What Does A Business Analyst Do
Having looked at the roles and responsibilities of a business analyst in the article 'Business Analyst Job Description', we will now concentrate on the question “What does a business analyst do?” A business analyst has various skills including communication skills, interpersonal skills, domain knowledge, problem solving capabilities and the ability to use structured methodologies and tools to produce the deliverables in an engagement. These skills help the business analysts perform a variety of tasks during the execution of an engagement. In this article we will look at the activities and tasks that a business analyst performs as a part of his/her job in fair detail.
Throughout this article, the word business analyst can mean a single business analyst or a team of business analysts. The number of business analysts deployed in an engagement would depend on the size and the complexity of the engagement. In case of multiple business analysts being deployed in the engagement, there would be a principal who would assume the lead role for the business analyst team.
Tasks and activities
Upon initiation of an engagement, the business analyst needs to commence planning for various activities and tasks that he/she would be held accountable for. The first task would be to plan the overall business analysis approach. The business analyst would work in close co-ordination with the project manager. In a lot of instances, the business analyst would be embedded within the project execution team. The tasks that business analysts perform would vary depending upon the phase of the engagement and they are listed below.
Planning phase
During the project initiation, the first activity would be the identification of a project manager. The business analyst would help identify the stakeholders at this stage. Identification of stakeholders is a critical activity as this would determine who would be included in providing the project requirements. The business analyst would also help formulate the roles and responsibilities matrix to help define roles and responsibilities for the team members. The estimation for business analysis tasks comes next. This would be a function of the engagement size and complexity and would determine the staffing requirements over the execution cycle of the engagement. Another important task would be planning the requirements management phase. This would entail how to approach the requirements gathering process, the methodology to document the same, prioritize and trace the requirements over the engagement life cycle and determine the methodologies and tools to be used for this purpose.
Some organizations have standard methodologies and approaches whereas some would not. The business analyst should be aware of the methodologies and tools and be able to recommend those that would best suit the context. The business analyst must also finalize the stakeholders’ communication plan during this phase. This would include finalizing the reporting templates and the frequency of reporting in consultation with the stakeholders. And finally, the metrics collection mechanism needs to be finalized as well. This will help monitor the progress of business analysis activity.
Techniques used: To be able to perform the above tasks during the planning phase, the business analyst can make use of a variety of techniques. The principal on the engagement can provide his/her expert judgment or weigh in based on past experience with similar engagements to provide relevant inputs. Stakeholders may prefer different modes of communication and hence an analysis of the communication needs of stakeholders needs to be performed to finalize the stakeholder communication plan. Lessons learned in the past with similar engagements can be a powerful input for the planning process, especially on how to deal with contingencies. In the context of requirements management, change control system is an important mechanism that needs to be put in place at this stage. The change control board would have representation from the organization and the engagement team and helps to agree upon requirements changes that creep in during engagement execution and how these requirements changes would be handled.
Requirements gathering phase
The business analyst performs several key activities during this phase. To begin with, requirements are elicited and documented with relevant traceability provisions to ensure association of requirements with the stakeholders. These are then presented to stakeholders to confirm understanding and ensuring a baseline version of the package. Subsequent changes to the requirements would have to go through the change control system for approvals.
Techniques used: Interviews and workshops are common techniques used by business analysts for requirements elicitation and playback for sign off.
Analysis phase
Business analysts analyze the requirements during this phase, prioritize the same, seek clarifications where required and finalize the scope. All assumptions made and the constraints are documented at this stage for validation.
Techniques used: Business process modeling, data modeling and use cases are some of the common techniques used during this phase.
Alternatives and assessment
During this stage, various alternatives are generated as possible solutions and they are assessed to zero in on the best solution. The business analyst should be able to evaluate various options and synthesize sound conclusions based on the analysis done earlier.
Techniques used: Business analysts can use different techniques to evaluate the various alternative solutions. Some of the popular techniques include SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats) analysis, validation of solutions with stakeholders, assessing the readiness and receptiveness of organizations to the proposed solutions and structured walkthroughs for stakeholders before finalizing the solution.
To conclude, the business analyst needs to bring to the fore all the skills that he/she possesses to ensure successful execution of the engagement. Business analysts would need to have strong conflict resolution and consensus building skills. This would help facilitate requirements gathering workshops with stakeholders where conflicting requirements with differing priorities need to be managed. Over the engagement life cycle, there would be ample opportunities and challenges that business analysts would encounter. The ability to overcome various challenges would largely be a function of soft skills and underlying competencies that business analysts possess. For example, a successful business analyst would be able to mitigate the effects of inadequate requirements discovery with strong interpersonal relationships with stakeholders.
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