Business Analysts must analyze and synthesize information provided by a large number of people who interact with the

business, such as customers, staff, IT professionals, and executives. The Business Analyst is responsible for eliciting the actual needs of stakeholders, not simply their expressed desires. In many cases, the Business Analyst will also work to facilitate communication between organizational units. In particular, Business Analysts often play a central role in aligning the needs of business units with the capabilities delivered by information technology, and may serve as a translator between those groups. A Business Analyst is responsible for knowing what the goal of a project is, how to achieve it, managing any changes to the goal and ensuring that all deliverables are aligned with the goal.

Organizations need to focus on strategic matters on a more or less continuous basis in the modern business world. Business analysts, serving this need, are well-versed in analyzing the strategic profile of the organization and its environment, advising senior management on suitable policies, and the effects of policy decisions. Organizations may need to introduce change to solve business problems which may have been identified by the strategic analysis, referred to above. Business analysts contribute by analyzing objectives, processes and resources, and suggesting ways by which re-design (BPR), or improvements (BPI) could be made. Particular skills of this type of analyst are "soft skills", such as knowledge of the business, requirements engineering, stakeholder analysis, and some "hard skills", such as business process modeling. Although the role requires an awareness of technology and its uses, it is not an IT-focused role. Three elements are essential to this aspect of the business analysis effort: the redesign of core business processes; the application of enabling technologies to support the new core processes; and the management of organizational change. This aspect of business analysis is also called "business process improvement" (BPI), or "reengineering". There is the need to align IT Development with the systems actually running in production for the Business. A long-standing problem in business is how to get the best return from IT investments, which are generally very expensive and of critical, often strategic, importance. IT departments, aware of the problem, often create a business analyst role to better understand, and define the requirements for their IT systems. Although there may be some overlap with the developer and testing roles, the focus is always on the IT part of the change process, and generally, this type of business analyst gets involved, only when a case for change has already been made and decided upon. In any case, the term "analyst" is lately considered somewhat misleading, insofar as analysts (i.e. problem investigators) also do design work (solution definers).

The role of Business Analysis can exist in a variety of structures within an organizational framework. Because Business Analysts typically act as a liaison between the business and technology functions of a company, the role can be often successful either aligned to a line of business, within IT or sometimes both. Business Alignment When Business Analysts report up through the business side, they are often subject matter experts for a specific line of business. These Business Analysts typically work solely on project work for a particular business, pulling in Business Analysts from other areas for cross-functional projects. In this case, there are usually Business Systems Analysts on the IT side to focus on more technical requirements. IT Alignment In many cases, Business Analysts live solely within IT and they focus on both business and systems requirements for a project, consulting with various SMEs to ensure thorough understanding. Depending on the organizational structure, Business Analysts may be aligned to a specific development lab or they might be grouped together in a resource pool and allocated to various projects based on availability and expertise. The former builds specific subject matter expertise while the latter provides the ability to acquire cross-functional knowledge. Business Analysis Center of Excellence Whether Business Analysts are grouped together or are dispersed in terms of reporting structure, many companies have created Business Analysis Centers of Excellence. A Center of Excellence provides a framework by which all Business Analysts in an organization conduct their work, usually consisting of processes, procedures, templates and best practices. In additional to providing guidelines and deliverables, it also provides a forum to focus on continuous improvement for the Business Analysis function.

A business process improvement (BPI) typically involves six steps: 1. Selection of process teams and leader Process teams, comprising 2-4 employees from various departments that are involved in the particular process, is set up. Each team selects a process team leader, typically the person who is responsible for running the respective process. 2. Process analysis training The selected process team members are trained in process analysis and documentation techniques. 3. Process analysis interview The members of the process teams conduct several interviews with people
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working along the processes. During the interview, they gather information about process structure, as well as process performance data. 4. Process documentation The interview results are used to draw a first process map. Previously existing process descriptions are reviewed and integrated, wherever possible. Possible process improvements, discussed during the interview, are integrated into the process maps. 5. Review cycle The draft documentation is then reviewed by the employees working in the process. Additional review cycles may be necessary in order to achieve a common view (mental image) of the process with all concerned employees. This stage is an iterative process. 6. Problem analysis A thorough analysis of process problems can then be conducted, based on the process map, and information gathered about the process. At this time of the project, process goal information from the strategy audit is available as well, and is used to derive measures for process improvement.

