Full Time Permanent Position in Edmonton, AB
As a business analyst, your primary responsibility will be research and discovery that drives business, customer, and technical insight. You will work closely with clients, their customers, and others using interviews, workshops, and other methods to develop understanding of both the big picture and the details. You will use this insight to develop clear vision, requirements, and functional design for client systems. Your work will create the foundation for successful projects, and you will be responsible for activities and deliverables such as documenting requirements, creating process flows, use cases, and reports. You will work closely with others on the team to develop concrete plans and prototypes based on the discovery work conducted by yourself and others.
Most importantly, you will work with clients, their users, and nForm colleagues to understand, define, and solve problems to create business and user value through designing fantastic user experiences.
Excellent interpersonal skills are required for client-facing engagements. As a boutique firm, you’ll be called on to serve in a variety of roles – flexibility and the ability to tackle new challenges are important. In particular, adopting a value-centered design approach will be important for your ongoing contribution to the company and our clients.
Qualifications
Skillset
- Strong analytical and architectural portfolio including things like requirements, scenarios, use cases, process flows, reports, and presentations
- Great inter-personal skills for teamwork and client-facing activity
- Experience facilitating workshops and other group work
- Fluent with Visio, Omingraffle or other diagramming tool
- Ability to model process flow and other structural components of system
- Ability to show ideas visually
- Ability to write clearly so that you can communicate your ideas
- Some familiarity with back and front end web technology, such as J2EE, .NET, Relational Databases, Object Oriented Code, Web Services, HTML, CSS, (you won’t be coding, but your designs need to be feasible, and you need to be able to speak to technical requirements and communicate with development teams)
- Web 2.0 awareness (from acronyms like RSS and RIA to your own thoughts on social software)
Mindset
- Ability to listen and take direction
- Ability to learn new skills, both with guidance and on your own
- Ability to work independently
- Keen interest in the craft of user experience; making systems work better for people takes priority over technical elegance
History
Minimum 2+ years of experience dedicated to a business analysis role or similar job function. We will consider candidates with significantly more experience as well. Your portfolio, process, and mindset trump both formal education and previous jobs, though we appreciate good schools and good work.
Compensation
- Salary reflective of experience, plus benefits to start. Salary review at 6 months, 1 year, and then annually
- Signing bonus for the right employee
- Relocation assistance for the right employee
- Participation in employee bonus program
- 3 weeks vacation, plus an additional week of paid personal time off (for running errands, medical appointments, waiting at home for the cable guy to show up, or watching your kid’s afternoon school production)
- Participation in employee professional development program
Some compensation isn’t about money or benefits. We’re all here because we like working with an experienced, smart team that not only serves great clients, but also influences the practice of user experience across industry. In the last year and a half, nForm has spoken at the Chilean IA Retreat, the Government Marketing Workshop, DigitalNow 2007, UX Week, UPA 2007, the IA Summit 2007 & 2008, the German IA Conference, the Italian IA Summit, Northern Voice, with upcoming appearances at UPA 2008, and others. We host our own Canadian User Experience workshop, CanUX, every year in Banff.
It’s not just events. We regularly blog and write articles, we co-founded the IA Institute, and we’re thrilled to announce that company principal Gene Smith has recently published a book, titled Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web.
How to Apply
Email your resume (Word or PDF) and link to your online portfolio to Yvonne Shek, at careers@nform.ca. If we’re going to go ahead with an interview, we’ll let you know within a week. Unfortunately we can’t respond to everyone who applies, so if you haven’t heard from us in a week, we’re probably looking for a different skillset.
I realize that I sit on the Board of Directors for the MEIC and on the Board of Advisors for NextMedia, however, I didn’t know about this great partnership and opportunity. It’s a contest focused on taking early concepts for tablet computing and media consumption, the goal isn’t to build the technology, it’s to get people to sketch and explore new opportunities enabled by mass penentration of tablets.