I notice when I talk about Business Analysis people often have a very fuzzy idea of what I’m talking about. And the deeper I go into defining the profession from a general perspective, the fuzzier it gets.

That’s why I decided to write down the things I personally do on a day-to-day basis, and I hope this will help build a better picture for the uninitiated. Other BAs might do different things, but usually there a level of similarity, otherwise there would not be a name for the profession.

1. Documentation – Most known and usually most tedious BA activity. The problem I’m trying to avoid with this is to have 5 team members and 3 major stakeholders and amongst them 15 different ideas what we are actually doing. The Business Requirements Specification is a tool for avoiding this, but not the only one and often falls short of achieving the objective.

2. Process Analysis – I don’t do enterprise analysis, at least not on my current position. What I do is more focused – when we change the systems people will change their work process. What I’m trying to describe is how things are done now (the AS-IS point of view) and how the work will be done after the change (the TO-BE process). The purpose here is to demonstrate to the team what the changes we are making will actually achieve. It also visualizes in front of stakeholders in detail what business result they have requested.

3. Requirements Elicitation/Analysis – A key task in my job, this is the description of what system changes we are actually going to make. The task here is to translate the general and unclear requests into detailed description of what is needed and is going to be done. I need to be at least somewhat familiar with the current system designs, since some (actually most) initial requirements are unreasonable and waiting for the developers to tell me that takes too much time.

4. Requirements change management – Extremely unpleasant topic for all involved. Means that me and the stakeholders have forgot something or a stakeholder has simply changed their mind. So we need to reanalyze all the wok done so fore – requirements dependency, project scope and price, requirements documentation and communication. Since most of the team works on many projects at once and we have no constant communication, spreading the new information to everyone is a demanding task.

5. Priorities – All requirements matter but some matter more.  With limited resources at disposal my work includes proposing or making decisions related to what will be developed now, what will wait the next development cycle and what will be done in the bright distant future when the world becomes a perfect place and all our wishes come true.

6. Project Management – I highly value PMs for all they do – organizing meetings, taking hard decisions, negotiating deadlines, monitoring deadlines and so on. Most often, however, I have the dubious privilege to substitute for them. Since as a BA I have clear picture of requirements and keep constant contact with stakeholders I am the usual suspect for filling the role of PM for the project. If you ever need to convince someone it’s important that each project has a PM – let him substitute for a while and he/she will quickly come around. I guess that’s the reason PMs are the strongest supporters of the BA profession – for similar reasons they do our job when we are not around.

That’s all I can thing of on the spot. If you can thing of things you do as a BA (and probably me too, but can’t recall at the moment) feel free to add to the list.

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• The role of the Business Analyst – poll results

I wrote a post in Bulgarian about the role of the business analyst in a software development team and I put a poll to survey how the people in the software development business in Bulgaria evaluate it. Now the poll is closed and I am giving you the results.

Question: How do you evaluate the role of the business analyst in your team?
Total votes: 27 (little but I still have few readers).

Answers:

1. Very important role. The BA investigates the customer’s needs and represent them before the team – 14 votes (52%)
2. All roles are equal. The BA is responsible for the functional (requirements) specification, which the developers implement – 6 votes (22%)
3. We don’t need such a person. The developers do the client’s business analysis themselves – 4 votes (15%)
4. What is a “business analyst”? – 3 votes (11%)
5. He just hangs around here and looks silly. He cannot write a simple JavaScript – 0 votes (0%)

How to interpret the results? Obviously, the first thing that has to be noted is the small number of the votes. For me, the main reason is the fact that still very few people visit my blog and most of them weren’t impressed by the poll. I think I will open it again in the future when there will be more visitors to my blog.

Anyway, the good news is that despite the few voters, the results show that the position of the business analyst exists in the software teams nowadays and it is appreciated positively. No matter if considered as very important (answer #1) or considered equal to all the others (answer #2), the business analyst takes his/her well-deserved place in the software team (totally 20 votes for both answers, which gives around 74%)

Answer #5 is rude and represents the vulgar and arrogant attitude of some developers to the surrounding world that doesn’t write code. I am glad that nobody voted for it. It probably means that this attitude was already buried in the past.

Answer #4 is a little silly. How can you be a self-respecting developer and not know what a business analyst is? I put this answer on purpose with the intention to be chosen for fun and to make the poll more colorful. I believe that this was the intention of the three guys who voted for it. And if they really don’t know what this is – keep on reading here – there will be more posts devoted to the job of the BA.

The most interesting answer for me is answer #3. It has a double meaning. There are companies, on one hand, that work on small projects or such that work on products and don’t use project principles at all. In such companies, every developer, having been working long time on the same product and having been communicating with the field experts from the business area being automated, gradually begins to gain exactly that knowledge and experience, which make him or her a business analyst. And if you add the aspiration of the company for more exploitation of its employees we come to a natural merging of the role of the BA with the role of the software developer in one person.

However, there is another interpretation. The team (or the company) could consist only of “great programmers” – people who think they know, understand, and can do everything. It was the ideal of the past socialist society in Bulgaria – so called “multi-dimensionally developed persons” – people who believe that a developer should be skilled in every aspect of the software business and there is no need of a narrow specialization in particular areas like business analysis, project management, testing, user education, etc. The developer can do everything!

I really would like to know what were the reasons to vote for this answer. I hope some of the voters will post a comment about it. And if you have an opinion about the role of the business analyst in your team – please, share it with me. It will be useful.

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