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These are exciting times at the Department for Education. We are transforming to become a user centred organisation, delivering better outcomes for all our users through agile and iterative software development and continuous improvement.

You will work with user researchers, product managers, designers, business analysts, delivery managers and content specialists as part of a multi-disciplinary team to directly deliver better outcomes for users. You will innovate to radically transform how public services are delivered and improved.

Read more about software development on the DfE Digital blog.

Business architect

As a business architect, you will work with roles such as business strategists, policy leads and product owners plus Enterprise, Solution and Technical Architects, to ensure business strategies align with operational and technological capabilities, working either within or across delivery portfolios. You will support the development and deployment of business architecture in your team and the wider organisation. You will also support and guide other business architects.

The role

A business architect uses their extensive knowledge and experience to address business scenarios, creating business capability maps, value streams, business models, organisation and information maps to facilitate the understanding of what a business does and how a business operates with the goal of improving business functions delivering value for their organisation and users.

A business architect communicates the issues and recommends next steps creating and overseeing the development of business architecture artifacts and aligning business goals with Technology strategies.

Your main responsibilities will include:

  • Supporting executive level work and managing the business architecture practice
  • Guiding others in using appropriate business architectural tools and methods
  • Understanding and applying business architectural principles, techniques, and tools to business scenarios
  • Creating business architecture artefacts, including abstract representations of the organisation, and knowing when to apply them
  • Developing standard and scalable models to collect, aggregate, or disaggregate complex information

Skills you need

It is essential that you can demonstrate the following skills and experience in your application and at the first stage interview:

  • Applying and developing business architecture frameworks, principles and techniques in an organisation
  • Advising and guiding an organisation to inform the implementation of its strategy
  • Sharing the value of business architecture with an organisation
  • Producing clear multidimensional views of an organisation to support decision making
  • Providing advice and recommendations to stakeholders based on your significant specialist knowledge and experience
  • Leading the definition of guidance and informing how an organisation approaches delivery
  • Making decisions characterised by medium levels of risk and complexity, and recommending decisions as risk and complexity increase
  • Building consensus between services or independent stakeholders

In addition, the following essential criteria will also need to be demonstrated at the second interview stage. You will need to show that you can:

  • Mediate between people and mend relationships, communicating with stakeholders at all levels
  • Manage stakeholder expectations and host or moderate discussions about high risk and complexity, even within constrained timescales
  • Speak on behalf of and represent the community to large audiences inside and outside of government
  • Build capability in methods and tools, ensuring they are adopted consistently and used effectively
  • Influence stakeholders and manage relationships effectively
  • Build long-term strategic relationships and communicate clearly and regularly with stakeholders
  • Demonstrate a good understanding of business issues, events and activities, and their short to long term impact
  • Support defining principles, patterns, standards, policies, roadmaps and vision statements
  • Effectively focus on outcomes rather than solutions
  • Help to develop, maintain or update strategy in response to feedback and findings
  • Define strategies and policies, providing guidance to others on working in the strategic context
  • Evaluate current strategies to ensure business requirements are being met and exceeded where possible

It is desirable that you demonstrate the following:

  • Experience of business analysis
  • Experience of systems thinking abilities, seeing the big picture
  • Advanced listening and interrogating skills, asking questions to extract valuable business information

Please note that desirable criteria will only be considered to make an informed decision in the event of a tie.

Selection process

Application

Candidates should complete the advertised Civil Service Jobs application by submitting a completed application form and CV, explaining how they meet the essential criteria specified under the Selection Criteria heading in the advert.

CV details need to be included in the template within the application form which is accessible through the Civil Service Jobs advert. Emailed CVs will not be considered.

Sift

Applications will be sifted by a panel who will look further at the evidence provided. The CV will be assessed in-line with the essential criteria listed in the advert.

Depending on the number of candidates who meet the minimum pass mark at sift, you may be invited to a first stage interview.

First stage interview

Longlisted candidates may be invited to attend a preliminary interview, which will be conducted via telephone, typically involving a commitment of up to 1 hour. The interview will consist of a series of questions to further assess the essential criteria listed in this advert.

As interviews will be conducted via telephone, please ensure that you are in a suitable location to hear and answer the questions.

If successful, candidates will then be invited to a second interview, which will be conducted via a video call.

Second stage interview

At this interview, candidates will be asked to provide evidence of the essential skills, specified as being assessed at the second stage interview, under the Selection Criteria heading.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview.