2022.09.30
A Day in the Life of a Business Analyst in IT Industry
This article will tell you what a business analyst deals with in IT projects — what tasks he faces in his work and what techniques and tools he uses to solve client needs.
In any IT project, there are tasks that are not directly related to either writing code or managing the project in principle. This is the area of responsibility of the business analyst—a specialist who collects and documents the input information from the customer, end users, programmers, and other participants in the development process, and then turns it into requirements, according to which the team develops the software.
Tasks of a Business Analyst at Different Stages of the Project
The following steps and their content and order may vary depending on the chosen development methodology, the complexity of the project, and the number of team members. But in general, a typical project and the tasks of a business analyst look like this:
Business Idea Processing
Once you have been entrusted to work on a project, the first and most important task is to identify the business idea and understand in detail what you will be working on. Then it is worth working out the stakeholders with whom you will interact, both those who are interested in the success of the project and those interested in its failure.
Once you understand the business idea, continue to analyze your competitors and target audience to make sure the idea really takes off. For example, you can survey potential end-users (gather a focus group, conduct an interview, or create a questionnaire), conduct observation of users (if they are nearby) or rummage through documents that describe business processes.
Decision-making
You need to understand and capture the business idea, form an understanding of the scope of the tasks, and process the technical and business risks. When everything is ready, you can evaluate the project together with the team, and plan the development stages and deadlines. Then go to the client, approve the vision, and make revisions based on the results of the discussion. When the client is satisfied with everything, you can move on to the implementation of the project.
Modeling
At this first stage, business analysts conceptualize what the product will ultimately look like. “Model” means not only the visual part but also the logical structure of the system. Analysts themselves—or with the help of designers—create a prototype, and, together with developers, form the key hypotheses of the architecture and help testers think through the process of evaluating the future product.
Construction
Next comes to the design phase, where you should implement the plans and move directly to development. At this stage, analysts identify and document detailed functional and system requirements for the product and approve technical details with the client and the team. As a result, the analyst creates the so-called baseline requirements—the basic requirements for the product. This is the basis with which you will have to work further and where you will have to make changes. As practice shows, you never leave a project with exactly the same requirements as you came in with.
Product Support
The final stage of development is product support. If the development is product-based, you answer user questions, help developers fix bugs, and compile user manuals. In a word, everything is possible to support everyone who is interested in the development.
In the case of outsourced development, the analyst’s involvement in this process is reduced: usually, a specialist supports developers who fix bugs and modify small features of the already released product.
A Day in the Life of a Business Analyst in IT
Now you can feel yourself in the role of a business analyst and understand how a specialist manages to cope with all the tasks from the customer while adhering to deadlines and not putting out fires.
- Before you start implementing the idea, it is important to make sure that the business analyst and the team are on the same page and have the same understanding of the details of the project. To do this, the specialist organizes a meeting at which he talks about the basic requirements of the customer, discusses in advance the possible difficulties, and thinks about ways to solve them.
- After communicating with the team, the business analyst should gather, record, and analyze the requirements. Based on the information received from the customer and the team, you can prioritize and visualize the processes with diagrams, schemes, and prototypes.
- You have understood the subject matter of the business, thought through the conceptual solution, and therefore are ready to present the idea to the customer and get the long-awaited approval.
- Next, the direct responsibility of the business analyst is to advise the development and testing team to put the product into development.
Business Intelligence Techniques and Tools
The analyst’s arsenal includes more than 100 techniques, tools, and approaches for all occasions. Among them, one can single out those that a business analyst uses in almost every task and at all stages of his activities. Below is a more detailed breakdown of them.
Decomposition, or Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
This is the basic technique of analysis, which allows you to divide a large task into understandable parts and put everything in order. Here’s an example. Let’s say you need to build a house. You should divide the task into blocks: foundation, walls and partitions, roof, and interior work. Now each of these blocks is divided into smaller parts, such as measuring, cutting, sanding, etc. As a result, you get a clear list of tasks that allows you to implement the ones you have in mind.
Prioritization
This is the definition of a step-by-step order of tasks. Usually, both the business analyst and the project principal have a huge amount of work. It’s impossible to do everything at once, so it’s worth determining what’s more important and useful. This technique is exactly the answer to these questions. You can read these examples of prioritization.
Evaluation Criteria
As a result of each task, the specialist expects to get a certain result. How do you know that you have achieved it? There are predetermined evaluation criteria that can help you check if you really achieved the result. For example, you want to eat. The main criteria are to get to a place with food quickly and to have a good meal. And to determine how well the food meets your expectations, it is worth referring to the help of evaluation criteria.
Effective processing of the business idea and the need for users and customers are integral to the success of the project. That’s why the demand for business analysts grows every year. Such specialists act as conduits between the business and the development teams and break into more and more domains. Because of the flexibility of business analysis as a profession, as well as the wide range of techniques and knowledge, an experienced professional can turn an abstract idea into a tool that will change the world for the better.