Business Analyst 3 (Senior)

ATTAINX INC•Herndon, VA

9h•Remote

About The Position

The Business Analyst 3 is a senior-level position responsible for leading requirements analysis, stakeholder engagement, product management, and process improvement activities across the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) IT ecosystem. This role requires deep expertise in business analysis, Agile/SAFe delivery frameworks, and federal IT program operations. The Business Analyst 3 operates with significant autonomy, drives portfolio- and program-level planning, manages complex stakeholder relationships across Government Product Owners (GPOs), Business Owners (BOs), and ISD leadership, and serves as a subject matter expert on assigned application domains. The role combines business analysis, product ownership, and Scrum Master responsibilities to ensure delivery teams produce outcomes aligned with NRCS mission objectives and FPAC governance standards.

Requirements

Fifteen (15) or more years of professional experience in business analysis, product management, or related IT delivery roles.
Five (5) or more years of experience in Agile/SAFeenvironments, including PI Planning facilitation, backlog management, and product ownership.
Three (3) or more years of experience supporting federal IT programs or government agency environments.
Demonstrated experience with portfolio planning, program-level Epic decomposition, and roadmap development.
Experience managing complex stakeholder relationships across business, technical, and executive audiences.
Experience with requirements elicitation techniques including JAD sessions, interviews, process mapping, and prototyping.
Experience coordinating UAT activities and managing defect resolution workflows.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
Jira (Epics, Features, Stories, dashboards, structure, roadmaps), Confluence
Requirements documentation: BRDs, use cases, user stories, acceptance criteria
Process modeling: MS Visio, Balsamiq, UML diagrams, activity diagrams, ER diagrams
Data analysis and reporting: scorecards, metrics, velocity tracking
MS Office Suite, MS Project, MS SharePoint
SQL fundamentals (ability to query and analyze data)
Familiarity with NRCS application domains (Protracts, NPAD, CART, CD) or similar federal conservation/agriculture systems
Must be able to obtain and maintain a USDA security background investigation (FBI fingerprint check and eQIP).
Must comply with all NIST, USDA, and HSPD–12 security training and reporting requirements.
Must complete mandatory training: Information Security Awareness (annually) and Section 508 (within 45 days of assignment).

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree (MBA or related) is preferred.
Experience with USDA NRCS or FPAC systems and business processes.
Experience with vendor management, SOW development, and RFP processes.
Experience with budget lifecycle processes and funding request documentation.
Familiarity with NIST SP 800–53, FISMA, and FedRAMP compliance frameworks.
Experience with Section 508 accessibility requirements.

Responsibilities

Lead requirements elicitation, analysis, and documentation for O&M and DM&E initiatives across assigned application domains (e.g., Protracts, NPAD, CART, CD).
Collaborate with Government Product Owners to translate business needs into well-defined Epics, Features, and User Stories with measurable acceptance criteria.
Develop and maintain product backlogs, roadmaps, and release plans aligned with PI objectives and business priorities.
Write Portfolio-level and Program-level Epics with benefit hypotheses; decompose into Features and Stories suitable for sprint execution.
Conduct gap analysis, AS-IS/TO-BE process mapping, and business process reengineering to identify improvement opportunities.
Facilitate Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions, stakeholder interviews, and whiteboard discussions to elicit and validate requirements.
Develop Business Requirements Documents (BRDs), functional specifications, use cases, screen design mockups, and workflow diagrams using tools such as MS Visio, Balsamiq, or equivalent.
Ensure all requirements and deliverables are traceable through the Government-designated system of record (Jira) and meet defined Acceptable Quality Levels (AQLs).
Serve as the primary liaison between delivery teams and Government stakeholders (GPOs, BOs, GPMs, COR) for assigned application domains.
Represent delivery teams on product-related questions, process design decisions, and cross-functional coordination.
Present solutions, strategic roadmaps, and status updates to governance bodies and executive leadership.
Facilitate consensus-building across multiple stakeholder groups with competing priorities.
Provide timely compliance, governance, and status reporting to the Government in formats and frequencies requested by the COR or GPMs.
Support change control processes by documenting scope changes, impact assessments, and obtaining required Government approvals.
Manage and facilitate a Business Analysis Center of Excellence to standardize BA practices across delivery teams.
Contribute to the Project Management Plan (PMP) including governance structure, communication protocols, risk management approach, and escalation procedures.
Maintain and actively manage entries in the risk and issue log in the Government-designated tool, including modernization dependencies, compliance gaps, and delivery risks.
Ensure adherence to FPAC architectural principles, the Technical Guidance Framework (TGF), and enterprise practices across delivery activities.
Support ITIL-aligned incident, problem, and change management processes consistent with FPAC standards.
Collaborate on SPOE/Feature/Story/SET ticket workflows with GPOs to ensure proper intake, triage, and authorization of work items.
Support the Government-approved change control process; ensure no work begins outside the approved baseline without documented Government authorization.
Track delivery timelines against approved schedules and proactively communicate risks or delays.
Coordinate with GPMs to obtain formal approvals prior to initiating work; document approvals in the Government-designated system of record.
Coordinate User Acceptance Testing (UAT) activities including test case validation, defect tracking, and sign-off procedures with NRCS business users.
Work with testing teams to validate test cases and manage overall UAT execution.
Ensure delivered functionality meets business requirements and acceptance criteria prior to production deployment.
Support release validation activities and post-deployment verification.
Mentor and provide guidance to Business Analyst 2 team members on requirements techniques, stakeholder management, and SAFe practices.
Provide NRCS, FAPD, and ISD process knowledge sharing to delivery teams and new staff during onboarding and transitions.
Maintain troubleshooting playbooks, process documentation, and knowledge articles in Government-designated repositories (Confluence).
Provide knowledge transfer sessions to Government personnel and incoming vendors during transitions.
Participate in planned and unplanned DR/COOP exercises; coordinate business stakeholder communication during DR events.
Support development and validation of application-specific disaster recovery runbooks from a business process perspective, including dependency mapping and business impact assessment.
Coordinate recovery validation activities with delivery teams and Government stakeholders; contribute to after-action reports.
Support alignment of assigned application domains with the Government’s data architecture and governance practices, including coordination with teams on data lineage, stewardship, and metadata registration in AWS DataZone.
Facilitate requirements gathering for data migration activities, including ETL/ELT pipeline specifications and integration with FPAC’s centralized AWS Data Lake strategy (Databricks).
Coordinate with technical teams on schema change impacts to business processes and downstream systems.
Coordinate Tier 3 support escalation workflows for assigned application domains, ensuring proper documentation and stakeholder communication.
Support establishment and maintenance of on-call support rotation schedules, escalation paths, and coordination procedures with Government stakeholders.
Track and report on support ticket trends, resolution metrics, and recurring issues to identify systemic improvement opportunities.
Coordinate requirements and business analysis activities for applications that integrate with FPAC GeoBranch geospatial services, ensuring geospatial requirements are properly documented and traceable.
Support geospatial data and service integration requirements across application domains as directed.
Contribute business analysis perspective to the comprehensive inventory of supported systems, including business impact assessment, operational dependencies, and cost-to-maintain analysis.
Participate in scoring model evaluation of modernization options (refactor, re-platform, replace, retire) from a business process impact perspective.
Support development of phased modernization roadmaps, including business continuity requirements and stakeholder impact analysis.
Contribute to Transition Package development including architecture decision documentation, final modernization roadmap, risk/issue log closure, release documentation, and knowledge transfer materials.
Support cost-benefit analysis and business case development for modernization initiatives.
Identify business process impacts of decoupling strategies for tightly coupled shared services (e.g., Core Services, CSAPI) and monolithic databases.