Elgendy - Business Analysis For Beginners: Jump-Start Your BA Career in Four Weeks

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Business Analysis For Beginners
Jump-Start BA Career in 4 Weeks
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Copyright 2015 Mohamed Elgendy
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Business Analysis

In BABOK version 2, the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) defines business analysis, as the set of tasks and techniques used to work as a liaison among stakeholders in order to understand the structure, policies, and operations of an organization, and recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.

Translation: Business analysis is the discipline of enabling businesses to identify and meet their goals by determining solutions to business challenges. The goal is to enable companies to determine their objectives for meeting certain opportunities or addressing problems. Solutions often include a system development component, but may also consist of process improvement, organizational change, strategic planning or policy development. The person who executes these tasks is called a Business Analyst or BA.

There is always a business need, our job is to clearly identify, analyze and document this need.

The role of the BA is to work with the Business and IT Teams in developing technology solutions. The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) defines the role as follows:

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.

Liaison among stakeholders

The Business Analyst acts as a bridge between business Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who have a business problem or opportunity and technology people who know how to create solutions for business improvement. You may ask why dont the business SMEs and technology team work together to create solutions? The primary obstacle to this scenario is that the business SMEs tend not to have technical knowledge and the tech nical team tends not to have knowledge of the business processes. You may want to think of the business analyst as a translator who speaks several languages. Without the BA, different team members will not be able to communicate with each other.

Each stakeholder has his or her unique area of knowledge, background, and experience. Often, the differences among the stakeholders are significant, making it not an easy mission for them to communicate with each other. For example, bankers are intimately familiar with the principles, practices, and terminologies involved in the financial business function. IT professionals who will produce and enhance the software systems that the finance people will use are unlikely to have such an understanding. Conversely, the IT people understand the details of how computers work and software is written; bankers are unlikely to share that understanding.

Therefore, the BA is a person who can speak to the users, business people, development team, testers and architects each with their own language to bridge the gap between all stakeholders.

In a nutshell, the business analyst uses tasks and techniques to define and validate solutions that meet business needs, goals and objectives. This solution is defined based on the information gathered from the project stakeholders. In figure 1-1, you can see how project stakeholders (project managers, business SMEs, users, developers, and other stakeholders) throw in their insights on the problem or opportunity to the BA. The BA will then work on analyzing the gathered information to develop a solution that meets their needs and objectives.

Business Analysis Life Cycle