Discusses, from a potential employer\'s perspective, the expectation of a BA in the areas of roles, activities, deliverables, skills, knowledge, performance measures and education

1. Business Analyst Job Description
Role
The Business Analyst (BA) will be responsible for analysing the business needs of clients and
stakeholders to help identify business problems and propose solutions.
Within the systems development life cycle domain, the BA will work as a liaison among
stakeholders to elicit, analyse, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business
processes, policies and information systems.
The BA will understand business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements and
recommends solutions that enable the organisation to achieve its goals.
Activities
The BA will undertake or participate in the undertaking of the following activities:
 guide stakeholders on devising effective and efficient approaches to achieving project objectives
 identify and resolve issues
 manage risks and provide input to the risk management process
 liaise with other project areas to coordinate interdependencies and resolve issues
 liaise with various business units to determine requirements and resolve issues
 identify business process improvement opportunities
 identify and define business requirements
 analyse and map business processes (current state/future state)
 analyse processes and data to identify gaps or perform process or data mapping
 prepare or provide input to business cases, feasibility assessments, etc
 produce high quality documentation
 report status and issues to the Project Manager(s)
 contribute to enterprise architecture development from a business needs perspective
Deliverables
The BA will prepare or assist in the preparation of the following key deliverables:
 Business Requirements constitute a specification of what the business wants. This is usually
expressed in terms of broad outcomes the business requires, rather than specific functions the
system may perform. Specific design elements are usually outside the scope of this document,
although design standards may be referenced.
 Functional Requirements describe what the system, process, or product/service must do to
fulfill the business requirements. Note that business requirements can often be split into sub-
business requirements and many functional requirements. These are also called System
Requirements.
 Non Functional Requirements are requirements that cannot be met by a specific function, eg
performance, scalability, security and usability requirements. These are often included within
the System Requirements, where applicable.
 Report Specifications are reporting requirements such as the purpose of the report, justification
of the report, report attributes and columns, or runtime parameters.

2.  Traceability Matrix is a cross matrix that traces the requirements through each stage of the
requirements gathering process. High level concepts will be matched to scope items which will
map to individual requirements which will map to corresponding functions. This matrix should
also take into account any changes in scope during the life of the project. At the end of a project,
this matrix should show each function built into a system, its source and the reason that any
stated requirements may not have been delivered.
Skills
The BA will demonstrate the following core skills and competencies:
 leadership, to structure work and information for use by management and developers, set
priorities and manage the work to those priorities, and meet deadlines
 relational, to develop good professional relationships with clients and internal staff, and
represent the organisation in a professional and positive manner
 interviewing, to talk with individuals and groups about their needs and ask the right questions
to surface essential requirements information
 listening, to understand what people say and to detect what they might be hesitant to say
 analytical, to critically evaluate the information gathered from multiple sources, reconcile
conflicts, decompose high-level information into details, abstract up from low-level information
to a more general understanding, distinguish presented user requests from the underlying true
needs, and distinguish solution ideas from requirements
 facilitation, to lead workshops, meetings and other forums to achieve a desired outcome
 observational, to validate data obtained via other techniques and expose new areas for
elicitation
 communicating, to articulate, both verbally and in written form, information effectively to
customers, marketing, managers, and technical staff
 organisational, to work with the vast array of information gathered during elicitation and
analysis and to cope with rapidly changing information
 interpersonal, to help negotiate priorities and resolve conflicts among project stakeholders
(such as customers, product management, and engineering)
 modelling, to represent requirements information in graphical forms that augment textual
representations in natural language, including using modeling languages already established in
the development organization
Knowledge
The BA will display a detailed understanding of the following subject areas:
 requirements elicitation, analysis, specification, verification, and management practices and the
ability to apply them in practice; familiarity with requirements engineering books and resources
 requirements engineering and its place within the software development life cycle in a team
environment
 product management concepts and how enterprise software products are positioned and
developed
 application domain knowledge, for credibility with user representatives and to work effectively
with them

3. Performance Measures
The BA’s performance will be measured in the following ways:
 evaluation from product and project management on overall product quality and effectiveness
in the marketplace of the requirements after the product has been developed
 feedback from key customer or marketing representatives on the way in which the requirements
engineering process was conducted
 customer satisfaction measures
Education and Experience
The BA will hold at least an undergraduate degree in Information Technology or Information
Systems from a reputable university.
The BA will have 3 to 5 years experience in similar roles elsewhere.