What is a Business Analyst

Now the term Business Analyst is synonymous with a career in the IT industry but the most successful and valuable analysts are individuals who understand the "business" rather than individuals who know IT.

So what exactly is a Business Analyst? What is the Business Analyst's job? What's the ideal background for this particular job? What skill set is necessary? Which kind of person is your best fit? What training is necessary and available? Each organisation seems to have its own ideas about the role, skills, duties and expectations. Given the importance of the occupation, a frequent definition would assist both professionals and employers. In this first part we look at just exactly what a Business Analyst is and explore the growth of the Business Analyst's role.

The contemporary Business Analyst - a definition

First, we need to clarify our vocabulary. One of the most commonly accepted definitions of a Business Analyst(B.A.) is that of a communicator. The B.A. is your connection between the prerequisites (the customer) and the applications alternative (the development team).

The skills demanded by the B.A. are much greater than simply good inter-personal communication skills - a selection of tools and techniques are necessary, as well as an appropriate background and character. Whilst the modern B.A. plays an extremely critical part in software development, the real skills required for success are not technology centric. It is worth noting that the evolution of the B.A. to understand how we came at this.

Evolution of the Business Analyst

In the early days of commercial computing, all of the investigation, development and design work for a software application was performed by the computing specialists, who often had little knowledge of their company they worked in.

During the nineties it became commonplace to employees from the company user community to become more closely involved in computer systems development. This move was designed to ensure that computer-based systems were targeted at the real business issues. The title Business Analyst (B.A.) became common, but there was no commonly-adopted role definition. The team filling this function knew about the company - or the component of it that they functioned in - but they knew little about IT and their analysis skills were often very limited.

Today, the business process analysis, the requirements specification along with also the outline design - plus a lot of the approval testing and procedures implementation function - is performed by the B.A.

He B.A. wants a variety of analysis and creativity skills, process and data modelling abilities, together with demands interpretation and specification-writing abilities. They also need social skills for interviewing and also for top workshops to find out what the clients really want and desire. B.A.'s also need to 'sell' the solution to decision-makers and development teams whilst negotiating and compromising about the three key elements of speed, cost and quality. To quote Arthur C. Clarke - "Do you want it quick, cheap or good? I can give you any two."

In addition to this, B.A.'s will usually be working in groups - they might need team leadership skills and many are expected to accept a project management role. Simply speaking the modern B.A. needs a range of 'hard' skills - process and data modelling, design, specification writing - and a variety of 'soft' skills - evaluation, creativity, interviewing, presentation, negotiation - to perform efficiently.

Surveys have constantly reported that more than 50% of large software projects are over-budget or behind schedule. As recently as October 2002, the Australian Financial Review reported on a Sydney organisation which had halted work on a customer billing system due to cost blow-outs and missed deadlines. More than $70 million had been invested, with only two out of 21 elements of the system delivered. With insufficient, improper or erroneous requirements as a significant contributor to job overruns and failure, the role of a skilled Business Analyst at a project team is more critical than ever.

More Information Here Alastair Majury Dunblane