WHAT DOES A LEAD BUSINESS ANALYST DO?
Published: Jan 13, 2026 - The Lead Business Analyst oversees team development and performance while ensuring full compliance with internal policies and optimal allocation of analysts to client work. This role involves leading end-to-end business analysis activities, including conducting workshops, defining As-Is and To-Be processes, capturing and managing requirements, and supporting technical teams throughout solution design. The analyst also develops and maintains business analysis artefacts in tools such as Jira, Confluence, or Azure DevOps, ensuring clear traceability and continuous process optimisation.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Lead Business Analyst
1. Lead Business Analyst Additional Details
- Product Collaboration: Work with the on-site product owner to understand the product vision and product roadmap.
- Product Analysis: Understand and identify the product capabilities, features, and functions.
- Backlog Definition: Define epics, stories, and success criteria.
- Business Ownership: Be in charge of story elaboration, business logic, and business results.
- Scope Management: Manage the product scope and prioritise capabilities, epics, and stories.
- Sprint Review: Participate in sprint review demos and provide feedback.
- Feedback Management: Track feedback and ensure it is included in the backlog and prioritised.
- Incident Management: Participate in incident triaging.
2. Lead Business Analyst Details
- Business Transformation: Responsible for supporting projects to support a larger business process reengineering and transformation effort.
- Process Reengineering: Define and reengineer business processes and work streams.
- System Integration: Lead large-scale system replacement and integration efforts.
- Client Partnership: Become a trusted partner within the client environment.
- Stakeholder Communication: Optimise communications between business line and IT executives and stakeholders.
- Strategic Alignment: Drive strategic planning and cooperation between IT and the business lines.
- Change Implementation: Implement new success-driven approaches.
- Requirements Engineering: Gather requirements and perform use case development.
- Delivery Assurance: Assure major IT project deliverables fit within the strategic business processes.
3. Lead Business Analyst Duties
- Stakeholder Consultation: Consult with stakeholders to define project scope, striving.
- Solution Design: Create solutions that significantly improve the quality of the stakeholder's business operations.
- Requirements Documentation: Gather and document functional and non-functional requirements for support, projects, and enhancements.
- Technical Collaboration: Partner with the technical team to ensure proper understanding and build of documented requirements.
- System Configuration: Identify necessary software configurations and implement them.
- Meeting Facilitation: Facilitate effective meetings.
- Project Planning Input: Clearly identify the business analysis tasks as input into the project plan.
- Effort Estimation: Independently provide business analysis estimates for projects.
- Risk Identification: Identify project risks and issues.
- Issue Escalation: Communicate and escalate accordingly.
4. Lead Business Analyst Key Accountabilities
- Stakeholder Prioritisation: Partner with business stakeholders to prioritise issues.
- Scope Management: Recognise scope changes as they occur.
- Business Collaboration: Collaborate with the business to document and bring issues to management's attention.
- Team Mentoring: Mentor junior associates.
- Process Modelling: Create complex current and future state process flows.
- Test Planning: Prepare test plans, test scenarios, and test cases for end-to-end testing.
- Test Execution: Execute functional and end-to-end tests using pre-defined test cases.
- User Acceptance Testing: Participate in user acceptance testing.
- Deployment Support: Provide input into the deployment plan.
5. Lead Business Analyst Roles and Responsibilities
- Agile Product Ownership: Responsible for business analysis and agile product ownership across a variety of initiatives, with an initial focus on news services, news consumers, and video solutions.
- Requirements Definition: Take high-level epics and deliverables and work with product management teams to turn them into well-defined requirements and use cases.
- Service Architecture: Work with architecture to map these requirements and use cases across a collection of services, or define new services to meet the requirements.
- Dependency Management: Identify the dependencies that other technology and content teams have.
- Systems Analysis: Understand systems and products that systems interact with, investigate their interfaces and use cases to ensure the right services are provided for their applications and customers.
- Domain Expertise: Develop a deep understanding and act as an SME for consumers across media types for news, with a particular focus on text and video solutions.
- Backlog Refinement: Refine epics into user stories and acceptance criteria for scrum teams, working with product and/or UX teams to ensure the product vision is well understood ahead of sprints.
