What's a Business Analyst?

When maintaining or improving a home, having a trusted handyman around that can come and fix or improve things whenever you need is invaluable.

In the world of IT projects the Business Analyst is like the handyman. From the start of the project to the end the Business Analyst plays a critical role in the successful project and delivering outcomes.

Here are the areas where a Business Analyst can make a difference in a project:

VALIDADE ORGANIZATION OBJECTIVES

Projects are used to create changes. That change can significantly improve the abilities and efficiencies of an organization. Without any proper analysis, any attempt of improving the organization can go very badly, resulting in confusing and difficulties to achieve organization objectives.

As a Business Analyst you'll seek to understand the strength and weaknesses your organization uses and then validate any improvements to be implemented by a project.

MANAGE REQUIREMENTS PROCESS

To do this you'll work with your organization team and get into the deep understanding of what your organization is doing today and what will make the organization more efficient. You then capture that information using several of the following tools:

• Flowcharts: Provides step by step "as is" and "to be" processes. This captures what the current state the organization is and what new desired state and outcomes will be.
  
• User stories: Provides a picture of what people in the organization will achieve.
  
• Context diagrams: Describes relations between business areas and clients and how they all fit together.
  

MANAGE RELEVANT CHANGE

This includes validating any changes proposed during the course of the project and promoting changes needed to the organization that is important to fulfill their mission. And ensure that any changes that occur within the organization are appropriately reflected in the project's products.

Lastly, help managing changes to project's deliverables that need to be made as a result of the project change.

When changes are introduced to a project you'll need to adjust the project's schedule and potentially plan costs as well as other items.

With the breadth of knowledge across the project, the Business Analyst is well placed to help with this changes.

MANAGE TESTING

As a Business Analyst, you're typically best placed to ensure that the process and technology products created by the project do what is intended to move the organization forward. As this can require significant knowledge of the people and processes involved in the organization having you as a Business Analyst managing the testing process is efficient and effective.

ENSURE COMPLETION CRITERIA ARE ACCOMPLISHED

All project should be started with the end in mind. The project should then include detailed completion criteria which details what things needs to be accomplished prior to the project to be considered finished.

THE BUSINESS ANALYST

Is usually the person who can look at the overall accomplishments made by the project and the capabilities of the processes and tools produced and determine if those objectives were accomplished as intended.