Business analysis

Business analysis as a discipline is closely related to requirements analysis, but aims to identify changes for an organization that are required for an organization to achieve its strategic goals. These changes include changes in strategy, structure, policies, processes and information systems.

Examples of business analysis include:

Analysis of the enterprise or company

focuses on understanding the needs of the business as a whole, its strategic leadership, and identifying initiatives that will enable the business to achieve strategic goals.

Requirements Planning and Management

involves planning the development of requirements, prioritizing requirements and managing change.

Requirements collection

describes how to collect requirements from interested parties.

Requirements analysis

describes how to develop and define requirements with details sufficient for a successful implementation by the project team.

Communication requirements

describes techniques to ensure that all stakeholders have a common understanding of the requirements and how to implement them.

Evaluation and validation of the decision

describes how the business analyst can verify the correctness of the proposed solution, how to support the implementation of the solution, and how to evaluate possible shortcomings in the implementation.

Since business analysis covers a very wide range of issues, there was a tendency for business analysts to specialize in one of the three areas of business analysis.

Strategist

In the modern business world, organizations should focus on strategic issues on a more or less permanent basis. Business analysts, responding to this need, are knowledgeable in analyzing the strategic goal of the organization and its environment, advising senior management on appropriate policies and the effects of political decisions.

Architect

Sometimes organizations need to make a change to solve the business problems found by the strategic analyst mentioned above. Business analysts analyze goals, processes and resources, and suggest ways in which modernization (business process reorganization) could be made, or improvements (business process modernization). Specific skills of this type of analyst are skills such as business knowledge, requirements development, stakeholder analysis, and business process modeling. Although the role requires an understanding of technology and its use, it is not an IT role.

Three elements are central to this aspect of business analysis: upgrading core business processes; technology connectivity to support core processes; and management of organizational change. This aspect of business analysis is also called “business process improvement” (business process modernization).

System Analyst

A long-standing problem in business, how to get the most out of IT investments, which are generally very expensive and critical, often strategically, important. IT departments, knowing about the business problem, often create the role of business analyst in order to better understand and define the requirements for their IT systems. Although there may be some overlap with the developer and testing roles, the focus of effort is always on the IT part of the company's change process, and in general this type of business analyst is involved only when the decision about the changes has already been made higher.

Ultimately, business analysts want to achieve the following results:

• Reduce costs
• Find a solution to the problem
• Finish projects on time
• Improve efficiency
• Document all requirements

Reduce costs and finish projects on time.

Delay projects are quite expensive.

• Project cost - during each month of delay, the project team continues to increase costs and expenses. If most of the development was done under a contract, the cost will quickly begin to increase if the contract is based on time-based payment. Fixed price contracts limit this risk. For internal resources, the cost of delays is not as obvious if the time spent on project resources is not tracked, since the cost of labor is essentially fixed.

• Cost of opportunity - the cost of opportunity is divided into two types - lost income and unrealized spending cuts. Some projects are specifically designed to attract new or additional revenues. During each month of delay, the company actually loses these revenues. The goal of other projects is to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Again, every month of failure set aside the implementation of these spending cuts for another month. In most cases, these opportunities are never captured or analyzed, leading to incorrect calculations of return on investment. Of these two lost opportunities, lost income is the most glaring. Its impact is the longest and tangible.

NB On many projects (especially large ones) the project manager is responsible for the timely completion of the project. The job of the business analyst is more to ensure that if the project is not completed on time, then at least the highest priority requirements are met.

To reduce costs and complete projects on time, business analysts need to identify risk factors that affect the efficiency and productivity of any process. As such, there may be a conflict of interest, the formal implementation of control procedures, incorrect setting of goals, late receipt of information, low functionality of IT systems and others ^[1] .

Document valid requirements

Business analysts want to make sure that they describe applications that meet the needs of end users. Essentially, they want to describe the right application. This means that they must document the right requirements, carefully listen to customer feedback, and provide a complete set of clear requirements to the technical architects and engineers who will write the program. If the business analyst has limited means or skills to identify the right requirements, then it is likely that he will document useless or incorrect requirements. The time spent documenting unnecessary requirements not only affects the business analyst, but also affects the entire development process. Engineers must create program code to fulfill these unnecessary requirements, and testers must make sure that the requested requirements actually work as described in the documentation. Experts estimate that from 10 to 40% of the requirements in new applications are unnecessary or remain unused. Reducing the number of these unnecessary requirements by even one-third can lead to a significant reduction in costs.

Improve project efficiency

Efficiency can be achieved in two ways: by reducing the rework of finished parts and reducing the duration of the project.

Tinkering is a common industry headache that has become so common in many organizations that it is often embedded in project budgets and plans. In general, reworking means additional work to eliminate errors due to incomplete or missing requirements. It can affect the entire software development process from design to coding and testing. The need for rework can be reduced if requirements gathering and design processes are solid, and ensuring that business and technical members of the project are involved in these processes at an early stage.

Reducing the project duration represents two potential benefits. Resources released for each month for which the project was shortened can be used on other projects. This may lead to savings on the current project and to earlier launches of new projects (thus increasing potential income).

Using the principles of business analysis for the purpose of preliminary and subsequent evaluation of the effectiveness of innovative investment projects involves the use, along with financial criteria, and indicators of a balanced satisfaction of the requirements of key stakeholders. ^[2]

• System analysis
• Examples of business intelligence and business intelligence

• Konrad Karlberg. Business analysis using Excel. Solving Business Problems, 4th Edition = Business Analysis: Microsoft Excel. - M .: “Williams” , 2013. - 576 p. - ISBN 978-5-8459-1888-8 .