and be agile. The current organisational structure needs to be well understood, so that future needs can be identified and solutions created to meet those needs. To be successful, a BA needs a combination of both soft and practical skills. Integral is communication skills, as a large amount of time is spent interacting with users, clients, team members and stakeholders. The success of a project relies heavily on the BA clearly communicating and outlining the project requirements. Analytical and problem solving skills are important as customer requirements need to be properly interpreted and translated into operational requirements. A measured and efficient decision will then need to be made so a BA needs to be able to access a situation, receive input from stakeholders and select a course of action.

There are certain things like sport such as football, badminton etc. Other than that there is not much else to get involved in, such as the above mentionned social activities, networking events or such like. It would be good to have some of these mentionned events and would make the role more interesting.

No

It has many things going for it but also a selection of drawbacks as outlined earlier in this survey. A lack of clarity and organisation key amongst the obvious shortcomings of this scheme. Perhaps other schemes within the company are run differently and are perhaps better organised, but this is the opinion purely from this role.

Properly read up on the information of the scheme, as well as what is expected of you and your expectations of them. The best way is still to just talk to someone already working there to get a more realistic view of what happens and whether it is the company for them.