The capacity of a person to facilitate organizational changes to meet stakeholder needs is known as business analysis. This phrase often refers to the process of monitoring company requirements and creating solutions to meet them. These methods are employed to develop a suitable plan and implement the change. Understanding an organization's structure, processes, rules, and operations is key to developing business analysis abilities.
Business Analysis Definition
Business analysis is the practice of:
- Understanding the structures and policies of an organization
- Recommending solutions that enable the organization to achieve its strategic goals
- Working as a liaison between stakeholders and IT departments
So, now you guys know what business analysis means. Different governing bodies such as the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), Project Management Institute (PMI), and British Computer Society (BCS) have helped to standardize the Business Analysis profession. Let’s take a look at the BA definitions from these groups that are setting current standards.
According to IIBA, International Institute of Business Analysis, “Business Analysis is the practice of enabling change in an organizational context, by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.”
According to PMI, Project Management Institute, “Business Analysis is Identifying business needs. Recommending relevant solutions. Working with stakeholders to elicit requirements. Analyzing, defining, documenting, and managing requirements.”
Why is Business Analysis Helpful?
Business analysis plays a vital role in every organization. It helps in identifying business needs/requirements and formulating the solutions for any business problems. Business analysis helps in improving the effectiveness of IT with better alignment between business and technical needs. It helps to identify and articulate the need for change and how organizations must work to facilitate that change. Overall it helps organizations do business better.
Organizations use business analysis, for
- Generating effective solutions
- Providing the required documentation
- Assigning sufficient resources
- Achieving greater efficiency
- Modeling the entire organizations
- Identifying new opportunities
- Achieving goals
- Providing value to stakeholders
- Making correct business decisions
Common Business Analysis Techniques
Here are some business analysis techniques used by organizations worldwide:
MOST (Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics)
Identifying the mission, objectives, strategies, and tactics helps business analysts analyze internal structures of what an organization aims to accomplish and how to formulate the solutions.
PESTLE (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal, and Environmental)
The PESTLE model evaluates external factors that would impact business and determine how to address these factors if found.
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)
SWOT is one of the popular business analysis techniques. In this particular technique, both strengths and weaknesses of the organization are considered. It involves structuring and categorizing processes into opportunities and threats. This helps to determine the proper allocation of resources.
MoSCoW (Must or Should, Could or Would)
This technique allows for prioritizing requirements by presenting a framework in which each condition can be evaluated relative to the others. Is it a must-have? Something the project should have? Something that could be improved? Or something useful that would be added to the future?
CATWOE (Customers, Actors, Transformation Process, World View, Owner, and Environmental Constraints)
This technique helps business analysts understand different stakeholders’ perspectives and the impact that their views will have on the direction of the project.
Apart from these techniques, there are many others such as Brainstorming, Mind Mapping, Business Process Modeling (BPM), Use Case Modeling, and others. It is important for business analysts to familiarize themselves with most of these techniques. Now, you might be wondering why you should even become a business analyst in the first place, right? For the rest of this business analysis definition article, let us try to answer this question.
Reasons to Become a Business Analyst
Currently, there is a huge demand for business analysts, and listed below are some reasons why you should consider a career in business analysis.
- It’s a flexible job role. You get to work on technical and the business streams
- There is a great demand in this field, and you can expect essential career growth
- Due to its enormous growth, the salary paid is also high
- You get to learn new and innovative things
- You can interact with colleagues to know the needs of the business
- You can polish your communication skills by collaborating with stakeholders and by trying to understand their needs
- You can become an expert in conducting surveys, workshops, and different levels of tests such as functional tests, unit tests, etc.
- You can learn how to analyze and model data to deliver a great product, formulate suggestions and strategic solutions, validate the results obtained and discover appropriate trends in the system
How is Business Analysis Different from Other Professions?
Business analysis work includes communicating among stakeholders, development teams, testing teams, and other departments. There are many other job roles that have similar job descriptions as that of a business analyst such as IT business analysts, technical business analysts, online business analysts, business systems analysts, or systems analysts. So, how is business analysis different from these job roles?
Business analysis is slightly different from financial research, project management, quality assurance, organizational development, testing, training, documentation, and several other actions. But, depending on the organizational goals, a business analyst will act in one of the roles mentioned above.
Difference Between a Business Analyst and a System Analyst
The business analyst profession requires an entirely different set of necessary skills involving eliciting, analyzing, communicating, testing, and verifying requirements, and identifying the path to solve business problems and improve processes. On the other hand, system analysts mainly focus on creating and implementing specific systems with a more technical approach to the work.
Difference Between a Business Analyst and a Data Analyst
A business analyst’s responsibilities depend on the industry standards, and the main objective includes analyzing and deriving relevant solutions from data to meet business requirements. On the other side, data analysts help companies by analyzing data and using that data to perform proper actions to present value to the business stakeholders. Data analysts also indulge themselves in providing competitive analysis or in identifying business or marketing trends.
Difference Between a Business Analysis and Data Analytics
In the business world, the terms business analytics and business analysis sound very similar. The primary difference between the two processes is that business analysis is more related to functions and operations. It depends on its architecture streams such as process architecture and enterprise architecture, whereas business analytics is usually dependent on data and reporting. It involves skills, technologies, past performance investigation, and information search.
Conclusion
Applying business analysis techniques to a situation can make you an attractive applicant for jobs at many different companies and industries. In the present time of a rapidly changing business environment, companies that will identify and adapt to the new opportunities may find greater success than those still neutral. Whether you are looking to change your career domains or advance within your present company, acquiring a business certification can give you a wealth of opportunities.
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