Senior Analyst, NEXT Operating Model & Roles Program
Citizens Financial Group · Johnston, Rhode Island, United States
At Citizens, we are transforming the future of distribution by creating a more connected ecosystem that empowers colleagues, deepens customer relationships, and enables advice-led engagement at scale.
The Senior Analyst, NEXT Operating Model & Roles Program, is a key individual contributor on the Operating Model & Roles program team. Reporting to the Director, this role manages the day-to-day integration, planning, analysis, and delivery of operating model and colleague role initiatives. The Senior Analyst translates the Director’s program architecture into executable plans, governance routines, analysis, and executive-ready materials while owning assigned workstreams from design through adoption.
This role combines strong program management discipline with hands-on operating model and role design. The successful candidate will bring structure to complex work, coordinate across functions, identify risks and dependencies early, and produce high-quality deliverables that help senior leaders make informed decisions.
This is not an administrative project management role. The Senior Analyst is expected to think critically, conduct substantive analysis, challenge assumptions when appropriate, and influence partners through expertise, sound judgment, and collaboration.
Primary responsibilities include
- Own the delivery of one or more assigned workstreams, such as role design, governance and decision rights, workforce impacts, or implementation readiness, from design through adoption.
- Translate the Director’s program architecture and priorities into detailed workstream plans with deliverables, owners, milestones, dependencies, decision points, and success measures.
- Break complex, long-term program deliverables into executable activities that demonstrate measurable near-term progress while maintaining alignment with the broader roadmap.
- Maintain day-to-day program tools, including integrated workplans, RAID logs, decision logs, action trackers, roadmaps, and operating routines.
- Track progress against the integrated roadmap and identify when workstreams are off track, misaligned, or at risk.
- Coordinate sequencing and handoffs across workstreams so prerequisites, dependencies, and downstream impacts are understood and addressed.
- Apply sound judgment to workstream sequencing and dependencies, constructively challenging timelines or approaches when prerequisite decisions or deliverables have not been completed.
- Recommend corrective actions and contingency options when assumptions, dependencies, priorities, or timelines change.
- Conduct current-state assessments of roles, processes, organizational structures, handoffs, pain points, and capability gaps.
- Develop draft role charters, accountability frameworks, RACI models, interaction maps, and decision-rights matrices.
- Translate strategic priorities into practical role designs with clear purpose, responsibilities, performance expectations, skills, and enabling requirements.
- Assess how proposed designs affect colleagues, customers, leaders, processes, controls, technology, and performance measurement.
- Identify overlaps, gaps, conflicts, dependencies, and unintended consequences across proposed designs.
- Prepare and co-facilitate working sessions that surface tradeoffs and move concepts toward practical future-state designs.
- Maintain the integrated program roadmap so it reflects current scope, sequencing, decisions, milestones, and dependencies.
- Prepare governance agendas, pre-reads, and decision materials, and document outcomes, owners, and follow-up actions.
- Track decisions required at each program stage and ensure options, tradeoffs, and recommendations are ready before governance forums.
- Follow up with workstream contributors and partners on agreed deliverables and commitments.
- Escalate material risks and issues to the Director with a clear assessment of implications and recommended actions.
- Break ambiguous questions into hypotheses, analytical approaches, and required outputs.
- Gather and synthesize qualitative and quantitative inputs, including time studies, staffing data, colleague feedback, and performance metrics, into clear insights.
- Build option assessments that compare benefits, risks, costs, dependencies, and implementation considerations.
- Test assumptions and ensure recommendations are supported by evidence and practical business understanding.
- Build effective working relationships with partners across Distribution, Consumer Bank, Human Resources, Operations, Technology, Digital, Data, Finance, Risk, Compliance, Learning, Communications, and Change.
- Serve as the day-to-day point of contact for workstream partners, keeping engagement purposeful and tied to specific outcomes.
- Understand stakeholder objectives, constraints, and concerns, and raise potential misalignment with the Director early.
- Represent the program in working-level NEXT integration forums as needed.
- Help develop implementation waves, transition plans, readiness criteria, and adoption plans with business and change partners.
- Coordinate pilots, testing, and feedback activities and capture lessons learned for subsequent phases.
- Identify business-readiness gaps and track mitigation plans with accountable teams.
- Support the handoff of completed work into sustainable business ownership.
- Build and maintain program dashboards that track progress, risks, decisions, readiness, adoption, and outcomes.
- Help establish baseline measures and future-state performance expectations with business and functional partners.
- Draft executive updates, decision papers, and presentations that focus on outcomes, risks, recommendations, and implications rather than activity.
- Translate complex program and operating model information into clear, concise narratives for different audiences.
- Work independently on assigned workstreams, using sound judgment to determine when to proceed, challenge, recommend an alternative approach, or escalate.
- Operate effectively in a hybrid delivery environment that balances Agile day-to-day execution with milestone-based program governance, reporting, and dependency management.
- Create structure and momentum when requirements are not yet fully defined.
- Maintain high standards for analytical rigor, program discipline, and communication quality.
- Share knowledge, tools, and best practices with program contributors.
- Bring a collaborative, enterprise-minded approach and remain accountable for deliverables.
Qualifications, Education, Certifications and/or Other Professional Credentials
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.
- 6+ years of professional experience in program delivery, project management, transformation, operating model design, organizational strategy, consulting, business strategy, operations, or a related field.
- Experience delivering complex, cross-functional programs or workstreams with multiple dependencies and senior stakeholders.
- Demonstrated ability to deconstruct complex, long-term deliverables into actionable work, communicate underlying activities and dependencies, and show incremental progress against major milestones.
- Hands-on experience building integrated plans, maintaining RAID logs, supporting governance routines, tracking decisions, and developing executive reporting.
- Experience supporting the design or implementation of operating models, organizational structures, roles, governance models, processes, or ways of working.
- Experience working in a hybrid delivery environment that combines Agile execution with milestone-based program governance and reporting.
- Strong structured problem-solving and analytical skills, including the ability to synthesize complex information into clear recommendations.
- Proven ability to create structure and momentum when requirements, responsibilities, or solutions are not yet fully defined.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experien