The importance of Business Analysis in IT

But, what is Business Analysis?

Business Analysis is a set of activities and practices that enable organizations to solve their problems and challenges or improve existing processes in a creative and less risky way. It includes understanding the business in a nutshell, analyzing the problems, or adding new features that would achieve the desires and aspects of the people who enroll in the project, including customers, managers, and development teams.

Business Analysis clearly impacts every aspect of the projects, as it provides the necessary information and path required to complete the projects perfectly. It will make the work a lot easier for developers and stakeholders to work together without costing much time and effort.

The involvement of a Business Analyst can determine the failure or success of a project.

To understand the importance of Business Analysis in any project, here are the techniques and roles that are used by the business analyst when doing their job.

Business Analysis gathers the concerns of the stakeholders and their vision in many ways like:

• Interviews: Personal and group interviews to identify the areas of concern by asking questions and answers.
• Questionnaires: In case the number of stakeholders is vast, and they cannot conduct personal interviews, this way is effective in collecting their inputs and opinions of them.
• Document analysis: Analyzing existing documents and collecting data about the company policies, regulations, actions, and improvements to existing products.
• Prototyping: Similar to making a wireframe for a product, which helps in the state the vision and requirements needed from the product in an efficient and precise way.

Bridging the gap between IT development and stakeholders

One of the most critical roles in Business Analysis is the ability to facilitate the communication between stakeholders and developers, it behaves like a bridge between stakeholders by translating the requirements needed for the project into understandable and clear Business requirements that developers and designers can understand and implement, while parallelly communicating with developer deliver their concerns to the stakeholders.

This is very important for the project and all parties, as it will save cost and time and clearly deliver the needed requirements aligning with developers' concerns.

Identification of the best solution that works best for a specific problem

The business analyst must understand the business in detail, analyze the processes and vision of the stakeholders, and have a clear possesses and direction of the project, so they can understand the problems or challenges that face developers or stakeholders and convert them into opportunities or improvements that could leverage the business or make it better.

System documentation

Through the project life cycle, business analysts create many documents to satisfy different project needs. They communicate with stakeholders and developers, defining the parameters that determine the type of document to be created and included in the specifications to be included in each.

Documentation includes the stakeholders' expectations, their detailed business requirements and needs, organizational policies and processes, and utilization project life cycle, including a requirements management plan, use cases, UML diagrams, user stories, and project vision document.

• Creating proper documentation for the product, services, and software.
• Improving processes, products, services, and software through data analysis.
• Explaining to the customers/clients the technical challenges that developers face leads to better decisions and business optimization.

Requirement gathering

Business Analysts engage with business leaders and users to understand how data-driven changes change processes, products, services, and software. It must articulate the needs but also balance them against what’s technologically feasible, financially, and functionally reasonable.

Business analysis should keep track of different parts of the organization and be able to find solutions for the issues that appear according to the understanding of the business needs, in addition, to writing proper documentation that describes and document all the process in detail.

Once the business analysis finishes gathering information and analysis, will implement the solution by making those crucial steps:

• The Business Analyst creates a Business Requirement Document (BRD) that specifies the business needs and requirements, making them descriptive and clear.
• BRD should be discussed in full with the whole team members, including developers, designers, QA testers, and stakeholders.
• Teams go through implementing testing before production to make sure all solutions will be applied successfully and satisfy the business needs.
• Once all tests are passed, the development should start with a clear vision of the achievement that should be done.

Conclusion

Business Analysis will satisfy stakeholders' needs and achieve their goals by managing the needs and requirements into manageable and precise needs that are technically achievable and help implement the best results.