Business Analysis

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Essential Skills for Business
Analysis

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Business Analysis
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Research & learning about business needs for:

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– Software solution
– Business process re-design/ re-engineering
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– Strategic Analysis of Organization/ Dept.

“…Business analysis is the set of tasks and

techniques used to work as a liaison among
stakeholders in order to understand the structure,
policies, and operations of an organization, and
recommend solutions that enable organizations to
achieve its goals…”

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Projects

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 Non IT Projects
– Buying laptops for new hires
– Starting a Call Center

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– Build an ATM Machine
 IT
– Create a website
– Application to file Taxes
– Develop the software for ATM machine

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Project Management Office

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A Project Management Office (PMO) is a group or

department within a business, agency or enterprise that
defines and maintains standards for project management
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within the organization. The primary goal of a PMO is to

achieve benefits from standardizing and following project
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management policies, processes, and methods. Over time,

a PMO generally will become the source for guidance,
documentation, and metrics related to the practices
involved in managing and implementing projects within
the organization.

 PMO Lead- Manager or Dept Head of the PMO

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Business Sponsor

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The project sponsor is the executive who
manages, administers, monitors, funds, and
is responsible for the overall project
delivery.

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Stakeholder/ Customer/ Business

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A stakeholder is any person or institution

who:
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– has a controlling influence in the program

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– benefits in some way from the program

– has an interest in the process and/or outcome
of the program
– has resources invested in the program, or
– has other programs that may depend on the
effectiveness of the language program.

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Project Manager
 A person with authority to manage a project.

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 Project managers have the responsibility of the
planning, execution, and closing of any project,
typically relating to construction industry,

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architecture, computer networking,
telecommunications or software development.
Project Managers are also in charge of the
progress and performance of the project on
behalf of the Project Owner.

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Business Analyst
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IT Business analysts study the overall business and information needs of an

organization in order to develop solutions to business and related technology
problems.
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“ IT Business analysts are the liaison between technology staff and

management.”
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It is an internal consultancy role that has the responsibility for investigating

business systems, identifying options for improving business systems and
bridging the needs of the business with the use of IT

A business analyst's job usually starts prior to the system design, building
and programming stages of the systems development process.

Business analyst are also needed for your changing business environment as
upgrades, new software, or new departments that need to integrate into
existing systems are always part of the ever changing world.

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Software Development Team
 Software Architect – a person in a team who will develop the design of the software

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product taking into account customer’s requirements. This person is not only a skillful
software developer. Design Architect is a "guru" who is able to work out software
architecture for any complex system.

 Designer – a creative person who is responsible for product look-and-feel taking into
account customer’s requirements. He should be a ‘hybrid’ designer who doesn’t strain
at Photoshop and can write CSS-code. He should be familiar with visual design as
well as with web standards, should be a professional in usability, universal design,

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accessibility, etc.

 Software Developer – a person in a team who will develop the product. Software
Developer should be an expert in various spheres of software development (mobile
application development, web application development) and should study all the time
to improve his knowledge and competence. But at the same time, he should be a good
team player.

 Deployment (Deploy)- The deployment role is the one which packages up all of the
compiled code and configuration files and deploys it through the appropriate
environments or on the appropriate systems. The deployment role is focused on
getting the solution used.
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Quality Assurance
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The inspection, testing, and other

relevant actions taken (often by
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an owner or his representative) to

ensure that the desired level of
quality is in accordance with the
applicable standards or
specifications for the product or
work.

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Scope of Project

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Scope is the term used to describe the
boundaries of the project.

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Project Life Cycle
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Goals of Business Analysis

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 Reduce waste
 Create solutions
 Complete projects on time

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 Improve efficiency
 Document the right requirements

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BA Deliverables
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Sub Disciplines- BA

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 Enterprise analysis
 Requirements planning and management
 Requirements Gathering/ Elicitation

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 Requirements Analysis
 Requirements Documentation
 Requirements communication
 Requirements Validation

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Enterprise Analysis
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Focuses on understanding the needs of the

business as a whole, its strategic direction, and
identifying initiatives that will allow a
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business to meet those strategic goals. It also

includes:
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 Conducting feasibility studies

 Identifying new business opportunities

 Scoping and defining new business opportunities

 Preparing the business case

 Conducting the initial risk assessment

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Requirements Planning &
Management

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 Involves planning the requirements
development process, determining which
requirements are the highest priority for
implementation, and managing change.

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Requirements Elicitation
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 Definition: To draw forth/ call out

 Techniques to elicit requirements
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– Document Analysis
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– Observation
– Interviews
– Brainstorming
– Requirements workshop
– Prototyping

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 Requirements Analysis
Analysis generates requirements attributes that are used to manage the project
thereafter. Analysis activities include:

§ Classifying requirements – Grouping requirements into logical entities for

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planning, reporting, and tracking. Classification can be done on a number of
dimensions including source, type, priority , risk, scope, volatility.

