Introduction to CBAP, CCBA
What is business analysis?
The BABOK® Guide defines business analysis as “the practice of
enabling change in an enterprise by defining needs and recommending
solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.”
The Business Analyst’s Role
The linchpin (key) of successful business analysis is the business
analyst performing the actual work.
Their involvement in defining and validating solutions that
address key business needs and goals is essential to both project and
business success. According to the BABOK® Guide, “a business analyst is any
person who performs business analysis tasks described in the BABOK® Guide, no
matter their job title or organizational role.” Business analysts work as
liaisons among stakeholders in order to understand the structure,
policies, and operations of an organization, and to recommend
solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
Essential Skills of Effective Business Analysts
In addition to the necessary business, technical, and domain
knowledge, the business analyst should have management, interpersonal,
business, and structured problem-solving skills.
The BABOK® Guide refers to these behaviors as the underlying
competencies of effective business analysts.
The BABOK® Guide puts the essential skills and knowledge of effective
business analysts into six categories:
1.
Analytical Thinking and
Problem-Solving Skills: Facilitating solutions to business problems would be
impossible without a logical mind.
2.
Behavioral
Characteristics: Effective business analysts apply personal integrity and
strength of character when dealing with people, including the business analysis
team, project team, and internal and external project stakeholders. The ability
to build strong, lasting working relationships serves the business analyst, the
enterprise, and the project or initiative well.
3.
Business Knowledge:
It is impossible to be a liaison between the business and the technology if you
have no understanding of the business.
4.
Communication Skills:
The number-one reason for project failure is poor communication. Business
analysts must have excellent communication skills, verbal, nonverbal, and written,
in order to complete business analysis tasks.
5.
Interaction Skills:
Good business analysts are team players. In large part, this is because of
their ability to interact and work well with other members of the team.
Leadership, negotiation, and facilitation skills play a key part in defining
and agreeing to a solution to a business problem or need. (facilitator: someone who is employed to make a process easier, or to help people reach a solution or agreement, without getting directly involved in the process, discussion, etc.)
6.
Tools and Technology: Although
using a requirements management tool is not a required skill, the ability to
master and apply requirements management, word processing, and spreadsheet
tools are desirable traits in experienced business analysts.
The Business Analyst and the Project Manager
The project manager focuses on meeting the project objectives.
They initiate, plan, and manage the project. The project manager makes
sure the project team delivers a solution that meets requirements, the
acceptance criteria, and the customer’s quality expectations.
The project manager juggles the many constraints present on a project, such as scope,
budget, schedule, resources, quality, and risk. On a large project, the
business analysis team is only one part of the project resources the project
manager is managing.
The business analyst works with key stakeholders to understand the
structure, policies, and operations of an organization and to
recommend solutions. The project manager focuses on planning
and managing the project to achieve the project objectives and deliver
those solutions to the stakeholders.
Key business analysis stakeholders
- Customer Uses the products, services, or solutions.
- Domain subject matter expert (SME) Possesses detailed, in-depth knowledge of a particular topic or problem area of the solution scope or the business need
- End-user Directly interacts with the resulting solution when it has been completed and deployed
- Implementation SME Is responsible for designing and implementing potential solutions and providing specialist expertise. Subsets of the implementation SME role include developers, software engineers, organizational change management professionals, system architects, trainers, and usability professionals.
- Operational support Helps to keep the solution functioning by providing end-user support or day-to-day operational support
- Project manager Manages the work performed to deliver the solution
- Tester Verifies that the designed and constructed solution meets the requirements and quality criteria for that solution
- Regulator Defines and enforces standards for developing the solution or for the resulting solution itself
- Sponsor Authorizes the solution development work to be performed and controls the budget
- Supplier Provides products or services to the organization
The Business Analysis Core Concept Model (BACCM™)
The Business Analysis Core Concept Model (BACCM™) provides you with a conceptual framework that shows what it really means to be a business analyst.
There are six concepts in the BACCM™:
Change:
Change is the driving force for most projects and initiatives. Change
takes place when one responds to satisfy a need. You need to be aware of the
enterprise-level changes that will result from your project efforts and
outcome.
Need:
Businesses and their stakeholders have needs that often result in
projects. Needs are value-driven ways to address business problems or
opportunities.
Solution:
Solutions are the end result of projects and initiatives. They resolve
the problems or take advantage of the opportunities (needs). Solutions satisfy needs within
the context of the enterprise and its environment.
Stakeholder:
Stakeholders are the people who have a relationship to the change, need,
or solution. Stakeholder analysis often groups stakeholders relative to these
relationships.
Value:
Value is the worth of something to a stakeholder within the context of
the enterprise. Business analysts assess value as a tangible or intangible
thing. Business analysts should assess value from the key stakeholders’ points
of view.
Context:
Context is the environment where the change is taking place.
Knowledge areas
The BABOK® Guide is based on a set of knowledge areas guiding the
business analyst when they perform business analysis activities at any point in
the project or product life cycle.
Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring: a business analyst
plans how to approach the business analysis effort. The approach is a set
of processes, templates, and activities used to perform business
analysis in a specific context.