Includes the following steps: 1. Business definition 2. Understand business domain(s) 3. Organization goals 4. Core competence 5. Competitive stance

Ultimately, business analysis wants to achieve the following outcomes:

Reduce waste Create solutions Complete projects on time Improve efficiency Document the right requirements

One way to assess these goals is to measure the return on investment (ROI) for all projects. According to Forrester Research, more than $100 billion is spent annually in the U.S. on custom and internally developed software projects. For all of these software development projects, keeping accurate data is important and business leaders are constantly asking for the return or ROI on
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a proposed project or at the conclusion of an active project. However, asking for the ROI without sufficient data of where value is created or destroyed may result with inaccurate projections.

Project delays are costly in two different dimensions: Project costs For every month of delay, the project team continues to rack up costs and expenses. When a large part of the development team has been outsourced, the costs will start to add up quickly and are very visible if contracted on a time and materials basis (T&M). Fixed price contracts with external parties limit this risk. For internal resources, the costs of delays are not as readily apparent, unless time spent by resources is being tracked against the project, as labor costs are essentially fixed costs.

Opportunity costs Opportunity costs come in two flavors lost revenue and unrealized expense reductions. Some projects are specifically undertaken with the purpose of driving new or additional revenues to the bottom line. For every month of delay, a company foregoes a month of this new revenue stream. The purpose of other projects is to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. Again, each month of failure postpones the realization of these expense reductions by another month. In the vast majority of cases, these opportunities are never captured or analyzed, resulting in misleading ROI calculations. Of the two opportunity costs, the lost revenue is the most egregious and the impacts are greater and longer lasting.

N.B. On a lot of projects (particularly larger ones) the project manager is the one tasked with ensuring that a project is completed on time. The BA's job is more to ensure that if a project is not completed on time then at least the highest priority requirements are met.

Business analysts want to make sure that they define the application in a way that meets the end-users needs. Essentially, they want to define the right application. This means that they must document the right requirements through listening carefully to customer feedback, and by delivering a complete set of clear requirements to the technical architects and coders who will write the program. If a business analyst has limited tools or skills to help him elicit the right requirements, then the chances are fairly high that he will end up documenting requirements that will not be used or that will need to be re-written resulting in rework as discussed below. The time wasted to document unnecessary requirements not only impacts the business analyst, it also impacts the rest of the development cycle. Coders need to generate application code to perform these unnecessary requirements and testers need to make sure that the wanted features actually work as documented and coded. Experts estimate that 10% to 40% of the features in new software applications are unnecessary or go unused. Being able to reduce the amount of these extra features by even one-third can result in significant savings.
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Efficiency can be achieved in two ways: by reducing rework and by shortening project length. Rework is a common industry headache and it has become so common at many organizations that it is often built into project budgets and time lines. It generally refers to extra work needed in a project to fix errors due to incomplete or missing requirements and can impact the entire software development process from definition to coding and testing. The need for rework can be reduced by ensuring that the requirements gathering and definition processes are thorough and by ensuring that the business and technical members of a project are involved in these processes from an early stage. Shortening project length presents two potential benefits. For every month that a project can be shortened, project resource costs can be diverted to other projects. This can lead to savings on the current project and lead to earlier start times of future projects (thus increasing revenue potential).

Systematic requirements analysis is also known as requirements engineering.[3] It is sometimes referred to loosely by names such as requirements gathering, requirements capture, or requirements specification. The term requirements analysis can also be applied specifically to the analysis proper, as opposed to elicitation or documentation of the requirements, for instance. Requirements Engineering can be divided into discrete chronological steps:

Requirements elicitation, Requirements analysis and negotiation, Requirements specification, System modeling, Requirements validation, Requirements management.

