Defining Business Analyst Role Accurately

The term Business Analyst (BA) is used to describe a person who practices the discipline of business analysis. A business analyst or "BA" is responsible for analyzing the business needs of their clients and stakeholders to help identify business problems and propose solutions. Within the systems development life cycle domain, the business analyst typically performs a liaison function between the business side of an enterprise and the providers of services to the enterprise. Common alternate titles are business systems analyst, systems analyst, and functional analyst, although some organizations may differentiate between these titles and corresponding responsibilities.

The International Institute of Business Analysis has the following definition of the role: "A business analyst works as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems. The business analyst understands business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements and recommends solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals."

The British Computer Society proposes the following definition of a business analyst: "An internal consultancy role that has the responsibility for investigating business systems, identifying options for improving business systems and bridging the needs of the business with the use of IT."

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

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 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 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 may overlap into roles such 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.

The International Institute of Business Analysis provides a certification program for business analysts (Certified Business Analyst Professional or CBAP), as well as providing a body of knowledge for the field (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge or BABOK).

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.

BAs work in different industries such as finance, banking, insurance, telecom, utilities, software services, etc. It is common that BAs switch between industries.