CONVENTIONS

ABBREVIATION FULL NAME

BA Business analyst

BAC Business assurance coordinator

FS Feasibility study

Internal PM Internal Project Manager

IT Information technology

OOM Object oriented methodology

PAT Project assurance team

PGPM Practice guide to project management for IT Projects under an out sourced environment

PIDR Post implemented departmental return

PMP Project management plan

PSC Project steering committee

RAD Rapid application development

SA Systems analyst

SA& D Systems analysis and design

SDLC Software development life cycle

TAC Technical assurance coordinator

UAC User assurance coordinator

UAT User acceptance test

UC Use cases

URD User requirement document

WBS Work break down structure

What is Business Analysis?

"Business Analysis is the process of understanding business change needs, assessing the
impact of those changes, capturing, analyzing and documenting requirements and then
supporting the communication and delivery of those requirements with relevant parties."
or

Business Analysis is the practice of enabling change in an organizational context, by defining

needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.

Business architecture:

What business analyst do

Business analyst plays a key role in ensuring that strategic plans for transformation are
developed properly and implemented efficiently.
Business analysis is a critical process that drives the project life cycle. Business analyst acts as
an intermediary between business and technical communities, analyzes competing business
needs and develop plans to implement the projects that support stakeholder objectives.

What is a Business Analyst?

Job titles for business analysis practitioners include not only business analyst, but also business
systems analyst, systems analyst, requirements engineer, process analyst, product manager,
product owner, enterprise analyst, business architect, management consultant, business
intelligence analyst, data scientist, and more. Many other jobs, such as management, project
management, product management, software development, quality assurance and interaction
design rely heavily on business analysis skills for success.

Here are three essential skills a business analyst will utilize:

(1) – Facts and figures

They will compare the past facts and figures to the current numbers, this will give the analyst the
information to deduce or predict failure within the company.

They will also examine information from stockholders to assess the risk in specific programs
with investment prospects.

(2) – Listening skills

A business analyst is always an objective listener. They will determine the needs that
management want by speaking to shareholders. This requires the analyst to ask questions, to find
out what is needed, which will more than likely lead to new discoveries that may have been
overlooked previously.A qualified business analyst will always gain information by listening to
team leaders and the end user.Ultimately, the decision will be made by an analyst between
what’s being developed within a company and what’s actually needed, although this decision is
made with the say so of stakeholders.
(3) – Negotiations

Within business there are usually different departments. A Business analyst will seek to associate
and involve them-self with the various departments. This will help them identify conflicts within
the various departments, which can be used to bring departments together.The business analyst
will negotiate compromises between departments so that the main project is not put in jeopardy.

The analyst has to have good negotiation skills so that they recognize strengths and weakness in
departments and help them overcome them. They will do this by developing a rapport with the
heads of departments and stakeholders, this will make it easier to bring teams together to
complete the tasks at hand.

Role of a BA in software development process is :

 Initiate the project
 Elaborate the details
 Support the implementation

Initiate the project :involves identifying the problem to be solved and establishing enough
about what the solution look like that a definitive go decision can be made whether to fund the
project This phase includes understanding the key terminology of domain model along with organizational
capabilities .

Elaborate the details: it means analyzing the requirements and ensure the implementation team
has all of the details they need to build or implement the solution. Often this phase involves
working with multiple stakeholders across the organization to ensure their knowledge and needs
are incorporated into the detailed decisions about what will actually get built.In this if the business
process is known we need to prepare requirement development plan i.e scope document. If the business
process is not known then we need to prepare some business process analysis to initiate the project.

Support the implementation: as BA don’t involve directly in to implementation, they will

handle additional roles as they are typically brought in if issuescome up during implementation
that cause some new requirements to be addressed. This could involve facilitating a problem-
solving meeting to discover how a particular business need can be met given newly discovered
technology constraints.

Eight Business Analyst Responsibilities

Scott Ambler, the practice leader of agile development for the IBM Methods Group and author
of several books on software project management and agile development, says that first and
foremost, business analysts (or as he terms it, business systems analysts, or BSAs) are
responsible for communication and collaboration between the business and IT.

"The most important responsibilities of a BSA are to act as a communication conduit between
the stakeholders and the team," Ambler says, "to represent the stakeholder community to the
development team if the developers themselves don't have direct access, and to translate the
business needs for the team.

Ambler developed a list of eight activities that business systems analysts will usually perform on
a traditional software development project:

1. Scope the system. At the outset of a project, business analysts may be the only "software
development staff" assigned to the project, Ambler writes. And at this point, they work with key
project stakeholders and business people to formulate and communicate the business vision for
the project, map out initial requirements and the scope of the project.

"Their fundamental goal is to get the project focused early by translating the initial high-level
vision into something realistic," Ambler writes.

2. Interpret business needs. A critical responsibility of business analysts is "to work with
project stakeholders to translate their requirements into something that developers can
understand as well as to translate the resulting questions that the developers have into something
the stakeholders can understand," Ambler writes. A key skill needed in this part of the process is
the business analyst's ability to distill the differing messages and needs of project stakeholders
into a single, consistent vision.
"This task often includes significant negotiation and political maneuvering," Ambler writes.
Business analysts will "often find themselves spending significant time in meetings, thereby
saving the rest of the development team from this inefficient use of their time."

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3. Translate technical issues. Business analysts also have the arduous task of breaking down
technical and architectural complexities so that project stakeholders can easily understand any
issues that crop up, such as "why your HTML-based application can't have as slick of a user
interface as a Visual Basic application," Ambler writes. "BSAs often explain what the developers
are doing and why they need to do it, including explanations of the basis of schedules and
estimates."

4. Spell out the project details and requirements. "BSAs will often work with project
stakeholders to identify, model and then document their requirements and business domain
details," Ambler notes.

5. Put development team in touch with the right people. "BSAs typically have very good
connections within the business community," he writes, "and therefore are in a position to help
development teams find the right people to work with."

6. Political guide. "BSAs often help project teams through the political minefields within their
organizations, particularly when the BSA has worked within the same organization for several
years," Ambler notes.

7. Test and validation. Business analysts work with project stakeholders to "validate their
requirements and analysis models via techniques such as reviews, walkthroughs and play
acting," he writes. "BSAs will often aid in writing user acceptance test (UAT) cases and will be a
liaison between project stakeholders and your testing organization during UAT."

8. Represent project stakeholders throughout the process. If project teams don't have direct
access to their project stakeholders, which is never a good situation, business analysts have to act
as "stakeholder surrogates," Ambler suggests. "Typically developers will treat a BSA as the
'customer' from which requirements, domain information and business priorities are provided.
The BSA, in turn, will work with the stakeholders to obtain information and to verify decisions."