Business Analysts In IT Industry

In layman's term, a business analyst in an IT industry is someone who bridges the gap between IT and the Business. In a software company, its the business people or what is called stakeholder's requirements are to be catered. That is when a business analysts pitch in, and their role lies from capturing the business needs to understanding the pain areas of a company to explain it to the technical team.

The graph of a Business Analyst is growing and is expected to grow over at least the next decade. In a survey amongst a number of expert business analysts, on asking what do they think are the most fundamental and significant skill sets every business analyst must possess, almost every one of them had a consistency of the replies which was:    

• Must be a good listener    
• Must be a decent writer    
• Good at analyzing and organizing information    
• Either a leader or a follower as the situation requires    
• Must be able to work independently or with a group of people as the situation requires    
• Self-motivated and assertive, but with a pleasant personality

In IT industry, requirement gathering is one of the most crucial part, since it is the first step toward what are you going to build. The time required for rquirement gathering may differ from project to project. The process includes, regular meetings with the client either via skype call or client being physically present on the site. Attention to details required while gathering the requirement. The BA records the requirement in any of the requirement management tool like JIRA or may be in some spreadsheets. An then they explain the requirements to the technical team and discuss the possibility and challenges.

In a software development project, following are the activities that are traditionally performed by business analysts:    

• Represent stakeholders    
• Help in deciding scope of the system, understand project(especially business) requirements.    
• Document the project requirements(BRDs)    
• Translate business needs to the team    
• Translate technical issues    
• Document the project requirements    
• As per the requirement, create and maintain domain models after analyzing it    
• Working with the project designers to make sure it meets the requirements    
• Working with the test team to confirm that tests adequately cover the all the scenarios    
• Run the UATs(User Acceptance tests)

When we talk about requirements gathering, it is usually misunderstood as a very easy task, but it is one of the most complex things in the IT especially if you are working on complex and mission critical projects. In my next blog I will talk about how requirement gathering is one of the crucial part of a project.