Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Business Analysis - An Emerging Career in IT

Many of us dreaded of IT career due to conventional career path of doing coding job for initial years. The ultimate goal of programmer is to reach at project manager or program manager level.

However, there is a non-conventional route to this career for those who actually would like to contribute towards IT field without having to start as programmer or database professional.

This article, we are focusing on the ‘Business Analysis’ that is related to application or system development process in information technology.

Concept: “Business Analysis” is a relatively new role in Information technology / system development process. Although 'business analyst' role did exist previously, but it was defined in an informal way where it was performed partly or fully either by the Business stakeholders or by domain Experts, or project manager or the project coordinator or the business/stakeholder's representative and QA personnel.

However, as the business and technology complexity and sophistication increased, it has almost become impossible for business or technical personnel to deal with both the roles. Therefore, the dedicated role of business analyst emerged and defined well. The business analyst now can analyse the business need, define the solution through rigorous requirement elicitation and management process, and later present the solution through set of requirement documentation templates consisting of the detailed descriptions and models of the requirements. This documents are known as requirement documents that are also known as business requirement document (BRD) or functional requirement document (FRD) that serves as the basis of developing and testing the solution. These documents also support all the stakeholders to understand the future business solution along with their role and interactions with the solution.

As per IIBA, "Business Analysis is the process of understanding business change needs, assessing the impact of those changes, capturing, analyzing and documenting requirements and then supporting the communication and delivery of those requirements with relevant parties."

Role: Although, this role has evolved over a period of time to and recent years it’s taken a definite shape, the role still defers company to company or industry to industry. The major role of managing requirement and coordinating with various functions remains unchanged.

A Business Analysis (breaking the activities /tasks into small parts before bringing out the solutions) is comprehensive activities of understanding problem, finding solutions, managing requirement, documenting requirements, designing/prototyping requirement, conducting User Acceptance Testing, designing user manuals and so on……..

In large size project, if there are 4-5 business analysts, the lead business analyst usually responsible for overseeing the complete activities and the team member are responsible for one of the activities such as requirement management, data analyst, QA coordination, report management, documentation, writing prototypes, preparing flow chart/process diagrams, writing Use cases. All these functions are performed using various tools – Visio, Enterprise Architect, UML, Rational Rose, Requisite Pro, Mercury Quality Center, SQL….

Those BAs who work and deal extensively with technical people may be known as IT Business Analysts or Technical Business Analysts or Business System Analyst and these analysts can easily move from one industry to another. It may not true for the business analyst coming from a particular domain such as Finance background Business Analyst usually takes up job in Finance Industry…

Career path: A Business Analyst could build a successful career path moving upwards as a project manager and then as a program manager or a Lead business analyst or Subject matter expert. Program manager or lead business analyst or Head Practice Management could be at senior management level position. SME (Subject Matter Experts) could be at par with division head in large company.

Here is the picture for you to understand the career path for business analyst in organisation:

Business Analyst - career path (ANISAN Technology Inc.)

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