What Does a Business Analyst Do?
Business analyst is an expansive profession which involves helping organizations meet their business goals by supporting change and development within them. To be effective at this role, one needs to have both strong business understanding and commercial acumen as well as technical knowledge of software systems.
An ECBA Certification can give you the skills and expertise required for this role, including some of its primary tasks:
Identifying Business Requirements
Establishing business requirements is an integral component of project planning. This process requires gathering technical information from all relevant parties and compiling it into an easily understood document that expresses these needs from a business perspective.
Business analysts are adept at gathering requirements from stakeholders and communicating them to development teams, in order to help focus design decisions and prevent the project from deviating from its initial purpose. It also establishes a safety margin that can accommodate for unexpected events or the possibility that expectations might not be met by their projects. Business analysts possess this skill.
Developing Business Requirement Documents
Business analysts collaborate with project stakeholders to document requirements in an organized fashion. This can be made simpler through using standard templates designed for specific business functions or domains.
Example: A business analyst for a disaster relief organization could use a template to establish the primary purpose of a new product and define its initial technical offer and market niche, along with expected business value.
An established project requires creating a business requirement document (BRD). The document defines its goals, the project deliverables and how its evaluation will occur; this step differs from creating a functional requirement document (FRD), which defines its technical workings.
Creating Technical Requirements Documents
Business analysts play an essential role in ensuring technical requirements are clearly articulated. Serving as intermediary between stakeholders and engineering teams, they translate business goals into actionable development tasks to ensure a final software product will provide expected business value.
As part of this process, they may help develop the main backlog and define nonfunctional requirements like scalability, security, usability and reliability.
They may also be accountable for creating functional requirements that outline which product features engineers must build to fulfill business goals, and helping to prioritize backlog items according to business priorities.
Creating Prototypes of the Business Model
As a business analyst, you will be required to act as the intermediary between organizational management and complex data and technical systems – making good communication skills critical.
Prototypes can help identify and validate business requirements quickly and efficiently, giving stakeholders a chance to provide input before production begins. Low-fidelity prototypes make it easier for owners to comprehend feature updates, provide feedback, and understand any necessary modifications.
As part of your role, it may be necessary to arrange meetings between development and business teams regarding any updates that will be implemented, thus necessitating clear communication of your ideas between the two groups.
Conducting User Acceptance Testing
User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is an essential element of software development. Real end-users test the product to verify whether or not it meets their business needs and works as expected.
Written requirements, drawings and mockups may assist in gathering the necessary functionality; however, nothing beats having real end-users put their product through its paces on live data to verify its operation as expected. A BA can play an instrumental role in acting as an intermediary between domain experts and implementation SMEs to formulate comprehensive UAT plans.
Documenting the Project Details
Project delays often stem from inadequate documentation. Business analysts can help address this problem by producing clear, comprehensive documentation for their projects that remains up-to-date throughout.
Business Analysts often create Use Case Diagrams which map out various scenarios of user interaction with a system, as a means of ensuring the system meets users’ needs during its design phase. They refer back to these documents throughout development to make sure that every system designed meets them.
They monitor the project budget to identify any potential resource allocation problems and help devise plans to address any mitigating measures necessary for mitigating effects of those issues.
Delivering the Project
Once the business analyst has amassed all the required information for project development, they must assign it to an appropriate development team and share their ideas with stakeholders and team members – it is their duty to make sure the end product matches client goals.
At CIC we do this by leading discussions to establish priorities and ensure all opinions are heard, considered, and reconciled. Furthermore, they conduct requirements workshops as well as estimations with development teams.