Hi guys,

What are steps as a BA that you usually take for a new project? The reason im asking is because there is so many different type of BAs out there I just want to see if we all follow some type of trends or some people make their own type of steps. Discussion would be great on this.

 Regardsless of the type of project  I am involved in I will utilise the following steps:

1. Conduct a feasibility study to capture an understning of:

- Who the stakeholders are

- the reason for the roject

- What the project hopes to delivery to the business (the objectives of the project)

- The business processes associated with the project (As Is)

- The IT systems and data information related to the project (if a technical project)

- Possible constraints which could hinder your work.

2.  With the background information you have start your requirements gathering excercise with the stakeholders

3. Validate requirements and develope your business requirement documents (this is where tools, techniques, concepts etc come into place such as Use Cases etc plus background information you may have already captured initially such as As Is business processes etc)

4.  Signoff documents

5. Continue to design, development etc

Surryfrog asks:  For instance, would there be a one - to - one mapping between a use case and an activity on the process model, or would many activities combine to map onto a use case?  If the latter, how do I decide what will make up a use case?

Great question Surryfrog!   What your asking about is how to partition.  And partitioning largely defines what analysis is all about (though you would never hear such reading popular BA related literature).

 There is only one formal way to do a logical, natural partitioning of a business system:   Perform an analysis of essential interfaces (the essential interfaces are data flows.)    The alternative is do a Sledge Hammer partitioning:  Just wack at it until you force a resolution to your problem.     The problem with this second approach is that while you can always partition an entity with a sledge hammer, the results are often not very useful.