What is a Business Analyst




Today the term Business Analyst is interchangeable with a career in the IT sector but the most valuable and successful analysts are those who know the "business" instead of those who understand IT.

So just what is a Business Analyst? What is the Business Analyst's job? What's the best background for this job? What skill set is necessary? What kind of person is your best fit? What training is required and available? Each organisation appears to have its own ideas about the job, skills, duties and expectations. Given the value of the job, a common definition would assist both professionals and companies. In this first part we look at just what a Business Analyst is and learn more about the growth of the Business Analyst's role.

The contemporary Business Analyst - a definition

First, we need to clarify our terminology. One of the most commonly accepted definitions of a Business Analyst(B.A.) is that of a communicator. The B.A. is your connection between the prerequisites (the client) and the applications solution (the development team).

The skills required from the B.A. are considerably more than just good inter-personal communication skills - a selection of tools and techniques are necessary, as well as an proper background and character. Whilst the contemporary B.A. performs a highly critical role in applications development, the real skills required for success aren't technology centric. It is worth noting that the growth of the B.A. to understand how we arrived at this.

Evolution of the Business Analyst

From the first days of commercial computing, all of the investigation, design and development work for a software application was performed by the computing specialists, who often had little understanding of the business they worked in.

During the nineties it became commonplace for employees from the business user community to become more closely involved in computer systems development. This move was designed to make sure that computer-based systems were targeted in the real business issues. The title Business Analyst (B.A.) became common, but there wasn't any commonly-adopted function definition. The team filling this role knew about the business - or the component of it that they worked in - but they knew little about IT and their investigation skills were often quite restricted.

Nowadays, the company process analysis, the requirements specification along with also the outline layout - plus a lot of the approval testing and procedures implementation work - is performed from the B.A.

He B.A. wants a variety of analysis and creativity skills, process and data modelling abilities, together with demands interpretation and specification-writing abilities. They also need interpersonal skills for interviewing and also for top workshops to find out what the customers really want and desire. B.A.'s also have to 'sell' the remedy to decision-makers and development teams whilst negotiating and compromising about the 3 key elements of speed, quality and cost. To quote Arthur C. Clarke - "Do you want it quick, cheap or good? I can give you any two."

In addition to this, B.A.'s will often be working in teams - that they might require team leadership skills and many are required to take on a project management role. In short the modern B.A. needs a variety of 'hard' skills - process and data modelling, design, specification writing - plus a range of 'soft' skills - analysis, imagination, interviewing, presentation, negotiation - to perform effectively.

Surveys have always reported that more than 50 percent of large software projects are over-budget or behind schedule. As recently as October 2002, the Australian Financial Review reported to a Sydney organisation that had stopped work on a client billing system because of price blow-outs and missed deadlines. More than $70 million had been spent, with just two out of 21 elements of the machine delivered. With inadequate, inappropriate or erroneous requirements as a significant contributor to job overruns and failure, the function of a skilled Business Analyst in a project team is more crucial than ever.


Continue Reading Here Alastair Majury Dunblane

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