- Vendor Management: Work with external service providers for the delivery and ongoing support of platform components provided by third parties.
6. Lead Business Analyst Duties and Roles
- Information Architecture: Work with information architecture to enhance the information model to meet new customer needs.
- Product Collaboration: Work with product management.
- Knowledge Management: Ensure the knowledge base is kept in sync with new service and product releases.
- Data Analysis: Carry out data and content analysis to understand the impact and value of enriching content with new metadata and analytics services.
- Gap Analysis: Carry out gap analysis with product management.
- Portfolio Strategy: Help determine product portfolio strategies, for example, identifying strategic products approaching obsolescence plans.
- Agile Leadership: Champion an ever-improving agile delivery method across technical and product groups.
- Stakeholder Communication: Communicate clearly and concisely with a variety of stakeholders on the direction of the services and the status of deliveries.
7. Lead Business Analyst Responsibilities
- Stakeholder Engagement: Liaise with Heads of Operations, Science R&D and Commercial teams and their nominated representatives to understand and shape their process automation and application software/tool needs.
- Process Modelling: Create business process flow diagrams that capture the context for automation to a high standard, turning them into reusable documentation that can be used as references for further projects.
- Requirements Analysis: Analyse tool and application requirements in detail, gathering detailed requirements and documenting them using prevalent requirements documentation standards (user stories/Behaviour-driven Development).
- Business Case Development: Develop business cases and contribute to creating/detailing project proposal forms with relevant information, including risks/mitigation and effort/cost estimates, for Data infrastructure and IT application development/procurement projects.
- Vendor Evaluation: Research features of third-party applications and off-the-shelf software and software modules (such as ERP) and produce validation reports against stated requirements of internal stakeholders.
- Technical Guidance: Guide science-focused analysts, bioinformaticians and data engineers on optimal and fit-for-purpose ways of capturing requirements for data tool and algorithm development.
- Standards Development: Develop a robust set of Business Analysis standards and lead their implementation and adoption.
- Knowledge Transfer: Lead the knowledge transfer of Requirements to development teams.
- Agile Product Ownership: Participate in Agile development sprints as acting Product Owner, maintaining user story and feature backlogs and actively collaborating with business/science stakeholders in prioritising user stories and tasks for upcoming sprints.
- Sprint Facilitation: Lead sprint retrospectives and help business/science stakeholders identify improvements to be included in product backlogs and be considered for future sprints.
- Agile Leadership: Lead by example in the adoption of Agile methodologies and participate in the setup of tools (such as JIRA) for the management of requirements and the project process.
- Quality Assurance: Work with testing teams and business stakeholders to provide Quality Assurance, actively contributing to test plans, scripts and product testing cycles.
8. Lead Business Analyst Details and Accountabilities
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work cross-functionally with key business partners.
- Strategic Planning: Help establish strategic goals and objectives, project objectives, and set expectations on functional scope.
- Meeting Facilitation: Facilitate meetings with project stakeholders.
- Requirements Definition: Determine project and application requirements.
- Stakeholder Management: Manage stakeholder needs and expectations, and communicate effectively to ensure ongoing project progress visibility.
- Agile Governance: Attend daily scrums to ensure the project roadmap is on track and proper organisational alignment is in place.
- Scope Prioritisation: Determine a prioritisation of functional scope.
- Sprint Planning: Work with delivery teams to set agile sprint plans and release schedules.
- Backlog Management: Responsible for backlog grooming and reporting, defect management, and risk monitoring.
9. Lead Business Analyst Roles
- Business Analysis Leadership: Accountable for the business analysis functional area, utilising best practices and a standard business analysis methodology to be used within the project.
- Team Leadership: Provide leadership and direction for business analysts engaged in client-facing projects.
- Resource Management: Coordinate with the Practice Lead to determine resource allocations required to meet project demands, and adjust resource plans and assignments.
- Change Management: Adapt to project changes, ensuring staffing levels align with the project schedule and budget.
- Stakeholder Relationships: Effectively communicate with and develop and maintain excellent working relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
- Requirements Management: Lead the collection, review, and documentation of the client’s detailed requirements.
- Delivery Planning: Assist in the development of user stories, estimates, and work plans.
