What Is A Business Analyst?

10 Nov 2014 14:52
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What Is A Business Analyst?

I was recently asked to define the role of a business analyst. People generally get what a developer ("writes code"), tester ("tests code") and project manager ("GANTT charts") do. Isn't that sufficient to deliver systems on time and on budget? Maybe, but what about those tricky things called "requirements"?

I wrote a short paper which identifies key tasks and success factors related to the ill-defined project role of a “business analyst”. It is based from on my own professional work experience as a business analyst over the past 20 years, across a variety of organisations (software firms, multi-national investment banks) and domain areas within the investment banking industry (buy-side, sell-side, front / middle / back office).

In conclusion, requirements elicitation and management should be considered a separate engineering discipline, alongside the more well-known roles. The business analyst role needs specific skills and training to be effective. The most effective practitioners recognise that the core tasks of requirement elicitation and capture are actually rooted in core engineering disciplines and principles of quantification, decomposition (of complex things into simpler, atomic statements) and
validation.

Please download and read the full What Is A Business Analyst? paper.

Please get in touch to discuss further, or leave comments below.

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