Team focus
Your SRA talks to the Business Analysis team about what’s keeping them busy in and out of work
Top row, left to right: Waq Hussain, David Hay, Tashan Smith. Bottom row, left to right: Sarah Teece, Laura Chin-See, Rebecca Donohoe, Diane Morgan
Tell us about the team
The Business Analysis (BA) team is a small team of seven who are part of the wider Business Improvement team. Head of Business Analysis Diane Morgan works out of both our Cardiff and Birmingham offices. Senior Business Analysts David Hay, Rebecca Donohoe and Sarah Teece, and Business Analysts Laura Chin-See, Melissa Green, Waqar Hussain and Tashan Smith can all be found, on their office days, in The Cube. Melissa recently gave birth to a beautiful baby girl and is currently on family leave, and Tashan joined us from the Contact Centre at the beginning of June.
We get involved in a wide range of activities, with our core function being to support change and improvement work by analysing the impacts of changes. We work together with project managers, colleagues from ICT and different areas of the business to map processes, gather requirements, and support the implementation of change through the project lifecycle.
What have you been working on?
We are involved in several key projects including:
- the practising certificate renewal exercise re-platforming
- keeping of the roll
- financial penalties
- Investigation and Enforcement improvements
- topic modelling
- multifactor authentication
- firm diversity data
- the sanctions data gathering exercise (among others!).
We also support ad-hoc process mapping and data changes to our customer relationship management systems (CRM). There’s never a dull moment in the BA team!
What’s coming up for the team this year?
A key focus in the next six months is our continuous improvement (CI) training programme, which kicked off in April 2023. All the business analysts in the team are participating in the lean six sigma yellow belt course, where they’ll learn tools and techniques to solve real business problems using data. They are joined by colleagues from the wider Business Improvement team and some operational areas. All the participants will be doing small CI projects in their areas over the next five months. We’ll keep you posted on the Business Improvement Community.
What do you do to relax and unwind outside of work?
We like to relax in a bunch of different ways. Diane, Sarah, and Waq love spending time outdoors, and Becky loves reading and exercising. Laura enjoys walking her dog Milo – they’ve recently completed the Standup to Cancer walkies challenge! David loves travelling. Tashan says he’s most at peace when he’s DJing or listening to music. One thing we all have in common is spending time with family.
What's your dream holiday destination?
Diane would like to go anywhere with tropical waters and coral reefs as she enjoys diving and snorkelling. Mauritius and Malaysia are on her bucket list! David is working his way through the 50 states and has only Louisiana, Alaska and Hawaii left to go!
Rebecca would like to visit Japan and Waq has always wanted to go to Dubai. He has passed through it several times but hasn’t yet got to spend any time there. Sarah would love to go back to Lapland during the winter months to go husky sleighing and see Father Christmas, or visit Monaco during the summer to watch the Grand Prix.
Both Laura and Tashan would like to go to Jamaica. Laura’s parents were born there and she’d love to go back for the beaches and food. Tashan would love to go there to visit the town where his grandad was born, which happens to be the same one Bob Marley grew up in.