Julia Dixon

Senior Business Analyst with 15+ years' experience working across complex, large-scale transformation programmes operating under regulatory, legislative and contractual scrutiny in both public sector and private enterprise. Comfortable stepping into environments where scope is unclear, stakeholder expectations are divergent and delivery pressure is high — and bringing the structure, rigour and collaborative approach needed to move from ambiguity to a clear, shared understanding of what needs to be built and why. Experienced operating at both programme and workstream level: defining how analysis should be approached, coordinating BA activity across parallel initiatives, running agile ceremonies and maintaining momentum across discovery, requirements, design and delivery.

Strong background in stakeholder engagement and facilitation across business and technology functions, with a track record of translating policy, operational needs and technical constraints into well-documented, prioritised, deliverable requirements.

Senior Business/Data Analyst (Contract) at Asset Data and Health — Scottish Water (2024-01 – Present)

Defined and managed the analysis approach for a portfolio of data improvement initiatives, maintaining a paint-point register and a structured backlog, evaluating individual requests from feasibility and business value perspectives, and tracking delivery against improvement targets.

• Facilitated cross-functional workshops to elicit, clarify and reconcile requirements across multiple asset owner groups, using a solution-agnostic approach to ensure deliverables reflected genuine need.
• Translated stakeholder requirements into structured business cases for system and process change initiatives, quantifying expected impact and presenting to senior management to secure approval and funding.
• Applied data analysis to validate delivered improvements and track measurable efficiency gains, providing evidence of business value realised post-implementation.
• Contributed to the development of new analytical capabilities: identified emerging asset health signals through empirical data exploration and translated them into repeatable metrics; utilised AI-driven tools for data extraction, enabling scalable data enrichment of corporate systems from previously untapped unstructured sources.
• Supported business readiness activities for a large-scale data platform migration: coordinated stakeholder sign-off, performed migration validation and post-migration integrity assurance.

Continuous Improvement Business Analyst (Contract) at Disability Services — Scottish Government (2023-01 – 2024-12)

Scoped, sourced and analysed operational data to identify process limitations and bottlenecks; produced as-is and to-be process maps, documented root causes and proposed optimisation solutions.

• Coordinated release planning activities; produced pre-release communications tailored to diverse audiences and conducted awareness sessions for new functionality launches, supporting business readiness across the programme.
• Defined performance measures for significant process improvements and facilitated their adoption by Operations; tracked post-implementation performance to validate efficiency gains and investigated anomalies. Maintained productive working relationships across multiple internal and third-party development teams.
• Supported an ERP transition project with subject matter expertise on business-critical payment processes; performed data cleaning, transformation and transaction reconciliation, and liaised with technical architects and data engineers to address integration pain-points.

Agile Product Lead / Senior Business Analyst (Contract) at Child Disability Payment — Scottish Government (2019-01 – 2023-12)

Led end-to-end agile delivery of a complex digital benefit administration platform (IBM SPM), owning requirements elicitation, documentation and traceability across the full lifecycle. Translated high-level policy and legislation into feature-level user stories and acceptance criteria, reconciling conflicting needs across policy, operations and technology.

• Owned and maintained the programme product backlog; led regular refinement sessions, aligning prioritisation to programme objectives and ensuring incremental delivery met user needs, regulatory standards and contractual obligations.
• Evaluated solution options and organised multi-disciplinary workshops for complex development aspects. Maintained short- and medium-term delivery plans and a full RAID log.
• Acted as stand-in Scrum Master when required: facilitated Scrum ceremonies — sprint planning, daily stand-ups, retrospectives and show and tells — across parallel workstreams; removed delivery blockers and provided progress updates to the wider business.
• Served as primary point of contact for external partner engagement: facilitated workshops to establish common practices, presented at multi-organisational governance checkpoints, and channelled cross-organisational queries to appropriate resolution routes.
• Engaged across all aspects of testing: reviewed and signed off SIT scenarios, provided domain knowledge support to test teams, coordinated UAT with end users, and managed post-go-live hyper-care and defect triage.

Senior Product Manager / Senior Business Analyst at Amazon.co.uk (2008-01 – 2018-12)

Led a large-scale cross-functional programme delivering a radically improved contact-handling system and guided decision-making framework, realising $90M in operational savings in year one. Led multiple further cross-regional initiatives delivering $3M–$20M in efficiency and risk savings.

• Designed and operationalised a resource planning model for seasonal labour intake, delivering successful labour cost management in peak trading periods.
• Owned MI and analytics delivery across multiple programmes: developed and maintained delivery roadmaps, translated senior stakeholder asks into prioritised delivery plans, and prepared business cases to secure resource allocation.
• Established data quality controls, early-warning monitoring and UAT protocols; conducted a cross-regional audit and rationalisation of reporting tools, improving consistency and adherence to data governance standards.
• Led a major reporting platform migration: gathered and documented functional requirements and technical specifications, documented data flows and integration points, coordinated with data engineering teams, and performed data integrity and migration validation testing.
• Managed and mentored a team of three product analysts, providing technical guidance and analytical oversight.

MSc in Data Science – University of Edinburgh (2018-01 – 2019-12)

BA (Hons) in Business Studies – University of North London (1999-01 – 2002-12)