Lead RPA Business Analyst — Operating Model & Automation Advisory
Location: Onsite — Houston, TX / Canonsburg, PA
automation is the right instrument.
Role Summary
We are seeking a senior Business Analyst who operates as a process redesign consultant rather than a requirements scribe. The individual will baseline how work is actually performed, quantify where cost and cycle time accumulate, design a defensible target state, and only then define what should be automated — sequencing redesign ahead of build so that automation locks in an improved process rather than an inherited one.
Credibility with the business is the core competency. This person must be able to sit across from a Tower Operations lead, a Land Management director, or a Revenue Assurance controller, tell them their process contains steps that no longer earn their keep, and be believed — because the claim is grounded in transaction volumes, exception data, control requirements, and a clear-eyed view of what the process exists to protect.
Domain Areas in Scope
Redesign work will concentrate on the process families that carry the highest manual load in a tower-only operating model:
- Tower asset lifecycle: application intake, structural analysis, permitting, notice-to-proceed, construction close-out, and as-built data capture.
- Colocation & amendment workflows: carrier applications, capacity checks, pricing approvals, and contract execution against Master Lease Agreements.
- Land & ground lease administration: lease abstraction, escalations, renewals, easements, payment accuracy, and landowner correspondence.
- Revenue assurance & billing integrity: lease-to-invoice reconciliation, amendment-to-billing lag, churn and termination processing, and dispute resolution.
- Network sourcing & vendor operations: supplier onboarding, purchase requisition-to-pay, field vendor invoicing, and spend data quality.
- Asset data integrity: reconciliation across CRM, ERP, ServiceNow, GIS, and asset-of-record systems, where duplicated or contradictory records are the root cause of downstream exceptions.
Key Responsibilities
Baseline the Real Process, Not the Documented One
- Establish a factual as-is baseline: volumes, handoffs, cycle time, touch time, rework rate, and cost-to-serve per transaction type.
- Use process mining, task mining, system logs, and ticket data to evidence what actually happens, and reconcile that evidence against what stakeholders describe.
- Quantify the gap between designed process and performed process — the workarounds, shadow spreadsheets, and informal approvals that carry real volume.
- Identify the small number of variants that carry the majority of transactions, and treat the long tail explicitly rather than by omission.
Design the Target State
- Produce a to-be process design that eliminates, consolidates, or re-sequences activity before any automation is scoped.
- Distinguish rigorously between steps that exist to satisfy a control, a regulation, a contract term, or a customer commitment — and steps that exist because someone once added them.
- Redesign the control environment alongside the process: propose where a preventive control replaces a detective one, and where a manual review can be retired without accepting unmanaged risk.
- Push standardization decisions to the accountable process owner, with the trade-offs made explicit and the decision documented.
- Model the target operating model implications — role changes, span of control, capacity release, and where released capacity is expected to land.
Build the Case, and Make It Hold Up
- Construct a benefits case with a stated baseline, an explicit measurement method, and a named owner accountable for realization.
- Separate hard savings from capacity release and from avoided cost, and refuse to present them as interchangeable.
- Present benefit estimates with ranges and stated assumptions, and be prepared to defend them under scrutiny from Finance.
- Establish a post-implementation measurement plan before build begins, so that realized benefit can be tested rather than asserted.
Sequence Automation Correctly
- Determine the right instrument for each redesigned process: policy change, system configuration, integration, RPA, intelligent document processing, agentic AI, or no intervention at all.
- Reject automation candidates where the underlying process is unstable, the data is unreliable, or the upstream system is scheduled for change.
- Translate the redesigned to-be process into automation-ready specifications with maximum straight-through processing and a defined, bounded exception path.
RPA & Automation Solution Enablement
- Partner with RPA developers, solution architects, and SMEs across the full automation lifecycle — from candidate assessment through design, build, UAT, and hypercare.
- Translate redesigned business processes into detailed, automation-ready process specifications and Process Definition Documents that a developer can build from without reinterpretation.
- Assess automation feasibility for each candidate, and surface risks, dependencies, system constraints, and process gaps before development is committed.
- Support prioritization of the automation pipeline based on complexity, business value, exception volume, and stability of the underlying process.
- Define the exception handling model for each automation up front — what the bot handles straight through, what routes to a human, and on what rule.
- Validate automation designs and built solutions against business intent and operational requirements, confirming the delivered bot reflects the process as designed rather than the developer's reading of the document.
Business Rules & Exception Management
- Document every decision point, validation, routing rule, and exception path with an owner and a source of authority.
- Analyze high-volume exception categories to root cause and address the source, in preference to handling the symptom in code.
- Challenge whether a stated exception is genuinely exceptional, or a common scenario that was never designed for.
- Maintain business rule repositories and decision matrices as living artifacts, and define who is accountable for keeping them current.
Stakeholder Engagement & Governance
- Facilitate redesign workshops with process owners, operations leadership, Finance, Legal, and Internal Audit — and drive them to a decision, not a summary.
- Navigate resistance from stakeholders whose current process is the product of long-standing accommodation, without softening a well-evidenced recommendation.
- Provide advisory support through UAT, cutover, and hypercare, and lead root cause analysis on production exceptions.
- Contribute to automation governance, redesign standards, and reusable design patterns across the program.
The Questions This Analyst Must Be Willing to Ask
The successful candidate challenges the business as a matter of habit, and does so with evidence in hand:
Process Design
- What is this step protecting, and what would fail if it were removed?
- Is this rule policy-driven, contract-driven, or person-driven?
- What share of transactions actually follows this path?
- Who last changed this process, and what problem were they solving?
- If we were designing this today, on this asset base, would we build it this way?
Exceptions
- Why does this exception occur, and can it be eliminated upstream?
- Is this an exception, or a common scenario the design never accounted for?
- Who resolves it today, on what authority, and against what standard?
- What is the cost of the exception, including the cost of detecting it?
Automation Suitability
- Should this process exist at all before we consider automating it?
- Can this decision be expressed as rules, or does it require judgment?
- What data determines the outcome, and do we trust that data?
- What would prevent straight-through processing, and is that obstacle structural or habitual?
- Is the upstream system stable enough for this automation to survive twelve months?
Operational & Financial Impact
- What is the business impact if this transaction is delayed by a day?
- What risk are we accepting if we process without manual review, and who is accepting it?
- Which rules change frequently, and what does that imply about where the logic should live?
- Where does the released capacity go, and who is accountable for capturing it?
Required Experience
Mandatory
- 10+ years in business analysis, process re-engineering, or operations consulting.
- 5+ years supporting RPA and intelligent automation programs, working directly with automation delivery teams from process discovery through production support.
- Hands-on experience authoring PDDs, defining exception handling models, and validating automation designs against business intent.
- Demonstrated record of redesigning a process — not merely documenting it — with a defensible, measured benefit outcome. Candidates should be prepared to walk through a specific redesign, its baseline, its measured result, and what it got wrong.
- Proven ability to build and defend a quantified benefits case in front of Finance.
- Fluency in producing the artifacts of credible redesign:
◦ As-is and to-be process maps (BPMN)
◦ Process Definition Documents (PDDs)
◦ SIPOC and value stream maps with quantified cycle and touch time
◦ Business rule catalogs and decision trees
◦ Exception registers with root cause and disposition
◦ Control-point maps and benefits realization plans
- Experience engaging directly with operations leadership and executive stakeholders, including the ability to deliver an unwelcome finding and hold it.
Preferred
- Direct experience in telecommunications infrastructure, towers, REIT operations, real estate or lease administration, engineering services, or field operations.
- Familiarity with lease administration, ground lease management, or asset lifecycle processes in a capital-intensive, geographically distributed asset base.
- Working knowledge of Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, or comparable enterprise platforms as the systems in which redesigned processes must actually live.
- Hands-on exposure to UiPath, Power Automate, Automation Anywhere, or Blue Prism programs.
- Practical experience with process mining and task mining tooling (Celonis, UiPath Process Mining, or equivalent) as an evidentiary instrument, not a dashboard.
Pay: $65.00 - $75.00 per hour
Work Location: In person
