Job: Manager BA / QA

Jobing Description

Manager BA / QA SLD July 2011

Department: SLD IT

Direct Reporting Line: SLD Head of IT

Indirect/Secondary Reporting Line: N/A

Subsidiary/Country: Sports Licensed Division -- USA

Location: Indianapolis

GSMS Grade: M3

Personnel Managed: BA & QA staff

The Quality Assurance (QA) and Business Analyst (BA) Manager will have demonstrated project management and process improvement experience that will drive the successful delivery of our technology initiatives through solid requirements, process definition and testing efforts. Oversees the development, implementation, control, and distribution of all Requirements and Quality Assurance / Testing practices, standards, methodologies, and metrics. Leads practices necessary to produce quality products/services and manage risk. Helps to establish standards to be universally applied throughout the site and recommends improvements. Supports BA and QA staff programs or projects. Ensures processes focus consistently on 'best practices' to ensure quality assurance objectives are maintained.

Monitors staff training initiatives and development to ensure quality support is maintained. Ensures staff monitoring is conducted, completed, and tracked in agreement with senior/site management expectations. Reviews status of initiatives and collaborates with other IT managers to ensure objectives are being attained. Assists in planning and estimation of requirements, process definition and testing support for new programs and projects. Schedules and prioritizes work and activities to meet target schedule, quality, scope, and cost objectives. The manager will have staff responsibilities including employee relations, performance, career development and reviews.

* Oversee requirements gathering efforts using interviews, document analysis, requirements workshops, surveys, site visits, business process descriptions, use cases, scenarios, business analysis, task and workflow analysis.
* Critically evaluate information gathered from multiple sources, reconcile conflicts, decompose high-level information into details, abstract up from low-level information to a general understanding, and distinguish user requests from the underlying true needs.
* Proactively communicate and collaborate with external and internal customers to analyze information needs and functional requirements and deliver the following artifacts as needed: (Functional requirements (Business Requirements Document), Technical requirements, Use Cases, GUI, Screen and Interface designs)
* Utilize experience in using enterprise-wide requirements definition and management systems and methodologies required.
* Successfully engage in multiple initiatives simultaneously
* Drive and challenge business units on their assumptions of how they will successfully execute their plans
* Strong analytical and product management skills required, including a thorough understanding of how to interpret customer business needs and translate them into application and operational requirements and subsequent test scenarios.
* Excellent verbal and written communication skills and the ability to interact professionally with a diverse group, executives, managers, and subject matter experts.
* Collaborate with developers and subject matter experts to establish the technical vision and analyze tradeoffs between usability and performance needs.
* Quickly understands the business issues and challenges within the organization and industry.
* Identify ongoing opportunities and approaches for automating functional business processes. Work with business users to initiate improvement programs and enhancements in Business Process as well as other Operations functions.
* Proven history of implementing testing process/methodology, including in depth understanding of QA and SDLC processes, testing tools (defect tracking, requirements gathering, automation, performance, etc), manual testing and scripting
* Manage the requirements and testing team, operational techniques and activities that are used to fulfill requirements for software quality. Work collaboratively with software development mangers and the business unit testers to define quality standards and plans in order to achieve stable, high quality releases.
* Put together a plan for future testing, including areas for development, hardware/lab requirements, and staffing requirements, to obtain specific results.
* Ensure test conformance of software products to unit, functional, regression, protocol/interoperability and user interface standards.
* Management of the Test Team, which is responsible for Design, development, implementation, and monitoring of testing throughout the plan, build, and operate life cycle based on industry standards and best practices. This includes Test Strategy, Test Plans and test execution.
* Collaborate with Portfolio Planning and IT Project Management Office to align requirements and testing staff based upon capacity to support work efforts and project demand.
* Provide strong oversight to deliver consistency and quality in all work efforts, thereby institutionalizing testing processes.
* Prepare and publish testing metrics and dashboards.
* Ensure designs are implemented as defined, with reverse modeling to effective implementation of recommended solutions, ensuring traceability between requirements and test cases
* Ongoing staff skill development and team development (PEP, career development, compensation planning, mentoring &
succession planning)
* Establishment of one on one sessions with directs with goals of understanding project assignments and workloads as well as providing coaching and feedback towards career development.; Establishment of periodic team meetings
* Create and execute test scenarios and test cases
* Test Manager willing to perform hands-on test lead role when needed for smaller programs.

Education/Qualifications

Required:

* BS/BA degree or equivalent higher educational certification
* 5-7 years experience in IT management
* 5+ years of project management experience in IT applications
* 5+ years of experience in using enterprise-wide requirements definition, testing and management systems and methodologies required including: Functional requirements, technical requirements, Use Cases, systems design documentation, traceability matrices, defect tracking and testing automation.
* Solid understanding of IT systems and development methodologies
* Experience with business process mapping and data modeling ability to understand, decipher and map out process and data flows clearly / story- board

Preferred:

* Advanced degree or certification
* Knowledge of the manufacturing or apparel industry
* Understanding and application of enterprise architecture
* Understanding and application of information security and risk control requirements

Competencies

Communication Skills; Decision Making; Listening; Leadership; Presentations; Conflict Resolution; Negotiation; Organization Change Management; Strategic Thinking and Project Management; Strong analytical skills; Proven problem solving ability