Senior Business Project Lead

University of British Columbia • Vancouver, BC

6d • CA$9,859 - CA$15,381

About The Position

UBC is undertaking a multi-year Student transformation project focused on improving specific priority functions that support the graduate student experience across UBC Vancouver and Okanagan campuses. This academically funded initiative seeks to modernize targeted business processes, support effective decision-making, and provide technologies to better support graduate students, faculty, and staff within UBC’s complex operating model. The Senior Business Project Lead is accountable for maximizing business value and outcomes for this major enterprise transformation initiative. The role focuses on business process transformation, value realization, and governance, ensuring that every requirement and decision is anchored in measurable benefit and strategic alignment. While this position partners closely with Enterprise Platforms (including Salesforce), its primary accountability is business leadership of the transformation—ensuring robust stakeholder engagement, defining future-state processes, and system requirements, benefits, scope boundaries, and decision readiness to enable effective platform delivery.

Requirements

• Undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline.
• Minimum of eight years of related experience including at least two years of managerial experience, or the equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Willingness to respect diverse perspectives, including perspectives in conflict with one’s own.
• Demonstrates a commitment to enhancing one’s own awareness, knowledge, and skills related to equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Nice To Haves

• Proven experience leading business process re‑design, scope definition, and value articulation for enterprise‑scale initiatives.
• Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, complex environments, synthesizing diverse inputs into clear, decision‑ready recommendations for senior leadership.
• Strong facilitation, stakeholder engagement, and governance skills, with experience working across multiple organizational units with competing priorities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex business concepts for a wide range of audiences, including senior academic and administrative leaders.
• Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) is an asset.
• Salesforce Certification (Administrator, Education Cloud Consultant, or Service Cloud Consultant) is also an asset.
• Experience working with enterprise CRM platform strategy (e.g., Salesforce Education Cloud), particularly in complex public sector or higher‑education environments with decentralized stakeholder groups.
• Demonstrated experience in Foundational Analysis: ability to enter an ambiguous environment, map the 'As-Is' landscape, and produce a clear, data-backed Problem Statement and Solution Blueprint.
• Degree in an IT or Business Administration related discipline preferred.
• Project Management professional designation is an asset.
• Change Management professional designation is an asset.
• Business Analysis professional designation is an asset.
• Experience providing functional leadership or mentoring is an asset.
• Experience supporting or leading business aspects of enterprise system implementations, such as CRM, recruitment systems, Student Information Systems, Workday, APIs, or other off‑the‑shelf COTS.
• Project experience in a higher‑education environment, policy and regulatory compliance situations is an asset.
• Experience demonstrates progressive responsibility, preferably in a University or other public sector environment.
• Experience with preparing RFPs, managing RFIs/RFPs for evaluation, selection and procurement of products and/or services from vendors.
• Experience in change management, data management, and solution and enterprise architecture.
• Experience supporting large‑scale, off‑the‑shelf COTS initiatives, including business process change, data migration, systems integration, and coordination with technical delivery teams.
• Effectively manage multiple tasks and priorities, work in a fast-paced environment, and manage responsibilities and tasks to meet time sensitive, critical deadlines.
• Intermediate knowledge of applications development methodologies, as well as development and implementation best practices, "rules of thumb", and benchmarks.
• An understanding of key trends and players in the IT industry.
• Effective leadership, consulting, consensus building, conflict resolution, and negotiation and team-building skills are an asset.
• Collaboration - Identifies and improves communication to bring conflict within the team into the open and facilitate resolution. Openly shares credit for team accomplishment. Monitors individual and team effectiveness and recommends improvement to facilitate collaboration. Considered a role model as a team player. Demonstrates high level of enthusiasm and commitment to team goals under difficult or adverse situations; encourages others to respond similarly. Strongly influences team strategy and processes.
• Communication for Results - Converses with, writes strategic documents for, and creates/delivers presentations to internal business leaders as well as external groups. Leads discussions with senior leaders and external partners in ways that support strategic planning and decision-making. Seeks a consensus with business leaders. Debates opinions, tests understanding, and clarifies judgments. Identifies underlying differences and resolves conflict openly and empathetically. Explains the context of multiple, complex interrelated situations. Asks searching, probing questions, plays devil's advocate, and solicits authoritative perspectives and advice prior to approving plans and recommendations.
• Problem Solving - Diagnoses problems using formal problem-solving tools and techniques from multiple angles and probes underlying issues to generate multiple potential solutions. Proactively anticipates and prevents problems. Devises, facilitates buy-in, makes recommendations, and guides implementation of corrective and/or preventive actions for complex issues that cross organizational boundaries and are unclear in nature. Identifies potential consequences and risk levels. Seeks support and buy-in for problem definition, methods of resolution, and accountability.
• Accountability - Sets enhanced objectives for self and others. Monitors performance trends and identifies opportunities to improve standards. Provides regular feedback and suggests alternative approaches necessary to ensure that organizational objectives and superior standards are achieved. Delegates responsibility and reallocates resources as needed to ensure that priorities are met for initiatives within area of responsibility.
• Analytical Thinking - Determines criteria for assessing issues and opportunities. Establishes clear goals and priorities needed to assess performance. Identifies relationships and linkages between different information sources. Anticipates issues that are not readily apparent on the surface. Identifies root causes and effects. Establishes clear goals and priorities. Anticipates potential problems and develops solutions needed to resolve them. Systemically analyzes relationships between apparently independent problems and issues. Reviews and cross-reviews reports. Identifies trends as well as isolated events. Translates analytical reports into management presentations, and provides guidance to resolve issues. Anticipates the possible outcome of potential solutions. Identifies areas of significant concern or opportunity. Probes and initiates research to identify critical problems.
• Business Enterprise Knowledge - Directs and coordinates the development and implementation of process-based solutions that cross organizational lines. Creates business case for investment in process and technological enhancements. Sets clear explanations for the integration and alignment of technology and business functions, focusing on the strategic value provided.

