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What is a Business Analyst? (Part 1)
What is a Business Analyst?
Today the term Business Analyst is synonymous with a career in
the IT industry but the most successful and valuable analysts
are those who understand the "business" rather than those who
understand IT.
So what exactly is a Business Analyst? What is the Business
Analyst's role? What is the best background for this job? What
skill set is required? What type of person is the best fit? What
training is required and available? Each organisation seems to
have its own ideas about the role, skills, responsibilities and
expectations. Given the importance of the job, a common
definition would assist both practitioners and employers. In
this first part we look at just what a Business Analyst is and
explore the evolution of the Business Analyst's role.
The modern 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 communicator. The B.A. is the link between the
requirements (the client) and the software solution (the
development team). The skills required by the B.A. are much more
than just good inter-personal communication skills - a range of
tools and techniques are needed, as well as an appropriate
background and personality. Whilst the modern B.A. performs a
highly critical role in software development, the real skills
needed for success are not technology centric. It's worth
reviewing the evolution of the B.A. to understand how we arrived
at this.
Evolution of the Business Analyst
In the early 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 knowledge of the business they worked in.
During the nineties it became common for staff from the business
user community to become more closely involved in computer
systems development. This move was designed to ensure that
computer-based systems were targeted at the real business
issues. The title Business Analyst (B.A.) became common,
although there was no commonly-adopted role definition. The
staff filling this role knew about the business - or the part of
it that they worked in - but they knew little about IT and their
analysis skills were often very limited.
Today,
the business process analysis, the requirements
specification and the outline design - plus much of the
acceptance testing and systems implementation work - is
performed by the B.A.
The B.A. requires a range of analysis and creativity skills,
data and process modelling skills, together with requirements
interpretation and specification-writing skills. They also need
interpersonal skills for interviewing and for leading workshops
to find out what the clients really want and need. B.A.'s also
have to 'sell' the solution to decision-makers and development
teams whilst negotiating and compromising on the three crucial
elements of speed, cost and quality. To quote Arthur C. Clarke -
"Do you want it quick, cheap or good? I can give you any two."
On top of this, B.A.'s will often be working in teams - they may
need team leadership skills and many are required to take on a
project management role. In short the modern B.A. needs a range
of 'hard' skills - data and process modelling, design,
specification writing - and a range of 'soft' skills - analysis,
creativity, interviewing, presentation, negotiation - to perform
effectively.
Surveys have constantly reported that more than 50% of large
software projects are over-budget or behind schedule. As
recently as October 2002, the Australian Financial Review
reported on a Sydney organisation which had halted work on a
customer billing system due to cost blow-outs and missed
deadlines. More than $70 million had been spent, with only two
out of 21 elements of the system delivered. With inadequate,
inappropriate or inaccurate requirements as a major contributor
to project overruns and failure, the role of a skilled Business
Analyst in a project team is more critical than ever.
This article adapted for the web by Phil Dean,
www.irmtraining.com.au. You may use this article in your
newsletter or internal document free of charge provided that you
do not alter it in any way and that you include the
following:
Written by Derrick Brown and Jan Kusiak ©2002-2005 IRM
Training Pty Ltd ABN 56 007 219 589.
http://www.irmtraining.com.au
About the author:
Phil Dean is Operations Manager for IRM Training
(http://www.irmtraining.com.au), Australia's premier Business
Analysis training company. More articles and white papers can be
downloaded from the IRM website.
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