There is a lot of research and ideas that come up every day in the mind of people for various IT projects to bring the best products and software for the welfare of an organization. Although an idea is not enough to implement the same you need a specialist who can define various goals and outline the requirements to make your idea live with proper planning. That is where the role of business analysts comes in Project development.
It seems a little difficult but that is what the duties and roles of a business development manager are in any project development. A BA works as an integral member of any IT team and understands the business requirements from the initiation of the project till the final deliveries.
Business Analyst = IT efficiency
The above statement is very true as business analysis is core for any software development project. A BA communicates and understand the pain areas of stakeholder and every department of the team and turn them into the solution through the help of IT transformation.
Many organizations face issues related to different departments or workflows. To resolve these issues they either change their workflows or use the help of IT technology. For example: A Human resource manager faces issues with the attendance of the employees which further creates problems in calculating the salaries and overtime. With the same, they would apply for HR software that can meet their requirements. Although with a proper business Analyst HR will spend more time and effort to understand the software capabilities and resolution skills. A Business Analyst on the other hand can understand the issues faced by HR and can also tackle other problems and help the department with a perfect tool that suffices the requirements.
With the help of BA, even the software vendor or the IT team get proper assistance in the development of the tool to transform a business idea into an HR team expectation. Therefore with accurate logic and a practical product wastage of time can be resolved by employing a Business Analyst.
Let’s understand what kind of skills are required to become a good Business Analyst.
The main aim of a BA in a team is to communicate and gather proper requirements for the project to meet the final goals of the tools that would be implemented in the business. There are various skills required to become a good Business Analyst.
- Technical Knowledge:
Technical and logical expertise is essential to understand the limitation of the technology undertaken. A little bit of understanding of technical know-how helps to define the specifications limitation and easy communication with the developers and testers during the implementation process. - Problem-solving and analytical skills.
Good analytical skills are the key to transforming ideas into deliveries of the project. A BA role is not only analyzing the business requirements but also helps in problem resolving and decision-making that arise between the company and developers. - Communication skills:
Gathering information from various departments needs powerful communication skills to understand the problems faced by the department and technical team. A BA helps in understanding the various flow and processes this requires engagement with different people therefore powerful communication skills are needed to understand the concerns of each other.
Apart from the above skills, some other roles and duties need to be performed by a Business analyst while undertaking any IT project.
Role and Duties during the software development process.
- Requirements Understanding:
The very initial stage of any project is requirements understanding. A business analyst needs to understand what problems an organization is facing and how it can be overcome with various IT solutions available in the market. A good requirements understanding also helps in other factors such as quickly implementing the tools which are available to overcome the specific needs of the business. - Requirements Gathering:
Once the requirements are understood properly a BA gathers the requirements from a Functional and technical point of view for the project. Functional requirements include how the solution will work and run whereas technical requirements analysis is meant for the logical behaviour and designing of the tools.
There are various methods through which business analysis can gather the requirements some of them include – interviewing the department’s Questionnaires prototyping brainstorming and documentation analysis. - Documenting the Specification:
Once the requirements are gathered the next role and responsibility of a BA is to prepare the Project specification documentation which reviews and refines the project requirements. This specification also helps the team to go through the list of task that needs to be worked on technically and functionally. A Specification document includes an outline of project requirements; project objectives; requirements; project scope; functional requirements such as charts diagrams and timelines; Assumption and cost and other factors related to the project. - Collaborating with Developers:
Once the documentation is created another role of a BA is to explain the requirements to the developers and assign the task to the development team. Software development requires some logic that needs to be shared with the developer to create a proper tool. The business analyst communicates with both the developers and stakeholders in such a manner until the project ends. - Conducting User Acceptance Tests:
There may be some cases where a BA need to participate in user acceptance testing which is the last phase of software development. Interaction with the actual user ensures the task is delegated appropriately with real-world scenarios.
Conclusion
To conclude our post we would say that Business analysts are an essential part of any development team.1