Responsibilities

• Plan, organize, manage, and oversee business transformation and analysis activities, ensuring alignment to approved outcomes, value realization goals, and governance expectations.
• Plan, organize, manage, monitor and be responsible for the business analysis activities of projects.
• Understand business context, project justification, business goals, priorities, and constraints, and articulate these into clear value statements, success metrics, and decision artifacts for leadership review.
• Understand business context, project justification, business goals, and priorities and update and maintain documentation on such.
• Lead Foundational Analysis for complex initiatives: Synthesize disparate data points from decentralized stakeholders to identify root causes, data silos, and process bottlenecks and material value gaps, producing a clear, decision‑ready problem statement prior to solution design.
• Understand and apply business architecture concepts to ensure strategic alignment with organizational goals, outcomes and business value and to inform prioritization, scope trade‑offs, and sequencing decisions across phases.
• Recommend and support governance and stakeholder working group structures, facilitating discovery, analysis, and consensus‑building that informs future‑state design and executive decision‑making.
• Lead current‑state assessment and future‑state design activities, identifying transformation opportunities and gaps, and advising on practical pathways to achieve the approved future state.
• Own and develop business requirements and decision frameworks that clearly articulate policy intent, outcomes, and constraints, enabling downstream derivation of functional and technical requirements.
• Partner with and support architects to ensure architectural decisions align with approved business outcomes, scope boundaries, and value priorities.
• Guide the development and validation of process and data artifacts, ensuring they accurately reflect approved business rules, decisions, and future‑state intent.
• Collaborate with integration architects to define business integration needs, decision points, and downstream impacts, supporting coherent end‑to‑end workflows.
• Lead preparation of business scope, requirements, and evaluation criteria for RFPs, ensuring clarity of outcomes, assumptions, and boundaries.
• Participate in developing RFP scoring mechanisms and facilitating and managing the scoring processes.
• Develop and present options, trade‑offs, risks, and benefits to support informed executive decision‑making.
• Partner with Change Management resources to execute stakeholder engagement, impact assessment, and readiness activities, ensuring business units are prepared for adoption.
• Provide business leadership for user acceptance activities and accept delivered solutions as meeting approved business needs and readiness criteria.
• Lead and conduct workflow and gap analysis for operational support processes.
• Acquire and maintain a working knowledge of the university's technical and business environment.
• Participate in the continuous improvement of the business analysis methodology via recommendations and suggestions, lessons learned and working groups with a focus on improving value realization, decision efficiency, and stakeholder alignment.
• Lead, mentor and coach other Business Analysts on process, techniques, and good practices and provide guidance on project specific situations.
• Actively seeks ongoing career development through self-motivated professional development in the field of business analysis.
• Act as a Business Value Gatekeeper: Lead value‑based fit‑gap analysis to ensure proposed solutions align with approved business outcomes and platform strategy.
• Challenge requirements that do not demonstrate measurable benefit or that introduce unnecessary complexity, ensuring business needs are clearly articulated before downstream technical design.
• Create Persona‑Driven artifacts: Develop Role & Persona Inventories and Journey Maps to inform business process re‑design and future‑state decision‑making, ensuring solutions address the specific 'Jobs to be Done' for students and staff rather than replicating legacy workflows.
