Business Analysis

So what then, is Business Analysis and why might you want to engage a Business Analyst?

Let’s take the first part of the question first.

With many years of experience working as a Business Analyst, undertaking various formal training courses, learning from peers and talking about the topic with all and sundry, Vox Mos has not been able to find an obvious, all-encompassing answer. And that, we suggest, is because there isn’t one.

We have seen that the remit of a Business Analyst can vary dramatically from organisation to organisation; some of the more common permutations include:

Whether the BA is IT focussed or Business focussed or Change focussed
Whether the BA is concerned with high level change (e.g. Strategy, TOM and ROI analysis)

or project bounded change (e.g. through detailed requirements definition and analysis)

or delivery change (e.g. managing impacts arising from build, test and go live activities

or supporting implementation)

or any combination of these:

Whether the BA is focussed on processes or systems or data or any combination of these
Whether the BA is focussed on delivery or benefits, or if, ostensibly, both, which will take priority when the inevitable conflict arises.

Why do we have all this variation? Well, simply put, this is because the remit of the Business Analyst is to sort out what’s what. And that task has the twin complexities of being potentially within the remit of any other employee and of having no obvious boundaries. So the remit of a specific BA is in reality bounded by the wants or needs of the hiring manager and they are in turn affected by the culture, structure and politics of the organisation within which they reside. I’ll discuss the implications for the BA and the organisation of this reality later.

So how to deal with all this variation when wanting to consider Business Analysis? Well we could develop a general definition that doesn’t bound the remit, but does capture the essence of analysis, or ‘sorting out what’s what’. There are a few of these around, the one that appeals most to us is from the BA training company ‘Business Analysis Solutions’ and goes as follows:

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

Here we have all the essence of any analysis but without any bounding, i.e. these apply equally to any of the permutations listed above, and any others you care to put forward:

Understanding
Assessing/Analysing
Capturing/Documenting
Communicating
Delivering

So in summary, Business Analysis, and therefore the remit of a BA, is to understand, analyse/assess, capture/document, communicate and deliver ‘something’ within a framework bounded by the organisation.

Why then do you need a BA? Well the BA will do this effectively and efficiently because its what they are trained to do, and have demonstrated time after time that they can do, successfully.

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