Business Analyst
I’m working as a Business Analyst from past 2.5 years which means i’m very new to this field though have done BA job with 2 different companies so far and learnt a lot.
There are different definations of a Business Analyst and my own simple defination of a Business Analyst is “A person who works as a liasion between business teams and development teams”.
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 defines BA as:
“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.”
My 1st BA role invloved in managing stakeholders mainly business clients from different companies. I used to write Business Proposals to submit for a tender to get a project, conducting interviews and workshops to gather requirements, analyse and document those requriements to present to both IT and business teams. Once i get the final sign off for the proposed solution of a project, i used to forward those requirements on to development team. Once the expected solution is developed then i had to verify that the developed system meets busienss objectives. I used to conduct UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and then the successful implementation of the system.
As documentation, I had to write SRS, use cases, test cases, user training manuals, system guides, presentations etc.
From above you could see that a BA has to work on full Business Life Cycle using any BA methodology and in my case i used RUP.
In my current BA role I m working on processes and policies. It’s kind of a bit different task as above though it involves managing stakeholders and gathering requirements.
A precious thing i learnt from my experience is that always manage your stakeholders/business clients very carefully. There are different type of people in different roles and different organizations and its not a childs’ play to keep everybody happy.
Once you have learnt this skill then consider yourself a successfull Business Analyst.
I think its enough about a BA so far. I will write more about BA skills in my future posts.
You can see this post on the Modern Analyst website as well:
http://www.modernanalyst.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/78/Default.aspx
Tags: Business analysis
October 25th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
In addition to what you have stated, I personally feel that all of us are playing a Business Analyst role in our day to day lives and it is just that in a corporate setting we have to also apply our technical skills.In layman terms, if we want to build a house we follow the same lifecycle steps as an software development project. We need to first do a feasibility study that who can be a contractor and what is our budget. Then we need to meet up with the contractor to explain our requirements and how do we want our house to be. What is our requirement cannot be the same for another person. Then the contractor will come up with a plan, design( And here comes the use of various tools to make this process efficient) so that we can visualise what is the end product going to be and if it is meeting our requirements.This meeting is to validate the designs and update/modify based on our feedback. This marks the stage where the requirements should be clear and accurate before the development starts as it will be very expensive to implement a change once the house is built. So the client and the contractor should agree on the set of requirements and also that any change requests afterwards would be at the cost of the client. All said and done, the development starts and the final product is then inspected by the testers(In this example, Inspection tester) to ensure that the product is built exactly according to meet the customer requirements. During this process the testers have to liasion with the business analyst to udnerstand that what the stakeholders requirements were as a BA plays a vital role in gathering requirements. If a business analyst makes an error while documenting requirements the whole house could fall down. Another key role is to always maintain a relationship with the stakeholders and walk the client through the models, business processes to ensure that the client understands what is being built and it is according to what is required. Now again coming back to my example, lets say I wanted a window on eastern side of my house but while building the house somehow the contractor missed that requirement and forgot about it, so now imagine that we discover that while UAT and how much cost will be incurred to incorporate that vital change after the house is built and it will also affect other functionalities which could be dependent on this requirement. So finally this phase also gets rolled off and the application is ready for the deployemnt i.e the house is ready to move in.
So we need to put our practical experiences and knowledge into action and also analyse at the same time that what action is going to yield maximum results for the project to be succesful.
Priyanka
Business Analyst