What is business analysis Flashcards
Describe the business change life cycle
There are five stages:
- Alignment
- definition
- design and development
- implementation
- realisation.
All five stages form the business case.
What are the three things that feed into the alignment stage of the business change life cycle, and what is the point of this stage?
Enterprise architecture
Business environment
Business strategy
Understand the context in which the change is being considered
Keeps the change initiative on track
Aid decision-making.
Describe the definition stage of the business change life cycle.
We are defining:
The 1. Business Case and 2. Requirements
- Business case will contain options
What is the impact of each option? - Requirement are business and solution
Present business case (to senior management) to secure funding
Describe the design and development stage of the business change life cycle.
Requirements become the solution through development
Test the solution
Test the new business processes
Describe the implementation stage of the business change life cycle.
Implementation involves deployment and testing.
It is very important to plan the deployment.
Communication must be robust
Describe the realisation stage of the business change life cycle.
Have the benefits in the business case been achieved?
Take remedial action if not
What is the business case?
A formal document
Created during the definition stage
Used for checking progress
Must be reviewed at each stage (take stock)
What are the the 3 ranges of activities of a business analyst?
- Strategic analysis and definition
- Business analysis
- IT Systems analyst
What is involved in the strategic analysis and definition BA role?
High level
Work with senior management
Analyse ideas for possible change
Usually a senior business analyst with good domain knowledge
Like an internal business consultant
What is involved in the “Business Analysis” role (part of the three roles that a BA can adopt)?
Making improvements across the business
Capture requirements from stakeholders
Process Improvement
Identify and drive business benefits
What is involved in the IT Systems analyst BA role?
Evaluate commercial off the shelf (COTS) solutions
Build models (function, process and data)
Just focussing on the IT systems, not the broader view
What is POPIT?
Aimed at helping the BA take a wide and holistic view of the business:
people
organisation
processes
information and technology
What are the core responsibilities of a business analyst?
investigate business systems - taking a holistic view
evaluation options - improving the business system
capture requirements - appropriate to the system development methodology
make effective use of information systems
What are the principals of business analysis?
Root cause not symptoms
Business improvement not IT change
Options not solutions
Feasible, contributing requirements, not meeting all requests
The entire business change lifecycle, not just requirements definition
Negotiation not avoidance
What are the variants of the BA role?
Business business analyst/Enterprise business analyst
Technical business analyst/Business systems analyst
Digital business analyst
Project Business Analyst
Proxy Product owner
