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