What is a Business Analyst?
by Al Santucci, Holly James and Debbie Gencarelli
The Search for a Business Analyst
Thoughts from a Recruiting Manager
The Casey Group is a professional services firm specializing in custom software development and outsourcing. Our search for Business Analysts led us to the International Institute of Business Analysis and, subsequently, to the Requirements Networking Group. What we discovered was that, while the Business Analyst function has matured over the years into a specialty discipline, it still means different things to different people, employers and practitioners alike. From the standpoint of a staffing manager for a professional services firm, this is how we see it.
What is a Business Analyst?
This proved to be a more difficult question than we thought it would be. And the answer, as for so many things, is “…it depends.” In our attempt to fully define the requirements of the position in order to locate the most qualified individuals, we spoke to hiring managers, Project Managers and Technical Architects. The problem we ran into was that there is not just one concept of a Business Analyst. And even within the Business Analyst function, there are different sub-functions that can evolve as specialties in and of themselves. There is a continuum from a Lead Analyst to an analysis tool expert technician. Sometimes we look for one person who can perform all the functions, oftentimes we need a team.
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Business analysis - more than just IT
I've been reading this thread with interest and the thing that strikes me is that you are still looking at tha BA as an IT role (i.e. whitin the context of an IT solution).
One area that is now getting more attention in the BaBOK as well as the BA community is the role of the BA in entreprise analysis. We have to remember for a project to succeed, requirements need to be fleshed out and, more importantly client expectations need to be put into a realistic perspective and that, way before a solution is even agreed upon. This is not often done judging by the project success rates out there.
This is where the BA is most effective and, as a company, this is where we chose to put the BA role, as a unit within the business area. Business is not always cut and dried, nor is it always logical. You therefore need someone to bridge the more emotional aspect of a project (business) with the binary application (IT solution)
My soapbox rant done, I do believe that the skills and methodology on the market is applicable to all projects, whether the solution is IT or procedural, including the Agile approach that is a great tool to manage client expectations by breaking down massive projects into more realistic phases.
However, what I've read so far, and the books you have proposed, tend to concentrate only on the disjointed aspects of business analysis, and most of them from a distinctively IT perspective.
Though great strides have been made for IT to understand business, it has not, from the bibliography out there, captured the reality of business analysis the way I am living it everyday.
At this point the BaBOK is the only document that is actually trying to put it all of those aspects together...it should not be waved off so easily.
Kathleen Mac Duff
IIBA member