The Business Analyst is a key agent of organisational change. The role is of increasing importance to organisations. Organisational Agility, the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, has become a major competitive force. Organisations have recognised the importance of investing in roles and skills that can recognise opportunities and threats as well as action successful change.
- The BA identifies and builds the case for business change:
- Understands the organisations strategy, critical success factors and key performance indicators
- Understands and assesses the external environment – opportunities and threats – SWOT analysis
- Develops business case and options
- Investigates the area under review and performs the feasibility study
2. Assesses the impact of those changes:
- Analyses the impact on organisational processes, resources, people and skills
- Accesses the risks – both internally and externally
- Understands, documents and communicates end-to end-process
3. Project initiation and management:
- May contribute to the project’s initiation or closely support senior decision makers
- Contribute to capture and documentation of issues and risks
- Stakeholder management
4. Captures requirements:
- Primary project resource leading the elicitation of requirements using techniques such as interviews, workshops, scenarios, document analysis, observation, questionnaires and prototyping
- Models the current, logical and future processes and captures data requirements
- Analyses requirements to ensure they are feasible, prioritised, unambiguous, not conflicted, testable and not solutionised.
- Document accurate requirements to the agreed standard.
- Validate requirements using various quality control techniques such as walkthroughs, wireframes
- Manages the change to requirements and ensures they are traceable.
5. Supports the communication and the delivery of those requirements:
- Helps to decide delivery phases
- Assists business implementation
- Communicates and protects the requirements
- Communicates with outside suppliers
- Supports user acceptance testing