A term “Business Analyst” OR “System Analyst” may really define or limit the scope of the role of BA (“business analyst”) in imaginary or dictionary language. However, when it comes to actual project life cycle, BA has to play a versatile role that starts from sending project proposal.. client interaction till the deployment of the project. And in certain cases, BA has to support post project activities for a long time. Hence, you as a BA need to be very flexible in terms of your role and responsibilities. Nevertheless, the role of a business analyst can be explained to a certain extent. What I have learnt from my personal experiences & observations is that, usually a role played by “a business analyst” vary “project to project” and the “project life cycle” you follow.
Usually, BA plays below roles:-
- Understanding business functions, operations and currently implemented solutions
- Studying & exploring latest available solutions
- Initiating project by sending a project proposal to client
- Requirements elicitation involves understanding client needs for the new project
- Direct Interaction with project stake holders, product champions to discuss functional requirements, business rules and latest needs
- Using tools & aids like use cases, class diagrams, decision tables etc. to elicit requirements
- Designing & proposing solutions
- Composing/Documenting Business Rules, Business Requirements, Functional Specifications, and Use Case Specifications
- Involvement in planning & estimating required efforts (in terms of hours/cost)
- Organizing meets for detailed discussions of requirements with developers, testers and project manager
- Reviewing test plans, test cases and test scenarios
- Managing changes in requirements, keeping entire team up to date for new requirements
- Training end users, stake holders on newly implemented solutions
Although BA is profiled with above all roles, BA have to play “versatile role”. This versatile role may involve training developers on functional domain, suggesting technological & logical solutions to development team, suggesting different ways of testing to testers, designing databases, coding (very less number of time), module/regression testing, reporting bugs, and playing a role of customer support for all post deployment queries of client.
Finally, to define a role in a sentence, I would say that - “BA initiates project, elicit requirements, assists thought implementations, and helps business user to make use of it.”
