Business Analysts for IT Projects

YEAH. In fact IT (industry) is THE industry that uses most of the BA's. A BA comes from the IT field. The business word out the BA does not necessarily imply operational knowledge or skills. Project team, yes - definitely yes, in fact it can be engineering or something like that. PMO ... not really, the focus is different.

Hi Abigail, in this context what do you mean by "come from"? If you refer to which area they work for, then yes often they are based in IT or in a central "change improvement team"-type pool. But if you mean where did they start their careers, I've found most to have originally been business people, often ones who then became system experts or champions or really good trainers, and then taken up BA training from there. I struggle to think of a developer/coder that became a successful BA. However, I guess at the end of the day the key thing is whether the person has the right BA skills and they have the suitable personality and exceptional communications skills to enable them to work with a very wide variety of people. and the attention to detail and patience to capture requirements and processes successfully.

Yes. Now, with that said, the project may be minimal and only require the Lead for the particular group to wear the BA hat. Generally, the team performing the work utilizes their own BA, but there are times when the requirements are written from the requesting teams BA. It really depends, but as a rule, the BA should have a place in every project. The BA has many relationships and experiences which will help to validate or deflect a potential project. Does the initiative roll up to a larger initiative, or is better suited under another team?
All companies are structured differently, depending on if Projectized, Matrix, or Functional will also have an impact.