Business Analysis Process
The complete process of Business Analysis is centered around planning the analysis process, defining the scope, getting detailed requirements, validating the value of these requirements against the project business case, analyzing how to achieve these requirements and lastly documenting them.
A Business Analysis Plan contains the steps to conduct the process, including:
Identifying stakeholders.
The templates of different documents that will be created.
Document validation and review process.
Mode of communications and frequency of analyst with stakeholders.
Tracking and versioning details for the documents.
Project scope defines what all is expected to be achieved to consider the project complete and successful. It includes:
Description of the Project scope.
What is within and what is out of the scope.
Deliverables to be accomplished.
Any constraints against the project.
Assumptions taken for the project.
After defining the project scope statement is defined, it’s time to get as much clear information as possible regarding all the requirements of the project. Elicitation is the part of business analysis when the analyst communicates with all the stakeholders, understand their needs and documents the requirements of the solution that needs to be developed.
The business analyst will conduct interviews, workshops and observations to get requirements out of the stakeholders.
Once the requirements are captured, they should be validated against the business case of the project.
Up to now the process has focused on ‘what’ the solution is expected to achieve but it is
equally important to define ‘how’ these requirements will be achieved. The elaboration of this ‘how’ is a part of the Analyze Requirements process. Let’s go through the things that are the part of this process:
Prioritize the requirements for their validity and any associated risks
Consider inter-dependencies between requirements
Create a data model
Create the process flow diagram
Create a process interface model
Validate the correctness of the requirements
Once the requirements are properly elicited and analyzed, it’s time for them to get Documented. Both technical knowledge and writing skills are very important. With many audiences of the documents belonging to different functions in an organization, care should be taken while documenting requirements. Consider:
They should be crisp, clear and concise, written in a simple language.
In case of usage of technical terms, they should be defined in the glossary.
Documents should be reviewed for their correctness and exactness.
Requirement documents should be validated and approved by the key stakeholders.