Wednesday, January 2, 2008

So what does a business analyst do for a living?

I keep drawing curious looks when i tell people that I work as a Business Analyst. What do you do exactly as a business Analyst? they ask. Do you sell software?

I tell them that i manage the requirements for the project. Which in a sense involves "Creating a shared understanding" between the project sponsors and the tech people.

Note the stress on "Creating a Shared Understanding". Without a clear direction of what needs to be done there would be utter chaos. And my job is exactly to ensure that we never face such a situation. But then the world is not always perfect.

Creating is not enough, it should be documented and agreed upon. The level of documentation would depend on various factors like the methodology being followed, size of the project etc.

The next big question is "How does one create a shared Understanding?" Now this is something which will take some time to be explained. In fact it is not one single way of creating a shared understanding. I would be blogging posts about this later in more detail.

Be warned! the job does not end at just creating a shared understanding. An Analyst would be associated with the project throughout it's life cycle.

The Analyst has to ensure all the requirements are well covered in the designs. This would require the analyst to have some level of technical understanding.

The Analyst will be extensively involved in the development activity to ensure all developers are in sync with the requirements, and know what they are supposed to do.

This may also involve testing the functionality of the developers work, reviewing the test cases for the various features involved, ensuring all requirements are developed and tested. No one likes to give a buggy software do they (Unless you work in Microsoft)?

Ultimately if all goes well, the analyst would prepare for the release of the project.

This would involve preparing for the User Acceptance Test -The sponsors would definitely not accept the software blindly without conducting some tests on it to ensure it's of high quality and it satisfies all the shared understanding we had created and agreed upon initially. An analyst would also have to prepare for the training needs of the software, deployment of the software etc.

All said and done, this would be the some of the roles of a Business Analyst in an Ideal world scenario. But then---"The world's not always perfect".

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