Business Consulting Senior Specialist

This is a hybrid role requiring employees to work onsite three (3) days per week. The position is currently based in Franklin, WI. For awareness, all employees currently located in the Franklin office are expected to relocate to Northwestern Mutual's Corporate Office in downtown Milwaukee, WI, at some point during 2027.

As a Business Process Senior Specialist, you'll be called upon to think strategically. You'll work across functions and/or departments to understand the needs of the business, facilitating relationships between business clients and technical resources. With a focus on addressing business processes and the underlying systems that support those processes, you will identify options, work to gain consensus on approach, develop requirements and related business rules, and work closely with business unit and technology subject matter experts to implement solutions for solving complex business challenges.

Confident, persuasive, and persistent, you will negotiate and communicate with business clients, vendors, and field-based employees to ensure expectations are managed and critical objectives are addressed. Upon solution implementation, you will drive organizational change management activities to promote adoption of the change and minimize impact to people and processes.

• Accountable to investigate, articulate and prioritize issues, coordinate resolution and/or workarounds in order to support the operations or respond to service requests.
• Accountable for eliciting, analyzing, representing and validating business needs to create requirements in order to achieve business objectives.
• Identifies options in order to meet business requirements.
• May work independently on small projects or as part of a team on larger efforts.
• Accountable for identifying, understanding and documenting the current state, opportunities for improvement and future state business processes in order to meet business objectives.
• May include problem definition, cost benefit analysis and options analysis.
• Accountable for identifying and coordinating client acceptance testing, client training and communication needs in order to ensure successful implementations.
• Accountable for providing information and analysis for the business including ad-hoc reporting and measures and metrics in order to support the business decision making process.
• Accountable for coordinating Organizational Change Management activities in order to promote adoption of the change and minimize impacts to people and processes.

• Bachelor's degree with an emphasis in MIS, Business or related field; or related work experience beyond the minimum required
• Four or more years of experience/knowledge of business operations/processes to include analysis, design, documentation, using industry best practices and standards
• Demonstrated flexibility to adjust to changing business needs by effectively managing and prioritizing concurrent assignments
• Demonstrated ability to identify and resolve critical issues through effective problem solving skills.
• Strong ability to develop and leverage relationships; ability to effectively influence and negotiate with internal and external partners
• Excellent communication skills focused on facilitation of meetings; ability to deliver informative, well-organized documentation and presentations and ability to effectively communicate in difficult and sensitive situations

• Analytical Thinking (NM) - Discuss the level of analysis needed to identify underlying process issues and support data-informed recommendations.
• Continuous Improvement (NM) - Clarify expectations for identifying opportunities, implementing feedback, and measuring impact.
• Documentation (NM) - Confirm…