1.
Planning the business
analysis approach for the project
2.
Determining how to
engage stakeholders, including stakeholder identification, analysis, and
categorization
3.
Defining the business
analysis governance activities for decision making
4.
Addressing business
analysis information management needs
5.
Planning the requirements
development and management process
6.
Managing and reporting on
the business analysis effort
Strategy Analysis focuses on how the business analyst identifies
the business needs driving a project by performing problem definition and analysis.
In addition to defining and refining these strategic or tactical needs, the
business analyst is responsible for defining a feasible solution scope that can
be implemented by the business. This work may also include developing a
business case or a feasibility study for a proposed project.
1.
Defining and understanding
the business problem or opportunity
2.
Assessing capability
gaps in the organization by analyzing the current and future states
3.
Assessing risks
relative to the proposed solution
4.
Defining the change
strategy for the initiative
5.
Determining the most
feasible business solution approach
Requirements Life Cycle Management defines how the business
analyst approaches managing and maintaining requirements. Tasks and techniques
for managing changes, conflicts, and issues related to requirements are also
described.
1.
Managing requirements
traceability
2.
Maintaining
requirements for accuracy and reuse
3.
Addressing requirements
prioritization
4.
Determining how
requirements should change
5.
Facilitating
requirements approval
Elicitation and Collaboration defines how business analysts work
with stakeholders to elicit requirements and understand stakeholder needs and
concerns.
1.
Preparing for elicitation
activities
2.
Meeting with
stakeholders to conduct the elicitation activity
3.
Confirming,
documenting, and recording the elicitation results
4.
Communicating and
confirming
Requirements Analysis and Design Definition: In essence, the business analyst takes the elicited information and makes sense of it to derive
the real requirements for the project. This knowledge area also focuses on
graphically modeling the requirements and resulting designs as well as
documenting them.
1.
Specifying and modeling
requirements and designs
2.
Verifying
requirements and designs
3.
Validating requirements
and designs
4.
Defining the architecture
and structure of requirements
5.
Defining solution
options
6.
Analyzing value
and recommending a solution
Solution Evaluation focuses on assessing and validating proposed,
in progress, and implemented solutions before, during, and after the project
life cycle. A business analyst’s attention is on the value that the solution
will deliver to the enterprise, including the constraints that may impact
value. While many tasks in this knowledge area take place later in the project
life cycle, some solution-focused activities may occur quite early.
1.
Defining solution
performance measures
2.
Collecting and
analyzing solution performance data
3.
Assessing
solution limitations
4.
Assessing
enterprise limitations
5.
Recommending
actions to increase solution value
Each knowledge area task is broken down into the following pieces:
§
Purpose
§
Description
§
Inputs
§
Elements
§
Guidelines and Tools
§
Techniques
§
Stakeholders
§
Outputs
Distinguishing Between Requirements and Design Requirements and
design are closely linked. Many times, the distinction between requirements and
design is unclear. Business analysts will use the same techniques to elicit,
model, and analyze requirements and designs on their projects. Figure 1.2 shows
the relationship between requirements and design in the BABOK® Guide.
Remember that requirements focus on the need, and designs focus on
the solution that will address that need.
Classifying
Requirements
Business
Requirements are the highest level of requirements and are developed
during Strategy Analysis activities. They define the high-level
goals, objectives, and needs of the organization. They also describe
and justify the high-level business functionality that is needed in the
resulting solution.
Stakeholder
Requirements These requirements define the needs of stakeholders and
how they will interact with a solution. Stakeholder requirements bridge
between the business requirements and the more detailed solution requirements.
Many folks refer to stakeholder requirements as high-level user requirements. They
identify what is needed from the user’s perspective and define “big picture”
capabilities that the resulting solution must possess.
Solution
requirements are the most detailed type of requirements found
in the BABOK® Guide. They describe the solution characteristics that meet the
higher-level business and stakeholder requirements. Typically, a business
analyst divides solution requirements into two specific types: functional requirements
and nonfunctional requirements.
§
Functional Requirements
Functional requirements define the capabilities that a product or a solution must provide to its users.
§
Nonfunctional
Requirements describe quality attributes,
design and implementation constraints, and external
interfaces that the product must have.
Transition
Requirements define the solution capabilities required to transition from
the current state to the future state and are no longer needed once the
transition is complete.
The
BABOK® Guide requirements state machine summary
- Approved Agreed to by stakeholders and ready for use in subsequent business analysis or implementation efforts
- Maintained Formatted and suitable for long-term or future use by the organization; maybe saved as organizational process assets
- Modeled Well-structured and represented using correct modeling notations
- Prioritized Having an attribute describing its relative importance or assigned priority to stakeholders and the organization
- Specified Well-formed requirements documented using text, matrices, and models
- Traced Having clearly defined and identified relationships to other requirements or designs within the solution scope
- Validated Demonstrated to deliver value to stakeholders; are within the solution scope and are aligned with business goals/objectives
- Verified Requirements have been checked and are of sufficient quality to allow further work to be performed.
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