business analyst (BA)

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

Prerequisites
No one defined way to become a Business Analyst. Often the BA has a technical background, whether having worked as a programmer or engineer, or completing a Computer Science degree. Others may move to a BA role from a business role.
Skills and knowledge
Business subject knowledge: Business Analyst should have 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.

Business Processes: provide expertise in the modeling / mapping of business processes, conduct business processes, is instrumental in the business process re-engineering (BPR) and involved in the change management exercise. Examples of the process tools used by Business Analyst include Visio Professional, Aris Software, iGrafx Software and other.

Project Management: A Business Analyst must be well versed in the project management practices and principles, understand project management standards (PMBok, Prince2, etc) have knowledge of project management tools like MS-Project.

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: 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 can be carried over into the new systems or analysis around what can be achieved in a new system.

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).

Techniques 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).

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

Role in 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, executed by the project team:

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. 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: Ability to add notes to project plan.
Functional Requirements describe what the system, process, or product/service must do in order to fulfill the business requirement(s). A business requirement often can be broken up into sub business requirements and many functional requirements. 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 (a cross matrix) 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. The matrix should take account of any changes in scope during the life of the project. At the end of a project, the matrix should show each function built into a system, its source and the reason any stated requirements may not have been delivered.

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