Business Analysis

last edited by: Peter Wootton on Apr 22, 2024 6:39 AM

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Contents
1 Applications
2 Procedures
3 Instructions
   3.1 Planning
   3.2 Elicitation
   3.3 Managing Requirements
   3.4 Analysis
   3.5 Assess & Validate

Business analysis is an internal consultancy role that has the responsibility for investigating business situations, identifying and evaluating options for improving business systems, defining requirements and ensuring the effective use of information systems in meeting the needs of the business refhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_analysis/ref.

Key solutions that result from business analysis work include process improvement, product development, strategic planning, policy development and organizational change. Business analysts attempt to take holistic views of the proposed situation and use best practices to present solutions. This typically involves examining the organization's people, processes, systems, and structures.

Applications

Identify the business problem or opportunity
Scope the solution
Represent the interests of the stakeholders
Interpret business needs
Document requirements from stakeholders
Test and validation

Procedures

Planning & monitoring
Elicitation
Requirements management & communication
Requirements analysis
Solution assessment and validation

Instructions

A business analyst lifecycle is highly dependent on a number of factors including (but not limited to):

Methodology used
Industry
Culture
Competition

Planning

With that said, the business analysis typically starts by planning the business analysis approach. This usually includes:

Stakeholder analysis
Communication
Key activities
Requirements management processes
Performance

Elicitation

With the business analysis plan in place, the BA moves to elicitation. This activity typically takes up a majority of the analysts time regardless of which methodology they are working with. Key outcomes of this stage include:

Preparation
Conducting elicitation activities via various best practice activities.
Documenting elicitation results
Validating elicitation results

Managing Requirements

As the business analyst is eliciting requirements, they are typically managing those requirements and communicating them in parallel. This includes:

Managing solution scope
Managing requirements
Requirements traceability
Preparing the requirements package
Communicating requirements

Analysis

After some or all of the requirements are elicited and managed (again, depending on the methodology) the business analyst moved on to requirements analysis. This phase has a number of key deliverables essential to the success of the project including:

Organizing requirements
Prioritizing requirements
Modeling requirements
Verify requirements
Validate requirements

Assess & Validate

The final stage of business analysis work is to assess and validate solutions to the business problem using the analysis work done in previous stages. Outcomes from this stage include:

Assess potential solutions
Allocate requirements
Assess organizational preparedness
Determine transition requirements
Validate solution
Evaluate performance