A Complete Guide for Business Analysis

Business Analysis

Business analysis involves identifying business needs and determining solutions to business problems. The solutions often include a software-systems development component, but may also consist of process improvements, organizational change, or strategic planning. The person who carries out this task is called a business analyst or BA.

The good practices followed by a business analyst are as follows:

Stakeholder Management

Stakeholder management is the most crucial part of business analysis and the majority of the efforts are required to gather information and make the right decisions. Stakeholder management is done in the best possible way with harmony. The business analyst should be good at identifying the right stakeholders and engaging them to gather requirements and understand the current landscape. For example, if the stakeholders are from the architect community, then a business analyst needs their guidance to create a possible solution. The stakeholders must be enabled to make the right decisions.

The business analyst acts as a bridge between business and IT stakeholders to create an end-to-end process. Depending upon the target solution, the gaps between the current or as-is process and the future or to-be process are identified to provide requirements. This exercise is also called gap-analysis as well.  

Due-Diligence

Due-Diligence is performed during planning or in case of a business problem by a business analyst. It is the act of seeing and reviewing all the processes, systems, and people. A report is created to understand the landscape and it is imperative. It includes an as-is process and it is performed at the beginning of the consulting assignment. Based on it, the business analyst provides input for the project.

Process Mapping

A user journey is the journey of a customer or end-user while interacting with an application. Process mapping is a powerful tool that enables a business analyst to create a picture of the entire life-cycle of a user with the application in the form of process maps. The swim lanes are used to indicate multiple systems, users, or teams involved in the process.

Decommissioning of a Platform

The meaning of decommissioning is to retire. If an application or system was built 20 years ago, it might have looked like a milestone for mankind, but the market is dynamic and new platforms are created daily. Removing an old application or a platform and adding a new one is known as decommissioning. It is implemented in the form of a huge investment. For example, one of the banking clients used to have an account origination application which took more than one hour to create a new banking account. Then they came up with a new application that enabled users to originate accounts on 14 screens instead of 44 screens. It caused a considerable reduction in time and along with that the customer experience was enhanced.

Behavioural-Driven Development

Behavioural-driven development is the part of agile methodology where a narrative is written for a story by a business analyst as a person availing benefits from the feature in near future. From the requirement, acceptance criteria are created. Acceptance criteria are the test case coming out of the narrative and it is tested by a Quality Analyst. It focuses on the feature's current condition, future condition and outcome.

Business analysis is a cross-functional discipline that requires collaboration and effective communication between teams. A good business analyst is professional focusing on three perspectives of an organization: people, process, and client.