Introduction To Business Analysis

In order to understand an organization's structure, rules, and operations and to make recommendations for changes that would help the organization achieve its goals, a variety of tasks and techniques known as "Business analysis"are used.`

Learning Outcomes from this article

• What is business analysis?

• Key Concepts of business analysis

• Knowledge Area

• Tasks

• Techniques

• Underlying Competencies

Key Concepts Of Business Analysis

1. Domain

   A Domain is an area undergoing analysis

2. Solutions

   A solution is a set of changes to the current state of an organization that are made in order to enable that organization to meet a business need, solve a problem, or take advantage of an opportunity

3. Requirements

   1. A condition or capability needed by a stakeholder to solve a problem or achieve an objective.
   2. A condition or capability that must be met or possessed by a solution or solution component to satisfy a contract, standard, specification, or other formally imposed documents.
   3. A documented representation of a condition or capability as in (1) or (2).

Requirement Classification Scheme

- Business Requirements:- It describes the reasons why a project has been initiated, the objectives that the project will achieve, and the metrics that will be used to measure its success

-Stakeholder Requirements:- It describes the needs that a given stakeholder has and how that stakeholder will interact with a solution. Stakeholder requirements serve as a bridge between business requirements and the various classes of solution requirements

-Solution Requirements:- It describes the characteristics of a solution that meets business requirements and stakeholder requirements. they are developed and defined through requirements analysis. Its consists of two parts

1. Functional

They describe the capabilities the system will be able to perform in terms of behaviors or operations

2.Non-Functional

These can include requirements related to capacity, speed, security, availability, and the information architecture and presentation of the user interface.

-Transition Requirement :-

It describes capabilities that the solution must have in order to facilitate the transition from the current state of the enterprise to a desired future state, but that will not be needed once that transition is complete.

Knowledge Areas

Knowledge areas define what a practitioner of business analysis needs to understand and the tasks a practitioner must be able to perform.

• Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring It is the knowledge area that covers how business analysts determine which activities are necessary in order to complete a business analysis effort.

• Elicitation describes how business analysts work with stakeholders to identify and understand their needs and concerns, and understand the environment in which they work.

• Requirements Management and Communication describes how business analysts manage conflicts, issues, and changes in order to ensure that stakeholders and the project team remains in agreement on the solution scope

• Enterprise Analysis describes how business analysts identify a business need, refine and clarify the definition of that need, and define a solution scope that can feasibly be implemented by the business

• Requirements Analysis describes how business analysts prioritize and progressively elaborate stakeholder and solution requirements in order to enable the project team to implement a solution that will meet the needs of the sponsoring organization and stakeholders.

• Solution Assessment and Validation describes how business analysts assess proposed solutions to determine which solution best it's the business need, identify gaps and shortcomings in solutions, and determine necessary workarounds or changes to the solution.

• Underlying Competencies describes the behaviors, knowledge, and other characteristics that support the effective performance of the business analysis.

Tasks

A task is an essential piece of work that must be performed as part of business analysis. Each task should be performed at least once during the vast majority of business analysis initiatives, but there is no upper limit to the number of times any task may be performed.

A task has the following characteristics

▶ A task accomplishes a result in an output that creates value for the sponsoring organization—that is, if a task is performed it should produce some demonstrable positive outcome that is useful, specific, visible, and measurable.

▶ A task is complete—in principle, successor tasks that make use of outputs should be able to be performed by a different person or group.

▶ A task is a necessary part of the purpose of the Knowledge Area with which it is associated.

Technique

Techniques provide additional information on different ways that a task may be performed or diferent forms the output of the task may take. A task may have none, one, or more related techniques. A technique must be related to at least one task.

The techniques which we would be looking at in the coming articles are as follows:-

▶ Acceptance and Evaluation Criteria Definition

▶ Brainstorming

▶ Business Rules Analysis

▶ Data Dictionary and Glossary

▶ Data Flow Diagrams

▶ Data Modeling

▶ Decision Analysis

▶ Document Analysis

▶ Interviews

▶ Metrics and Key Performance Indicators

▶ Non-functional Requirements Analysis

▶ Organization Modeling

▶ Problem Tracking

▶ Process Modeling

▶ Requirements Workshops

▶ Scenarios and Use Cases

Business analysts will find that a study of any of those areas will reward them with a greater understanding of the business analysis profession, and the ability to collaborate with other professionals. Also, we would be exploring more of every aspect of the business analysis to make you from novice to industry-ready.

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