Senior Business Analyst; Utilities

MAKE STRATEGY A REALITY | ACCELERATE YOUR GROWTH | CHOOSE YOUR PATH As the world’s leading change and transformation consultancy and delivery partner, we enable our clients to move from strategy to reality, taking a pragmatic, practical approach to delivering change that lasts. We’re seeking Senior Business Analysts and Business Analysts to help our utility clients deliver the digital, technology and organisation change across the AMP cycle.

* Please note, this is an initial 3-6 month contract that will require up to 3 days working on client site in Reading and may involve extensive travel to other sites.

You’ll join North Highland’s Energy & Utilities (E&U) practice, working with our UK water utility clients across the South of England analysing and shaping their multi-year transformation and change portfolios, delivered under managed service and consulting frameworks. The sector is delivering the biggest upgrades seen in a century — modernising assets, systems and ways of working to ensure essential water and waste services are provided.

These portfolios are delivered against the backdrop of the AMP 8 regulatory period and include various delivery modes:
Enterprise Programmes (core platform and technology replacement / modernisation, regulatory-driven programmes etc), Digital Delivery (Agile/hybrid programmes transforming customer journeys, operational decision-making, case management etc), Operational Change (targeted, “deploy and embed” initiatives affecting frontline populations), and Operating model change (people-led restructuring of how teams are organised, governed and held accountable). The portfolios span all core business units of water utilities — Water, Waste, Engineering, Asset Management, Supply Chains, Operations and Control Centres as well as enabling functions such as HR, Finance, Commercial and Procurement.

You’ll play a pivotal role working with stakeholders to translate their ambition and business needs into clear, actionable requirements and helping shape complex change and solutions. You’ll work closely not only with digital delivery teams but be at the heart of our client’s operations - field operatives, control room staff, asset planners, customer operations and compliance teams to ground solutions in operational and regulatory reality.

• Lead requirements elicitation and definition through workshops (often multi-disciplinary), interviews, site visits, job shadowing and document analysis; translate outcomes into high-quality artefacts (epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, use cases and walkthroughs).
• Map current-state (AS-IS) and future-state (TO-BE) processes; identify gaps and cross-functional handoffs across value streams and client operations.
• Highlight constraints driven by regulation, safety and asset criticality, producing evidence-based documentation suitable for assurance and audit.
• Support operating model and workforce change analysis — roles and process impacts, decision rights, governance and handoffs so solutions land effectively across teams.
• Analyse data flows, data needs and core use cases; capture end-to-end customer and operational journey requirements to support service design, prioritisation and delivery readiness.
• Maintain end-to-end traceability from business objectives through requirements to delivered outcomes, managing changes through appropriate change control.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Change and Ops to ensure requirements are understood, testable and deliverable, supporting UAT readiness and implementation cutover where needed.

• Proven Business Analyst experience in utilities/water, or other closely regulated operational environments (power, telecoms, infrastructure, transport,…