Business analysts often end up in this role by accident, as their careers evolve. They are perhaps called on to work jointly with the business or computer department, and end up linking the two. Two major sources of BA professionals can therefore be considered: the computer world (e.g. architects, developers) and the business world.

What is the best background for becoming a business analyst? The debate is still ongoing in the community. Both have their qualities and their faults—computer people have a tendency to anticipate the solution while mangers sometimes lack the knowledge to interact with IT.

I believe that good business analysts are above all specialists in business analysis. They have backgrounds in both disciplines and act as a bridge between the two worlds.

Requirements Risk management could be a useful approach to requirements analysis, and lead to better requirements management.

High level the idea goes like this:

Risk management is an important part of project management
Requirements management is also a critical part of the puzzle
Should we be running a requirements risk management process on our projects?
The purpose of this article is to introduce the topic of Requirements risk into the Requirements Management discussion. Feedback and commentary is welcome and can be provided at ModernAnalyst.com

Whether you call them Systems Analysts, Business Analysts, Systems Engineers, or Enterprise Architects, it is very encouraging to see this vital function being reintroduced to companies. As far as I am concerned, it was inevitable. I guess companies finally figured out you cannot satisfy your systems problems simply by using better programming tools and techniques.

Business analysis is about more than software development. It can help business leaders to understand the business and develop resourcing, training and IT strategies. Through careful analysis of workflows and business processes you can identify opportunities for increasing efficiency and profitability. You can use business analysis techniques to help you identify potential processing bottlenecks or under-utilisation of costly resources.

Business analysts go by many titles one of them being Management Consultant.  In this article, Tony Jacowski talks about the management consulting career.

Author: Tony Jacowski