Business Analysis is all about tasks and techniques followed to qualify the business needs and finding the business solution. The solution may include the system development, process development or improvement and change in the organizational structure. It is about the process to complete the tasks with quality and those who follow these processes are known as business analysts. In some organizations, these business analysts are referred as system analysts, business process analysts, business system analysts and much more.

The tasks followed by business analyst require specific knowledge areas and a business analyst should focus on them while performing the activities.

  • Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring

This knowledge area covers the activities which a business analyst should follow to determine the efforts involved in the future steps. It mainly covers stakeholder analysis, managing risk, issues, and requirements. It also covers the techniques to manage the requirements and the track of the project progress.

  • Elicitation and Collaboration

Requirements are the most important aspect of the project and understanding them correctly is of utmost importance. It’s not only important to gather the requirements from the available sources (sources may refer to stakeholders also) but also to elicit from them. There are several elicitation techniques followed by BA practitioners like brain storming, prototyping, interviewing etc to collect the most precise information and thus the ambiguity in the requirements can be mitigated. The actual purpose of the elicitation is to record the correct requirements of the stakeholders to avoid unwanted and superficial demands in future.

  • Requirements Analysis and Design Definition

It covers the tasks that business analysts perform in order to manage and maintain requirements and design information from inception to retirement. These tasks describe establishing meaningful relationships between related requirements and designs and assessing, analyzing and gaining consensus on proposed changes to requirements and designs.

  • Requirements Life Cycle Management:

It covers the tasks that business analysts perform in order to manage and maintain requirements and design information from inception to retirement. These tasks describe establishing meaningful relationships between related requirements and designs and assessing, analyzing and gaining consensus on proposed changes to requirements and designs.

  • Solution Evaluation

This covers the assessment of the available solutions which can help the stakeholders select the most appropriate solution to implement the requirements. Once the best solution is selected the BA makes it sure that it meets those requirements throughout the life cycle of the project.

  • Strategy analysis

describes the business analysis work that must be performed to collaborate with stakeholders in order to identify a need of strategic or tactical importance (the business need), enable the enterprise to address that need, and align the resulting strategy for the change with higher- and lower-level strategies.

Relationships Between Knowledge Areas

The following diagram shows a general relationship between the knowledge areas.

Business analysts perform tasks from all knowledge areas sequentially, iteratively, or simultaneously.

  • Growth through innovation/creativity:
    Rather than be constrained by ideas for new products, services and new markets coming from just a few people, a Thinking Corporation can tap into the employees.
  • Increased profits:
    The corporation will experience an increase in profits due to savings in operating costs as well as sales from new products, services and ventures.
  • Higher business values:
    The link between profits and business value means that the moment a corporation creates a new sustainable level of profit, the business value is adjusted accordingly.
  • Lower staff turnover:
    This, combined with the culture that must exist for innovation and creativity to flourish, means that new employees will be attracted to the organization.