You’ve probably been hearing about Business Analysis or you’ve never heard of it before and you want to understand what it truly means. This is the right article for you if you’re under this category!
Before we go further, we need to know what the term ‘Business Analysis’ means. According to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK), ‘Business Analysis is the act of enabling change in an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.’ So we can easily say that Business Analysts are enablers of change. Business Analysts do not fear change, rather they embrace it.
So who is a Business Analyst?
A Business Analyst performs any of the Business tasks described in the BABOK, no matter their job title or organizational role.
A Business Analyst identifies the actual need or problem of an organization, translates those needs into functional and non-functional requirements, and recommends solutions to the stakeholders. Business Analysts access the organization or company’s current state, to define the future state and identify the steps required to move from the current state to the future state. The role of a Business Analyst requires a lot of communication (usually a back and forth process) and collaboration. This is because they are the bridge between the stakeholders or the business world and the Technical team. They facilitate stakeholder collaboration, understand problems and goals, analyze needs and solutions, devise the right strategies, and drive change.
Ever heard about the story of a group of blind men and the elephant? It is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other.
Let us align that story to a business world without someone who performs the role of a Business Analyst. Sometimes, we don’t know what we truly want until we get clarification. Even most ideas don’t come out fully formed.
The Business Analyst can be likened to be the eye through which the customers and stakeholders see. They are customers centric and without them, projects could pan out like the group of blind men and the elephant or the image below.
Business Analysts are involved in all phases of the Software Development Life Cycle. They do not just stop at gathering requirements and recommending them, they ensure that all the requirements are met from initiation to closure of the project, and even after the project, they are still involved. Business Analysts discover, develop, analyze and synthesize a lot of information and they focus on delivering value to not just the stakeholders, but their customers as well.
Truth is, the role of a Business Analyst differs from organization to organization and they go by various titles sometimes.
Some of these titles are; Systems Analyst, Product Owner, Requirements Engineer, Business Operational Analyst, Information Architect, Agile Business Analyst, Business Architect, Data Analyst, Product Manager, Process Analyst, Management Consultant, IT Business Analyst, etc.