HELEN HOLDER

As the Lead Business Analyst for Prisons Digital I have overall responsibility for the BA capability across the department and, as part of the Senior Leadership Team, provide BA consultancy to strategic initiatives. Key activities include:

• Collaboration with other senior leadership roles to develop and deliver the strategy for replacement of legacy technology within Prisons Digital.
• Oversight of analysis activities across multiple digital product delivery teams in order to ensure alignment to strategic objectives and support smooth workflow.
• Assessment of prioritisation and risk factors associated in order to guide effective business decisions and mitigate potential issues.
• A focus on root causes of complex business challenges in order to ensure the correct problems are addressed.
• Analysis of current business operations with a view towards identifying areas requiring change or improvement.

Working as part of a Strategic Delivery group, this role involved providing support to the organisation in their strategic objective to remove dependency on legacy IT systems and replace them with modern digital products. Key activities included:

• Working with leads in the Product Management, Portfolio Management, Delivery Management and User Centred Design disciplines to develop strategy, manage communications, develop metrics, forecasting and reporting models, contribute to roadmap development and produce analysis outputs that help to inform decisions as to the approach and tactics applied in relation to the strategy
• Working in collaboration with multi-disciplinary agile product teams to support discovery, ensure alignment to strategy and provide directed analysis in response to identified problems
• Trained as a Government Digital Standard (GDS) assessor to support Justice Digital in evaluating products as they pass from Alpha to Beta and into live service
• Run a monthly BA forum for Business Analysts working across the digital prisons domain to encourage knowledge sharing and collaborative problem solving
• Development of core reporting metrics around legacy replacement using a balance business scorecard approach
• Creation of artefacts that helped to solidify understanding of the current state and provide a basis for gap analysis, future roadmaps and forecasting
• Provided analysis and recommendations on accelerating programme delivery and contributed to both the Business Case and commercial procurement activity required to progress this

As the head of the Business Analysis, User Research and Business Relationship Management capabilities within the Chief Information Office (CIO) I led a team consisting of 2 Senior BAs, 2 BAs, 3 User Researchers, 3 Business Relationship Managers and additional contract resources as required. Key activities were:

• Responsibility for building long term relationships with high level customer and supplier representatives and using feedback from stakeholders to establish new business needs or improve services
• Owner of the Change Front Door process for the DIO Chief Information Office and chair of the Change Triage which reviews change requests coming into the department
• Chair of the Technical Customer Services Committee and BA Community of Practice
• Development and implementation of a BA Service Framework which included standardised procedures and documentation for situational investigation, feasibility assessment and the capture and analysis of user requirements which included a review and redesign of the BA function to provide a more flexible and scalable model to support Agile ways of working
• Implementation of BA and BRM Capability and development of annual roadmaps to drive continuous improvement and ensure alignment to departmental strategies and goals
• Lead BA for several major technology projects including the Asset Information Management Common Data Environment with experience of working within both waterfall and Agile project frameworks and competent in the use of a variety of BA tools and methodologies e.g Process modelling techniques to depict As-Is/To-Be scenarios, User Journeys to understand and improve customer experience, User Stories, Context diagrams, Use Case Models and many more

Key activities and achievements:

• Acted as the Lead BA heading up a team of internal analysts and supplier consultants in the final implementation phase of the DIO Infrastructure Management System (IMS)
• Further delivery of several iterative change programmes aimed at enhancing existing capability delivered in previous releases of the DIO IMS
• Use of modelling techniques to communicate changes to business processes or to highlight opportunities for process optimisation
• Stakeholder identification and management to ensure effective communication and engagement strategies were in place across all change initiatives.
• Implemented a Change Request Triage forum to support the allocation and progression of IT requests and to facilitate information sharing and collaboration across the wider IT business area

• Responsibility for the strategic development and maintenance of the NABIS database and communication of change to end users, business management team and IT functions across all Police forces within England and Wales
• Liaison with third party development team to communicate required change and oversee development lifecycle from requirements engineering through to User Acceptance Testing and release
• Responsible for the development and delivery of training of the database and any changes delivered through new releases to UK police forces in England, Wales and Scotland as well as Forensic Suppliers
• Management of general system administration processes such as account management, first line user support etc
• Presentations to senior Police Officers and Staff in relation to the NABIS database
• Managed 7 major functionality releases from Discovery phases through to deployment into a Live environment
• Managed numerous minor system releases as part of continuous improvement of functionality
• Implementation and management of a live time quality assessment and reporting process aimed at improving integrity of data within NABIS database