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Business Analyst (BA) is one of the most important roles in a software company. Some would even call it the most important role, which is more or less an extremist view because software is a team work exercise, it is practically impossible to come to a conclusion on the most important role.
Business Analysts of software firms act as the liaison between business users and development teams by serving as business problem solvers. They provide the process, questions, and techniques to efficiently extract the information needed from the Business Users for successful application development projects.
They can sort through the chaos and ambiguity of what is told to them by many people and go on to extract a concise description of the business. They are also capable of analyzing the business to identify problems and/or opportunities and to define solution characteristics. He should not be intoxicated by technology and should not jump to designing the solution. Being customer focused through out the life cycle of the project is expected from a BA.
The person who holds this responsibility should pose outstanding conceptual, analytical, communication, facilitation, and presentation skills with highly developed organization and management skills. Handling many priorities at the same time would be expected from him since a typical BA would work on several projects while facing the clients directly but diminishing effectiveness of any of those is not tolerable for this critical role. Being a good team player is essential as is the case for any position in a software company. Drawing prerequisite lines on paper is a difficult task but a sound academic background and a few years of experience in the field would really help. There is some theoretical stuff that you should learn through education while some practical situations are to be learnt only through experience. Anyway, as a general rule, academic performances and experience should not be barriers for a real performer, who only speaks through successful work achievements.
Most in the BA position today have come from the IT side with an IT education background while there is a smaller portion that comes from a business academic background but experienced working in the IT industry. There is a third group, which is smaller, that do not have an IT academic background or experience in the IT industry, but who are experts in their respective business domains.
Business analysis is distinct from financial analysis, project management, quality assurance, organizational development, testing, training, and documentation.
The Business Analyst is responsible for development and management requirements. Specifically, the Business Analyst elicits, analyzes, validates and documents business, organizational and/or operational requirements. Solutions are not predetermined by the Business Analyst, but are driven solely by the requirements of the business. Solutions often include a systems development component, but may also consist of process improvement or organizational change.
BAs therefore require a thorough understanding of the business domain in which they operate and should be able to communicate, in a clear and concise manner.
Since the BA finds out requirements and clarifies it to the development team, he/she has the responsibility of guarantying that the final product contains the solutions that he initially communicated to the client. Therefore, he obviously plays a role in the project from the very beginning to the end. Whatever the process adhered by the company, the BA will be involved throughout the process.
As mentioned before, technical expertise is not at all expected from a good BA. BAs are not good software designers in the modern software space. Good design is a highly technical skill, which needs to balance the technology constraints with what the user wants, while ensuring that the system remains flexible, agile and robust. BAs communicate and work with both the IT people and business people and their job lines are sometimes blurred. Because of this BAs may find themselves doing project management. But a good BA should definitely avoid this unless his company expects him to play the additional role of project manager, because he has a more serious duty to perform. He has the responsibility to deliver a product which solves the business problem of the user at the end of the day. As an example, if the BA is merely concerned in delivering the product on time, he is in fact working with a project management perspective rather than a business analysis perspective. The product might come out on time, but the business problem of the client would not be solved, which would ultimately result in both financial and time lost to both the provider and the client.
Documentation skills of a BA should be near perfection. He needs to document a lot during his project activities. Standards and formats for this have to be defined either by the company, client or the BA himself. Some of the information that needs clear documenting is given below.
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