Requirement engineering according to Laplante (2007) is "a subdiscipline of systems engineering and software engineering that is concerned with determining the goals, functions, and constraints of hardware and software systems."[4] In some life cycle models, the requirement engineering process begins with a feasibility study activity, which leads to a feasibility report. If the feasibility study suggests that the product should be developed, then requirement analysis can begin. If requirement analysis precedes feasibility studies, which may foster outside the box thinking, then feasibility should be determined before requirements are finalized.

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challenged and removed. (October 2009)

See Stakeholder analysis for a discussion of business uses. Stakeholders (SH) are people or organizations (legal entities such as companies, standards bodies) that have a valid interest in the system. They may be affected by it either directly or indirectly. A major new emphasis in the 1990s was a focus on the identification of stakeholders. It is increasingly recognized that stakeholders are not limited to the organization employing the analyst. Other stakeholders will include:

anyone who operates the system (normal and maintenance operators) anyone who benefits from the system (functional, political, financial and social beneficiaries) anyone involved in purchasing or procuring the system. In a mass-market product organization, product management, marketing and sometimes sales act as surrogate consumers (mass-market customers) to guide development of the product organizations which regulate aspects of the system (financial, safety, and other regulators) people or organizations opposed to the system (negative stakeholders; see also Misuse case) organizations responsible for systems which interface with the system under design those organizations who integrate horizontally with the organization for whom the analyst is designing the system

Stakeholder interviews are a common technique used in requirement analysis. Though they are generally idiosyncratic in nature and focused upon the perspectives and perceived needs of the stakeholder, very often without larger enterprise or system context, this perspective deficiency has the general advantage of obtaining a much richer understanding of the stakeholder's unique business processes, decision-relevant business rules, and perceived needs. Consequently this technique can serve as a means of obtaining the highly focused knowledge that is often not elicited in Joint Requirements Development sessions, where the stakeholder's attention is compelled to assume a more cross-functional context. Moreover, the in-person nature of the interviews provides a more relaxed environment where lines of thought may be explored at length.

Requirements often have cross-functional implications that are unknown to individual stakeholders and often missed or incompletely defined during stakeholder interviews. These cross-functional implications can be elicited by conducting JRD sessions in a controlled environment, facilitated by a trained
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facilitator, wherein stakeholders participate in discussions to elicit requirements, analyze their details and uncover cross-functional implications. A dedicated scribe and Business Analyst should be present to document the discussion. Utilizing the skills of a trained facilitator to guide the discussion frees the Business Analyst to focus on the requirements definition process. JRD Sessions are analogous to Joint Application Design Sessions. In the former, the sessions elicit requirements that guide design, whereas the latter elicit the specific design features to be implemented in satisfaction of elicited requirements.

One traditional way of documenting requirements has been contract style requirement lists. In a complex system such requirements lists can run to hundreds of pages. An appropriate metaphor would be an extremely long shopping list. Such lists are very much out of favour in modern analysis; as they have proved spectacularly unsuccessful at achieving their aims; but they are still seen to this day. Strengths

Provides a checklist of requirements. Provide a contract between the project sponsor(s) and developers. For a large system can provide a high level description.

Weaknesses

Such lists can run to hundreds of pages. It is virtually impossible to read such documents as a whole and have a coherent understanding of the system. Such requirements lists abstract all the requirements and so there is little context.

This abstraction makes it impossible to see how the requirements fit or work together. This abstraction makes it difficult to prioritize requirements properly; while a list does make it easy to prioritize each individual item, removing one item out of context can render an entire use case or business requirement useless. This abstraction increases the likelihood of misinterpreting the requirements; as more people read them, the number of (different) interpretations of the envisioned system increase. This abstraction means that it's extremely difficult to be sure that you have the majority of the requirements. Necessarily, these documents speak in generality; but the devil, as they say, is in the details.