- Quality Collaboration: Collaborate with the test and QA team to verify that the solution is properly configured and extended to meet requirements.
- Client Trust Building: Build a high level of trust and confidence with partners and clients in the proposed solutions.
10. Lead Business Analyst General Responsibilities
- Stakeholder Analysis: Perform stakeholder analysis to identify impacted or influencing groups and stakeholder requirements and responsibilities.
- Estimation Planning: Develop plans and accurate estimates for completion of requirements, continuously improving the level of detail and accuracy of estimates.
- Risk Management: Manage risks, assumptions, and constraints for requirements, and communicate to appropriate parties.
- Analysis Approach: Define the business analysis approach, including tasks and deliverables, based on the project and delivery methodology.
- Requirements Facilitation: Facilitate collaborative sessions with large and diverse business stakeholder groups to drive requirements discovery, analysis, and review.
- Vendor Collaboration: Provide facilitation services to business stakeholders, including partnering with third-party vendors and assisting in the evaluation of third-party vendor solutions and requirements.
- Requirements Validation: Prepare, review, and support requirement validation and sign-off utilising a variety of facilitation and communication techniques.
- Coverage Analysis: Apply advanced coverage analysis techniques.
- End-to-End Traceability: Ensure the relationship between scope, detailed requirements, and testing through to implementation, and provide guidance and support to build the capabilities of intermediate business analysts.
11. Applications Business Analyst Lead Functions
- Requirements Leadership: Assume lead role in capturing detailed, system-agnostic business requirements for the full scope of technology initiatives.
- Discovery Facilitation: Lead discovery sessions with business partners.
- Use Case Analysis: Identify business scenario use cases for all in-scope process steps, including main and alternate flows with actors, goals, triggers, and pre- and post-conditions.
- Process Documentation: Lead team and one-on-one shadowing sessions to document the full context of each flow, including volume, frequency, duration, and concurrent activity.
- User Experience Design: Build storyboards of the user experience, capturing details of business information (data) and policy (rules) used in the context of flow steps.
- Team Mentoring: Mentor and train team members in business analysis best practices.
- Executive Communication: Present findings and recommendations to senior Beauty and Home PLM business partners, including Product Development, Packaging Development, Sourcing and Costing, Formula Development, Safety, Regulatory, Compliance, Product Testing, and Commercialisation.
- Cross-Functional Delivery: Work closely with application system analysts, operations and integrations, project management, testing centre of excellence (TCOE), and cross-functional MGTI team members to support application delivery initiatives.
- Effort Estimation: Provide effort estimates for business analysis in proposed initiatives.
12. Applications Business Analyst Lead Accountabilities
- Process Mapping: Facilitate sessions to document current business processes and design to-be processes (level 2 process maps).
- Requirements Communication: Communicate requirement details to other project resources, including systems analysts for packaged systems, QC teams, and training teams.
- Specification Review: Review functional specifications, ensuring that all details of the business processes and rules are included.
- Test Case Traceability: Initialise all test cases with traceability to business and functional requirements.
- Functional Testing: Perform functional testing to validate functionality and partner with QC teams for regression testing.
- User Acceptance Testing: Facilitate user acceptance testing and act as an escalation resource to determine whether reported issues are defects or business-correct behaviour.
- Change Enablement: Act as a change agent by assisting in business training execution and materials creation.
- Gap Analysis: Execute gap analysis and identify proactive ways to improve processes.
- Benefits Analysis: Conduct cost and benefit analysis and measure key success criteria of initiatives.
13. Lead Business Analyst Additional Details
- Stakeholder Engagement: Work with the client and internal end users to determine business needs and requirements.
- Objective Alignment: Understand stakeholder competing objectives and provide guidance on effective approaches to achieve project objectives.
- Reporting Analysis: Generate and compile reports based on findings, including probable causes and possible solutions to system issues.
- Decision Support: Meet with decision makers, systems owners, and end users.
- Requirements Definition: Define business, financial, and operations requirements and systems goals, and identify and resolve systems issues.
- Impact Analysis: Complete detailed analysis and impact assessments to deadlines, coordinating across multiple resources.
- Delivery Support: Support the Lead BA to ensure projects are implemented on time, within budget, and without impact to BAU.
- Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with Citi Operations and Technology teams to define accurate, complete, and fully documented requirements.
- Progress Reporting: Provide regular progress reporting to the Lead BA or Product Owner and key stakeholders.
14. Lead Business Analyst Tasks
- Operating Model Analysis: Ensure all aspects of existing target operating models are understood before plans are put in place.
- Stakeholder Coordination: Interact with key stakeholders to ensure requirements are met and operations are ready for new processes.
- Documentation Management: Ensure suitable documentation is produced to a high standard on all assigned work to support delivery and maintain a complete audit trail.
- Scope Definition: Facilitate the definition of project scope, goals, and deliverables.
- Approval Management: Initiate and obtain document sign-off with all impacted BAU areas, technology, and project teams.
- Project Planning Support: Assist with project plans.
- Delivery Tracking: Track project deliverables using appropriate tools.
- Progress Monitoring: Constantly monitor and report on project progress to all stakeholders.
- Status Reporting: Present reports defining project progress, problems, and solutions.
15. Lead Business Analyst Role Purpose
- Data Engineering: Design, create, and maintain recurring lead management ETLs, metrics, and reports.
- Predictive Modelling: Build data and ML models for lead prioritisation by working with operations and technology teams.
- Cloud Infrastructure: Leverage Amazon infrastructure and tools to improve back-end data sources for increased accuracy and simplicity.
- Process Automation: Identify areas of opportunity for automation and participate in strategic and tactical planning discussions.
- Data Storytelling: Effectively translate data into actionable insights and communicate them to key stakeholders and senior leadership.
- Performance Reporting: Support the design, development, and maintenance of ongoing performance metrics, reports, and dashboards to drive key business decisions.
- Cross-Functional Analysis: Collaborate with cross-country and cross-functional teams on analytical projects requiring data analysis.
- Executive Insights: Lead deep-dive analyses of business challenges and formulate conclusions and recommendations for senior leadership.
16. Lead Business Analyst Responsibilities
- Business Analysis: Create a detailed business analysis, outlining problems, opportunities, and solutions for the business.
- Problem Solving: Identify problems and opportunities within the business and provide solutions that help achieve business goals.
- Operational Analysis: Analyse the CSI organisation’s efficiency by studying its needs, business model, workflows, and technological systems.
- Technical Advisory: Make recommendations to the Head of Service Design in technical development projects to improve business efficiency.
- Design Governance: Ensure the solution and design process is adhered to during all phases of project delivery.
- Design Escalation: Provide an escalation point for design-related issues within projects.
- Team Leadership: Manage and mentor BAs in the team.
- Risk Management: Identify and communicate Information Assurance risks to the IAS Lead.
17. Lead Business Analyst Duties and Roles
- Solution Design: Create solutions that balance business requirements with information, user, and security requirements that are capable of being effectively managed in service.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Engage with relevant stakeholders.
- Impact Assessment: Provide understanding of the planned solution and identify possible impact on the service.
- Architecture Analysis: Describe the current architecture by investigating its components and how they are organised within a system.
- Systems Evaluation: Help the business evaluate existing systems and provide advice on meeting organisational requirements and future needs.
- Risk Identification: Identify risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies related to projects and their impact on the ongoing service model and processes.
- Communication Skills: Demonstrate strong communication skills with diverse audiences, along with strong critical thinking and analytical abilities.
- Security Risk Analysis: Identify risks associated with business processes, operations, information security programs, and technology projects.
18. Lead Business Analyst Roles and Details
- Team Development: Oversee the professional development of team members.
- Workforce Management: Manage joiners, movers, and leavers within a team.
- Resource Allocation: Ensure team members are assigned and optimally utilised on client billable work.
- Policy Compliance: Ensure team members comply with Capita policy, including mandatory training completion, time sheet management, and absence management expectations.
- People Management: Monitor and manage staff disciplinary, performance improvement, and health, safety, and environment needs as required.
- Process Planning: Develop the as-is and to-be planning business processes and identify pain points.
- Requirements Elicitation: Conduct user workshops and capture business requirements.
- Technical Support: Support the technical team in solutioning.
