Business Operations Specialist

Zelis•St. Louis, MO

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Business Operations Specialist plays a central role in how the Zelis Implementation team operates, governs work, manages operational risk, and scales effectively. This role owns and improves the team’s operational governance rhythms, reporting processes, ticket oversight, initiative tracking, and AI-enabled workflows that help leadership make informed decisions and keep the organization aligned around shared priorities. The primary duty of this role is to evaluate operational data, assess risk across initiatives and systems, determine what requires escalation or leadership attention, and recommend practical improvements to strengthen team execution. Operating independently within established priorities, this person exercises judgment on what to act on, what to monitor, and what to bring to leadership — without requiring step-by-step direction. This role requires independent judgment, cross-functional coordination, analytical thinking, and a continuous improvement mindset. Success comes from the ability to identify operational risk before it surfaces as a problem, distinguish meaningful signals from routine activity, and provide decision support to Implementation leadership in a fast-moving environment.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree preferred; a focus in Business, Operations, Communications, Information Systems, or a related field is preferred.
3–5 years of experience in an operations, business operations, program support, implementation support, project coordination, or comparable role in a fast-paced professional services, technology, or healthcare environment.
Demonstrated experience managing multiple concurrent workstreams with a high degree of organization, reliability, and independent follow-through.
Experience interpreting operational data, identifying risks or trends, and making sound judgment calls about what to act on, what to track, and what to escalate.
Strong written communication skills, with the ability to produce clear, professional-quality summaries, reports, status updates, and team-facing communications.
Proficiency with tools such as Jira, Confluence, Smartsheet, SharePoint, and Microsoft Office.
Hands-on experience using AI tools, such as Claude, ChatGPT, or similar technologies, to support work tasks; demonstrated comfort integrating AI into day-to-day operations is required.

Responsibilities

Own the Implementation team’s operational governance rhythm, ensuring leadership and team members are aligned around the right priorities, risks, decisions, and follow-up actions.
Evaluate operational data, reporting inputs, initiative updates, ticket trends, and team activity indicators to identify risks, dependencies, gaps, or issues requiring leadership attention.
Determine which operational issues require escalation, continued monitoring, or independent follow-up based on business impact, urgency, and potential risk to Implementation execution.
Prepare leadership-ready summaries, status updates, and decision-support materials that clearly communicate key risks, open decisions, progress, trends, and recommended actions.
Recommend and implement improvements to governance routines, reporting processes, escalation paths, communication practices, and recurring operating cadences as team needs evolve.
Design, build, and own the Implementation team’s ticket oversight program across Product and IT systems — establishing the framework, monitoring criteria, escalation thresholds, and reporting cadences from the ground up, then driving ongoing execution, refinement, and leadership visibility as the program matures.
Evaluate IT support ticket dashboards on a recurring basis, assessing patterns and stress indicators such as elevated critical volume, aging unassigned tickets, threshold breaches, recurring themes, or other signals of operational risk.
Monitor implementation-impacting Product development tickets in Jira, maintaining visibility into the open queue and identifying items that may affect implementation timelines, client readiness, operational stability, or team execution.
Facilitate recurring prioritization discussions with Implementation leadership by preparing relevant analysis, surfacing newly identified risks, capturing decisions, and driving follow-through on next steps.
Partner with leadership to refine escalation thresholds, monitoring criteria, reporting views, and coverage areas as team needs and system capabilities evolve.
Own the team’s internal initiative tracking process, ensuring current visibility into initiative status, owners, timelines, dependencies, risks, and upcoming decision points.
Assess initiative health ahead of review cycles, identify workstreams at risk of falling behind, and surface prioritization recommendations or follow-up actions to leadership.
Proactively engage initiative owners to gather updates, clarify risks, identify blockers, and ensure leadership has an accurate view of progress and areas requiring attention.
Own the operational structure and ongoing effectiveness of the team’s Confluence and SharePoint spaces, ensuring information is organized, current, accessible, and aligned to team operating needs.
Identify gaps in existing documentation, process resources, onboarding materials, or team knowledge repositories, and recommend improvements to strengthen consistency and scalability.
Serve as a resource to team members on operational processes, tools, and documentation practices — providing guidance on established workflows and helping others navigate team systems effectively.
Own and improve the Implementation team’s AI-assisted workflows, including reporting automation, documentation generation, administrative task support, and other processes that improve operational efficiency.
Proactively identify opportunities to apply AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, or equivalent technologies to streamline recurring coordination, reporting, communication, documentation, and governance tasks.
Develop, document, and refine new AI-enabled workflows as team needs evolve, partnering with leadership to evaluate effectiveness, manage responsible use, and scale successful approaches.
Recommend enhancements to existing workflows, templates, reporting methods, and documentation practices to reduce manual effort and improve consistency, accuracy, and speed.
Maintain the operational infrastructure that keeps the Implementation team running smoothly — including meeting cadence, calendar management, time-off and go-live visibility, report distribution, onboarding coordination, and event logistics — exercising judgment on how these processes are structured, sequenced, and improved over time.
Identify inefficiencies or gaps in recurring operational processes and recommend adjustments that improve consistency, reduce manual effort, and better support team and leadership needs.