These lists create a false sense of mutual understanding between the stakeholders and developers.
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These contract style lists give the stakeholders a false sense of security that the developers must achieve certain things. However, due to the nature of these lists, they inevitably miss out crucial requirements which are identified later in the process. Developers can use these discovered requirements to renegotiate the terms and conditions in their favour. These requirements lists are no help in system design, since they do not lend themselves to application. Alternative to requirement lists As an alternative to the large, pre-defined requirement lists Agile Software Development uses User stories to define a requirement in every day language.

Main article: Goal modeling Best practices take the composed list of requirements merely as clues and repeatedly ask "why?" until the actual business purposes are discovered. Stakeholders and developers can then devise tests to measure what level of each goal has been achieved thus far. Such goals change more slowly than the long list of specific but unmeasured requirements. Once a small set of critical, measured goals has been established, rapid prototyping and short iterative development phases may proceed to deliver actual stakeholder value long before the project is half over.

In the mid-1980s, prototyping was seen as the best solution to the requirements analysis problem. Prototypes are Mockups of an application. Mockups allow users to visualize an application that hasn't yet been constructed. Prototypes help users get an idea of what the system will look like, and make it easier for users to make design decisions without waiting for the system to be built. Major improvements in communication between users and developers were often seen with the introduction of prototypes. Early views of applications led to fewer changes later and hence reduced overall costs considerably. However, over the next decade, while proving a useful technique, prototyping did not solve the requirements problem:

Managers, once they see a prototype, may have a hard time understanding that the finished design will not be produced for some time. Designers often feel compelled to use patched together prototype code in the real system, because they are afraid to 'waste time' starting again. Prototypes principally help with design decisions and user interface design. However, they can not tell you what the requirements originally were. Designers and end-users can focus too much on user interface design and too little on producing a system that serves the business process.

Prototypes work well for user interfaces, screen layout and screen flow but are not so useful for batch or asynchronous processes which may involve complex database updates and/or calculations. Prototypes can be flat diagrams (often referred to as wireframes) or working applications using synthesized functionality. Wireframes are made in a variety of graphic design documents, and often remove all color from the design (i.e. use a greyscale colour palette) in instances where the final software is expected to have graphic design applied to it. This helps to prevent confusion over the final visual look and feel of the application

There are five maturity levels. However, maturity level ratings are awarded for levels 2 through 5. The process areas below and their maturity levels are listed for the CMMI for Development model:

CM - Configuration Management MA - Measurement and Analysis PMC - Project Monitoring and Control PP - Project Planning PPQA - Process and Product Quality Assurance REQM - Requirements Management SAM - Supplier Agreement Management

DAR - Decision Analysis and Resolution IPM - Integrated Project Management OPD - Organizational Process Definition OPF - Organizational Process Focus OT - Organizational Training PI - Product Integration RD - Requirements Development. RSKM - Risk Management. TS - Technical Solution. VAL - Validation. VER - Verification.

OPP - Organizational Process Performance QPM - Quantitative Project Management

CAR - Causal Analysis and Resolution OPM - Organizational Performance Management

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The process areas below and their maturity levels are listed for the CMMI for Services model:

CM - Configuration Management MA - Measurement and Analysis PPQA - Process and Product Quality Assurance REQM - Requirements Management SAM - Supplier Agreement Management SD - Service Delivery WMC - Work Monitoring and Control WP - Work Planning

CAM - Capacity and Availability Management DAR - Decision Analysis and Resolution IRP - Incident Resolution and Prevention IWM - Integrated Work Management OPD - Organizational Process Definition OPF - Organizational Process Focus OT - Organizational Training RSKM - Risk Management SCON - Service Continuity SSD - Service System Development SST - Service System Transition STSM - Strategic Service Management

OPP - Organizational Process Performance QWM - Quantitative Work Management

CAR - Causal Analysis and Resolution OPM - Organizational Performance Management

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