- Requirements Management: Manage the collection and traceability of business requirements.
- Service Optimisation: Analyse current services and processes and identify and implement opportunities to optimise them.
- Artefact Management: Manage business analysis artefacts in support of a cross-functional team using DevOps tools such as Jira, Confluence, or Azure DevOps.
- Requirements Modelling: Develop business-level requirements using methods such as epics, use cases, user stories, wireframes, requirements traceability matrices, and functional and non-functional requirements.
19. Lead Business Analyst Key Accountabilities
- Customer Communication: Responsible for customer communication.
- Expectation Management: Responsible for customer expectations management.
- Specification Ownership: Accountable for specifications (user stories) creation and review.
- Requirements Gathering: Responsible for business requirements gathering through capturing user stories, prototyping, etc.
- Process Analysis: Analyse as-is processes, identifying gaps and areas for improvement.
- UX Review: Accountable for UX designs reviewing.
- Sprint Prioritisation: Responsible for project scope prioritisation between sprints.
- Cybersecurity Requirements: Manage the development of detailed business requirements for on-premise and cloud-based cybersecurity technologies that drive desired outcomes and specify effective solutions across IT and OT.
- Performance Reporting: Manage the development, implementation, and improvement of efficient monitoring and reporting systems, and undertake or support post-implementation benefits realisation reviews of projects.
- Service Design Management: Manage the development and review of business processes, workflows, and service design documentation.
20. Lead Business Analyst Details and Accountabilities
- Team Mentoring: Responsible for mentoring and training direct reports.
- Process Organisation: Organise for maximum efficiency and productivity, adapting and iterating processes as the business grows and evolves.
- Team Contribution: Act as a multiplier for the team, sharing expertise and contributing to projects.
- Project Management: Use project management skills to increase the team's productivity and ensure the timely delivery of projects.
- Leadership Collaboration: Work in tandem with the manager to ensure the success of the team.
- Technology Awareness: Stay abreast of trends in the industry, implementing new technology.
- Vendor Management: Manage relationships with vendors.
- Journey Automation: Automate and integrate the entirety of end-to-end customer journeys.
- Journey Portfolio: Work on portfolios of customer journeys that span entire operating divisions.
- Customer Engagement: Define new ways for customers to engage using the latest technology.
- Service Redesign: Redesign the way services are designed and run to meet the above.
21. Lead Business Analyst Overview
- Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate with stakeholders and end-users to understand and gather requirements to develop the best solutions.
- Solution Design: Design based on high-level requirements at the program level and deliver end-to-end solutions.
- Detailed Analysis: Analyse requirements in depth, produce detailed designs, and help developers build solutions.
- Team Development: Develop and mentor developers and testers on domain knowledge.
- Strategic Contribution: Contribute to the strategic vision for building high-performance teams.
- Requirements Engineering: Collect, clarify, assess, and formalise business requirements for a product or ecosystem by proactively working with client stakeholders.
- Requirements Governance: Set up a sustainable requirements management process or assess and improve an existing one through clear recommendations.
- Backlog Management: Work with a product owner to form the product backlog, including creating or updating epics, features, stories, and tasks in JIRA.
- Cross-Team Coordination: Work with onsite and offshore product, business, and engineering teams and individual stakeholders.
- Quality Definition: Assist with defining acceptance criteria and test scenarios for product increments.
22. Lead Business Analyst Duties
- Solution Implementation: Responsible for understanding requirements and implementing innovative solutions.
- Operational Efficiency: Achieve operational efficiency using data management tools.
- Strategic Analytics: Lead and support strategic business initiatives focused on business intelligence and analytics by coordinating with internal and external stakeholders.
- Statistical Modelling: Responsible for the application of mathematical and statistical models to achieve desired objectives.
- Business Coordination: Responsible for continuous coordination with business users to monitor implementation effectiveness and provide feedback for improved model building.
- Analytics Innovation: Responsible for identifying new areas for analytics implementation and convincing users of the value of analytical projects.
- Performance Measurement: Define metrics to evaluate recommended opportunities and build reports and dashboards to measure performance.
- Insight Communication: Drive insights into program health and effectiveness across products, regions, and markets, and communicate key metrics and insights to partners and stakeholders.