Principal Business Analyst

Informa Group .

3d • Hybrid

About The Position

Taylor & Francis (T&F) is continuing its digital investment with a focus on the needs of academic researchers and institutes. Realising the long-term value of these investments depends on rigorous, coherent business analysis - understanding how the business works, framing the right problems, and ensuring that what we build reflects a shared, well-modelled view of our capabilities, processes and data. The Principal Business Analyst is one of two senior BA practitioners aligned to the Taylor & Francis Business Architecture function, reporting to the Enterprise Business Architect. The role leads the largest and most complex cross-domain analysis in its domain group, actively builds up the T&F business architecture, and jointly with the other Principal BA owns the standards, methodology, community and capability of business analysis across T&F. They enable the broader BA community by providing quality oversight, operated through standards, peer review and coaching, not management authority.

Requirements

• Degree-level education, or professional experience where you have gained equivalent knowledge.
• Substantial track record of business analysis in complex, multi-domain organisations - publishing, content or platform business experience is an advantage.
• Demonstrated experience scoping and leading large, complex or cross-domain analysis initiatives end-to-end, including coordinating multiple BAs through design and implementation.
• Demonstrated experience setting BA standards and methodology in a federated or distributed delivery environment.
• Direct experience working alongside enterprise or business architects on capability-driven analysis and design.
• Comfortable contributing to architecture-level artefacts and recording architectural decisions.
• Strong track record of engaging at senior stakeholder level - technology leadership and business sponsors.
• Coaching and developmental experience with junior or mid-career BAs, even where formal line management is not involved.
• Demonstrated experience of working with colleagues in multiple locations and time zones.
• You hold authority through expertise, not position - you are comfortable influencing and raising standards without line-management authority.
• You are comfortable leading a large, ambiguous initiative while coordinating Business Analysts you do not formally manage.
• You are confident raising the standards of a mixed BA team with varying skills and backgrounds, and you coach generously.
• You communicate clearly in writing and in person, especially with senior business and engineering audiences.
• You have the patience to build business architecture and BA capability incrementally, and you inspire others to persevere through resistance or setbacks.
• You nurture an open environment where stakeholders and collaborators feel involved and heard, and you work across silos to articulate and achieve shared goals.
• You are willing to challenge constructively, including pushing back on delivery pressure when it conflicts with BA practice standards or undermines analysis already done.
• You have an exceptional ability to analyse complex problems, frame them well, and drive towards decisions with the customer in mind.

Nice To Haves

• Business analysis certification (e.g. BCS/ISEB, IIBA CBAP) is desirable but not essential.

Responsibilities

• Leading complex and cross-domain analysis
• Personally scope the largest, most complex and most strategically significant analysis initiatives in the domain group - defining the problem, the scope of analysis required, the approach, the dependencies, and the BA capacity needed across domains.
• Coordinate Domain BAs through design and implementation once an initiative is scoped - keeping the analysis coherent across teams, respecting capability boundaries, and surfacing and resolving cross-domain conflicts before they reach delivery.
• Own requirements coherence across domain boundaries, preventing contradictory or overlapping requirements.
• Lead requirements elicitation and facilitation for high-ambiguity or senior-stakeholder initiatives, and lead feasibility and options analysis for significant initiatives - presenting recommendations to senior stakeholders and governance forums.
• Manage stakeholder relationships across domain teams and senior product, delivery and engineering stakeholders within the domain group.
• Contribute to UAT planning across domains for cross-domain initiatives, ensuring end-to-end test coverage is coherent.
• Maintain analytical quality as work moves through design and implementation, flagging where emerging delivery decisions undermine the original analysis, and act as the senior escalation point for the most ambiguous or contentious analysis problems in the domain group.
• Building up the business architecture
• Act as the primary BA point of contact for the Business Architect within the domain group, ensuring domain-model vocabulary is applied consistently across BA artefacts.
• Ensure BA work on initiatives actively feeds the business architecture - processes, organisational structures, systems and data flows are progressively documented and kept current as delivery programmes progress.
• Lead the documentation of capability-level processes, organisational structures, systems and data flows across the domain group, drawing on Domain BA contributions to build a complete and consistent picture.
• Support the creation and analysis of Business Decision Records (BDRs), highlight opportunities to unify or simplify process, and surface capability-boundary questions to the Business Architect.
• Validate that initiative analysis aligns with the target architecture and the domain model, and flag and escalate where it does not.
• Managing the BA practice (shared across the Principal BAs)
• Jointly define and maintain T&F BA methodology, standards, templates, artefacts and a shared vocabulary tied to the T&F domain model.
• Jointly define the BA competency framework and progression model, and advise on recruitment, development and retention of BA talent.
• Jointly run the T&F BA community of practice, identifying and addressing practice-wide skill gaps.
• Jointly define requirements governance standards across the organisation (traceability, change control, sign-off) and UAT standards across the BA community.
• Provide quality oversight of BA outputs within the aligned domain group — reviewing artefacts and ensuring process models, requirements documentation and domain analysis are correctly captured.
• Coach Domain BAs in the aligned group on technique, standards and approach, building capability without direct line-management authority.

Benefits

• A competitive salary + bonus
• 24 days annual leave
• 4 volunteering days annually
• Day off for your birthday
• Pension contributions
• Medical insurance for self and dependants; life cover and personal accident cover for self
• Seasonal social and charitable events
• Training and development
• Tools and equipment for remote working

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: Associate degree