• Lead the business scope and value definition for Requests for Proposals (RFPs), ensuring functional needs, success criteria, and decision boundaries are clearly articulated to support vendor accountability and reduce downstream change.
• Facilitate high‑stakes discovery and decision workshops with stakeholder groups (e.g., Faculty, Central Admin, Students).
• Synthesize competing priorities into decision‑ready options and a unified, PLT‑approved Future State vision that balances business value, user needs, and platform sustainability.
• Lead scope governance and MVP definition, developing prioritization frameworks and value‑gap analysis to recommend what is in‑scope for initial delivery versus future phases, and presenting options for executive approval.
• Acts as primary business steward for stakeholder relationships, proactively managing expectations around scope, trade‑offs, risks, and outcomes to ensure alignment and sustained confidence in the transformation.
• Obtains through governance mechanisms business acceptance and sign‑off those delivered solutions are fit for purpose and achieve the approved business outcomes, based on user acceptance testing and readiness criteria.
• Acts as custodian of the project governance framework, preparing decision materials, documenting outcomes, and escalating decision packages to the Project Leadership Team and Steering Committee as required.
• Leads business engagement during post‑go‑live hypercare and transition to sustainment, acting as the primary functional escalation point, coordinating with operational owners, and ensuring business issues are identified, prioritized, and addressed to support a stable transition into steady‑state operations.
• Owns post‑implementation benefit realization, including defining success measures, supporting data collection and validation, monitoring realized benefits against approved business cases, and reporting outcomes and insights back to business leadership to inform ongoing optimization and future phases.
• Analyzes business needs utilizing a structured requirements process (gathering, analyzing, documenting, and managing changes).
• Develops overall strategies and provides advice on options, risks and costs versus benefits.
• Communicates with stakeholders of varying technical ability and subject matter expertise and explains services to clients of all management levels to ensure they have a clear understanding of IT roles, processes, and activities.
• Manages liaison relationship with clients to ensure technical solutions meet user needs.
• Conducts feasibility studies and drafts proposals for evaluation by appropriate users and managers.
• Develops and assists in the presentation of business cases.
• Leads short and long‑term planning sessions to implement integrated business process improvements.
• Identifies, elicits, and documents business requirements, defines business rules and communicates requirements for the implementation of business solutions.
• Prepares functional, system and program specifications bridging multiple projects.
• Reviews test plans and monitors the testing process to ensure that business results are adequately tested with minimal risk.
• Procures technical assistance to help in problem resolution.
• Provides technical leadership, coaching and mentoring to less-experienced individuals.
• Maintains appropriate professional designations and up‑to‑date knowledge of current information technology techniques and tools.
• Performs other related duties as required.
• Plans, directs and supervises work of project team members, such as other business analysts, consultants, quality assurance analysts, and other staff assigned to the project.

Benefits

• The Compensation Range is the span between the minimum and maximum base salary for a position.
• The midpoint of the range is approximately halfway between the minimum and the maximum and represents an employee that possesses full job knowledge, qualifications and experience for the position.
• In the normal course, employees will be hired, transferred or promoted between the minimum and midpoint of the salary range for a job.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior