Business analyst

A business analyst (BA) is responsible for analysing the business needs of their
clients and stakeholders to help identify business problems and propose solutions.
Within the systems development life cycle domain, the BA typically performs a
liaison function between the business side of an enterprise and the information
technology department or external service providers. Common alternate titles are
business systems analyst, systems analyst, and functional analyst, although some
organizations may differentiate between the above titles and corresponding
responsibilities.

Contents
• 1 Roles and responsibilities
• 2 Skills and knowledge
• 3 Role in the system development life cycle
• 4 Other activities and skills
• 5 Typical deliverables
• 6 Prerequisites
• 7 See also

• 8 External references

Roles and responsibilities

The role of the BA is to apply analytical skills to business requests (which are often
high-level or lacking in detail) and communicate these business wants/needs in a clear
and unambiguous manner.

Skills and knowledge

Business subject knowledge: The BA should have some background knowledge of
the subject to make the requirements gathering efficient, or at least have the skills to
apply logical analytical thought to a business issue. The degree of prior knowledge
required depends highly on the complexity of the project. This kind of investigation is
also known as domain analysis.

IT capabilities: understanding of what systems can and cannot do.

Feasibility: analysis around how realistic the requirements are in terms of effort, time,
costs.

Relevance: the purpose served by individual requirements in relation to larger

business and/or project goals.
Data: this area will usually focus on identifying what data the business currently has,
what data need to be carried over into the new systems and/or analysis around what
can be achieved with a new system.

Techniques that a BA uses to gather and document requirements include UML,

process flows, use cases, interview skills, workshop facilitation, and investigation of
current state (existing systems and/or processes).

Skills required to successfully execute the business analysis process include

communication skills, understanding of a variety of technologies and platforms
(client/server and mainframe), entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs) and relational
database concepts, object-oriented technologies (Rational Rose, object-oriented
analysis, object-oriented design, object-oriented programming), and the systems
development lifecycle (SDLC).

Also the BA needs to have the ability to assemble, analyze and evaluate data and to be
able to make appropriate and well-reasoned recommendations and decisions to
support the business stakeholders and the project team.

Role in the system development life cycle

The BA plays a central role in the systems development life cycle (SDLC). In general
terms, the SDLC contains well-defined phases which are executed by the project
team:

• a business idea or request,

• feasibility (business case),
• planning (business requirements, functional requirements),
• delivery (coding, execution of activities),
• testing (test cases, unit testing, integration testing, user acceptance testing),
• implementation (roll-out of the idea or request),
• close-out (documentation, post-implementation review).

This is also known as project methodology. A version of the SDLC is part of many
different project methodologies such as rapid application development (RAD), system
development methodology (SDM), and Rational Unified Process.

The business analyst will provide different services during the SDLC:

• assisting with the business case

• high-level feasibility studies
• gathering of the requirements
• designing and/or reviewing test cases
• processing change requests
• tracing the requirements during implementation (traceability matrix)
• manage project scope
• acceptance, installation, and deployment

Other activities and skills

 • Provide guidance to stakeholders on devising effective and efficient
approaches to achieve the project objectives
• Identify and resolve issues
• Manage the risks
• Liaise with other project areas to coordinate interdependencies and resolve
issues
• Liaise with various business units to gather requirements and resolve issues
• Improve business processes
• Gather and define business requirements
• Analyze and map processes (current state/future state)
• Analyze data
• Produce high quality documentation
• Report status and issues to the Project Manager(s)
• Contribute to enterprise architecture development from a business needs point
of view
• Great communicator and diligent team member

Typical deliverables
Business Requirements constitute a specification of simply what the business wants.
This is usually expressed in terms of broad outcomes the business requires, rather than
specific functions the system may perform. Specific design elements are usually
outside the scope of this document, although design standards may be referenced.

• Example: The ability to add notes to a project plan.

Functional Requirements describe what the system, process, or product/service must

do in order to fulfill the business requirement(s). Note that the business requirement
often can be broken up into sub-business requirements and many functional
requirements. These are often referred to as System Requirements.

• An example that follows from previous business requirement example: (1)

System must provide the ability to associate notes to a project plan. (2) System
must allow the user to enter free text to the project plan notes, up to 255
characters in length.

Non Functional Requirements are requirements that cannot be met by a specific

function, e.g. performance, scalability, security and usability requirements. These are
often included within the System Requirements, where applicable.

Report Specifications are reporting requirements such as the purpose of the report,
justification of the report, report attributes and columns, or runtime parameters.

The Traceability Matrix is a cross matrix that traces the requirements through each
stage of the requirements gathering process. High level concepts will be matched to
scope items which will map to individual requirements which will map to
corresponding functions. This matrix should also take into account any changes in
scope during the life of the project. At the end of a project, this matrix should show
each function built into a system, its source and the reason that any stated
requirements may not have been delivered.

Prerequisites
There is no one defined way to become a BA. Often the BA has a technical
background, whether having worked as a programmer or engineer, or completing a
Computer Science degree. Others may move into a BA role from a business role -
their status as a Subject Matter Expert and their analytical skills make them suitable
for the role. Business analysts often grow further into other roles as Project manager
or consultant.

A BA does not always work in IT-related projects, as BA skills are often required in
marketing and financial roles as well.

A few consulting companies provide BA training courses and there are some
consulting books (UML, workshop facilitating, consultancy, communication skills) on
the market. Some helpful text books are:

• UML for the IT Business Analyst: A Practical Guide to Object-Oriented

Requirements Gathering by Howard Podeswa,
• Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn and
• Discovering Real Business Requirements for Software Project Success by
Robin F. Goldsmith.

Unfortunately, most of the books describe functional requirements gathering and the
specification process in full detail without clarifying how to accurately gather
business requirements up front.

Goldsmith's book in fact deals exclusively with how to discover the REAL, business
requirements and also identifies more than 21 ways to test/evaluate the adequacy of
the business requirements which have been defined. The book strongly distinguishes
the REAL, business requirements from product, system, software, or functional
requirements/specifications, which are actually high-level design of a presumed way
of accomplishing the presumed requirements. Goldsmith also presents public and in-
house training on both discovering and evaluating business requirements.

BAs work in different industries such as Finance, Banking, Insurance, Telco, Utilities,
etc. It is common that BAs switch between industries. The Business Domain subject
areas BAs may work in include workflow, billing, mediation, provisioning and
customer relationship management. The Telco industry has mapped these functional
areas in their eTOM (Telecommunications Operational Map) model