The Business Analyst on your Project
Project requirements? Business analyst. If you are lucky enough to have a BA on your project, then you’ll find that they will do a much better job of the requirements than you probably have the time or inclination to do. The role of the BA changes from company to company but generally they specialize in helping the team understand how the project fits with corporate strategy overall and getting you a top notch solution that meets tactical, operational and strategic objectives. While some BAs tend to focus on requirements elicitation and tracking, others will hold senior, strategic roles and be working with the C-suite to define organizational portfolio improvements. Whatever ‘your’ BA does, whether they are credentialed by IIBA (http://www.iiba.org/), PMI (http://www.pmi.org/Certification/PMI-Professional-in-Business-Analysis-PMI-PBA.aspx) or no one at all, they will definitely be an asset to your project team.
Let’s think about the BA’s role when it comes to business requirements.
Requirements elicitation
If you’ve ever asked someone what they want from a project and got a blank stare in return, you’ll know why it’s not appropriate to call it ‘requirements gathering’. Requirements aren’t out there to pick off the tree: you have to go and find them and refine them. People often don’t know what they want from a project and one of the BA’s roles is to help them define and articulate what it is that they want, often by looking at the problems they are facing and what could be better about their situation.
Typically a business analyst will have an in-depth understanding of how the organization works, what processes are in use, how different teams hang together and hand-offs between divisions. This can be very useful when it comes to determining process requirements and ensuring that everyone is included in the requirements exercise.
Requirements management
70% of BAs (http://requirementssolutions.com/what-do-business-analysts-do-2/) say that requirements management is part of their brief. A BA can follow the requirements through from the initial suggestion to the project’s testing phase. The requirements management plan helps define what has to be done, but you can expect this to generally involve linking the requirements to the testing plan to check that every requirement is tested (and has made it to the final release). Working out how to trace requirements through the lifecycle is something that a BA will be skilled at, and they might use software tools to help keep track of each requirement throughout the life of the project.
Interestingly, only 16% of people (http://www.esi-intl.com/services/~/media/Files/Public-Site/US/Brochures/ESI%20International%20%20BA%20KNP%20%20Final.ashx) who hold a hybrid project management/business analysis role do requirements management. That could be interpreted as people holding that hybrid role don’t have the time or skills to do this properly – another reason why a dedicated BA on your project team has to be a good idea.
Managing risk
A business analyst will often take a holistic view of the project – they see it from end to end as a piece of work contributing business value. Those involved with other project tasks can get sucked into the detail and end up missing that big picture view. As a result, a BA can often spot project risks long before anyone else, especially when you take their detailed knowledge of requirements into account.
BAs will also be a great help when it comes to risk understanding and mitigation. As the business expert on the team, they’ll be able to identify exactly how this risk will impact the project and the requirements and will probably come up with ways that the others on the team haven’t thought of.
Together, you can work on ways to adjust the requirements to mitigate the risk, remove the requirement, or do something else to secure the future of the project. The BA can help with the analysis exercise around the impact of this risk and ensure that requirements and associated documentation, use cases, test cases and so on are all updated accordingly.