§ Prioritizing requirements – Establishing the relative importance and risk of each

requirement, and specifying an implementation priority

§ Conceptual modeling – To aid in understanding the problem. Some types of

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models typically used are data and control flow charts, state models, event traces, user
interactions, and object models.

§ Architectural design and requirements allocation – Deriving architecture of the

solution and allocating requirements to subsystems (assigning responsibility for
satisfying requirements to subsystems).

§ Requirements negotiation – Another name for conflict resolution. Addresses

problems with requirements where conflicts occur between stakeholders wanting
incompatible features, or conflicts between requirements and resources, or between
capabilities and constraints.

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Requirements Documentation
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Documents can be in various form:

– Textual
– Matrix
– Diagrams
– Models
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Eight Characteristics of Good Requirements

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 Complete - All that is needed is stated.

 Clear - They are unambiguous.
 Consistent - They do not contradict other requirements.
 Certifiable - They can be verified and validated.
 Chosen - They have been ranked as to importance.
 Chaseable - They can be traced forward and backwards.
 Credible - What is asked for is technically possible.
 Clean - They do not have any implementation decisions.
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 Validate Requirements
The goal of requirements validation is to seek out and correct problems before
resources are committed to implementing the requirements.

It is concerned with examining the requirements to certify that they meet the
stakeholders’ intentions, and to ensure that they define the right system, the

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essence of the agreement and understandings between developer and acquirer
about what to build, in a manner that ensures a common understanding across
the project team and among the stakeholders.

Key activities of requirements validation are:

§ Conduct requirements reviews to validate that requirements are correct,

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unambiguous, complete, consistent, ranked for importance, verifiable
(testable), modifiable, and traceable.

§ Use prototyping to validate requirements. Prototypes demonstrate

assumptions and actual understandings and can alert the team to mismatches
between the written requirement and the interpretation carried forward in the
prototype

§ Validate the conceptual models developed during analysis

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Plan how each requirement will be verified (establish acceptance tests)
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Requirements Communication
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 Describes techniques for ensuring that

stakeholders have a shared understanding
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of the requirements and how they will be

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implemented.

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Business Analysis Techniques
 PESTLE
This is used to perform an external environmental analysis by examining
the many different external factors affecting an organization.

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– Political (Current and potential influences from political pressures)
– Economic (The local, national and world economy impact)
– Sociological (The ways in which a society can affect an organization)
– Technological (The effect of new and emerging technology)
–

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Legal (The effect of national and world legislation)
– Environmental (The local, national and world environmental issues)
 MOST
This is used to perform an internal environmental analysis by defining
the attributes of MOST to ensure that the project you are working on
is aligned to each of the 4 attributes.

– Mission (where the business intends to go)

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–
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Objectives (the key goals which will help achieve the mission)
Strategies (options for moving forward)
Tactics (how strategies are put into action)
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BA Techniques- Cont’d
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 SWOT
This is used to help focus activities into areas of strength and where the
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greatest opportunities lie. This is used to identify the dangers that

take the form of weaknesses and both internal and external threats.
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– Strengths - What are the advantages? What is currently done well? (e.g.
key area of best-performing activities of your company)
– Weaknesses - What could be improved? What is done badly? (e.g. key
area where you are performing poorly)
– Opportunities - What good opportunities face the organization? (e.g. key
area where your competitors are performing poorly)
– Threats - What obstacles does the organization face? (e.g. key area
where your competitor will perform well)

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Requirements
 Definition

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– A condition/ capability needed by a stakeholder to solve a
problem
– A documented representation of a condition/ capability
 Types of Requirements

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– Business Requirement
– Functional Requirement
– Non Functional Requirement
– Technical Requirement
– User/ Stake holder Requirements
– Implementation Requirements

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Business requirements
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What the needed achievements will be, and the

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quality measures. They are usually expressed in

terms of broad outcomes the business requires,
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rather than specific functions the system may

perform. Specific design elements are usually
outside the scope of this document, although
design standards may be referenced.
 Example: Improve the readability of project
plans.

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 Functional requirements
Describe what the system, process, or product/service must

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do in order to fulfill the business requirements. Note that
the business requirements often can be broken up into
sub-business requirements and many functional
requirements. These are often referred to as System
Requirements although some functionality could be

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manual and not system based, e.g., create notes or work
instructions.
 An example that follows from previous business
requirement example:
 The system shall provide the ability to associate notes to a project
plan.
 The system shall allow the user to enter free text to the project plan
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notes, up to 255 characters in length.
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User (stakeholder) requirements

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 Reflect how the product will be designed

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and developed, and define how test cases

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must be formulated. However,

stakeholders may not always be users of a
system.

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 Non-functional (Quality-of-service)
requirements

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Requirements that do not perform a specific
function for the business requirement but
are needed to support the functionality.

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 For example: performance, scalability,
quality of service (QoS), security and
usability. These are often included within
the System Requirements, where
applicable.
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Implementation requirements
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Capabilities or behaviors required only to

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enable transition from the current state of

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the enterprise to the desired future state,

but that will thereafter no longer be
required.

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