Neil Johnston

I am a professional business analyst (CBAP, 2019), with a wealth of experience working in organisations at sites world-wide, successfully delivering changes which benefit the organisation and their consumers.

My career began in the defence sector as a software developer, which initiated my experience of analysis, design, testing and project management. Subsequent roles introduced me to the wide scope of work which a business analyst can be involved in across the whole project lifecycle.

I now use my skills to quickly understand an organisations strategic goals; then collaborate with business stakeholders and technical specialists, to help steer business change on the agreed, successful course.

I am a key member of the strategic ‘Digital Architecture’ team, working with the IT Director to provide options to the executive in relation to IT cost reduction and potential future shape of the IT landscape. Key to this was gathering together information detailing the 100’s of applications in use and aligning them with Business and Application Capability Matrices.

This is in parallel operational BA work in delivery of operational improvements and chang-projects.

BA tasks within the last 12 months:

Stakeholder Management: needs gathering, progress reporting, benefits workshop, stakeholder review/sign-off, project activity co-ordination, problem solving.

Project Management: analysis planning, mentor/coach junior members of staff, vendor relationship, requirements documentation, requirement traceability, hand-off to test management.

Requirement Gathering: user stories, formal & informal interviews, brainstorm, workshop, risk identification, Integration requirements and mapping.

Problem Analysis: root-cause, cause-effect, gap & bottleneck analysis, impact analysis.

Process Analysis: Process mapping (as-is and to-be), process improvement & re-engineering; process automation.

Change Management: Options paper, change planning, change requests.

Beng Computer Engineering.