HOW business Analysts Approach Projects

The Business Analyst typically follows key tasks and activities during a project or initiative to analyze business needs, define solutions, and facilitate successful project outcomes. Different organizations or industries may have variations in their specific structure, processes, and approach. Using the use case of a simple website design project we will highlight how the BA should approach the project to have a successful project:

BUSINESS ANALYST

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BUSINESS ANALYST 〰️

• Understanding the Business Context: when you are assigned a new project as a BA like the website redesign, you must understand the project scope and objectives. For example, what is the problem statement we hope to solve and what are we trying to achieve by implementing this change? Another step is identifying your key stakeholders, their roles, and needs both technical and business. For example, the UX designer who will support the User Interface changes on the new site, product, or content management team from the business who will be providing the redesign requirements. Having this picture makes you an effective BA on the project

• Gathering Requirements: Great, you know the project scope, objectives, and your stakeholders. Now you need to elicit requirements from them using various techniques like interviews, workshops, surveys, and other techniques. As you gather this requirement, you need to ensure you are analyzing the information being documented and validating that it aligns with the business objectives and needs. Finally, you need to understand the prioritization of the requirements based on business value, feasibility, and resource constraints.

• Documenting and Managing Requirements: creating detailed requirement documents, including user stories, process flow diagrams, functional specifications, and other artifacts to ensure requirements are clear, unambiguous, and easily understandable by stakeholders is crucial. For example, this redesign project will require wireframes and mock-ups using tools like Figma or Adobe to communicate the interface changes will help get both the technical and business teams on the same page. Establish a requirements baseline and manage changes to requirements throughout the project lifecycle. Communicate requirement updates to stakeholders and ensure they are aware of any changes using tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, or your organization’s choice

• Defining Solutions, Design, and Development: Collaborate with stakeholders and subject matter experts to propose potential solutions and analyze the feasibility and impacts of different solutions. For example, the redesign project may be looking to improve the customer’s user experience, performance, and reliability of the existing site. As a BA, you must collaborate with designers, developers, and other project team members to translate requirements into design specifications and provide ongoing support during the development process.

• Support Testing and User Acceptance Testing: BAs assist in creating test cases and test scenarios based on requirements documented. You also participate in testing activities to validate that the delivered solution meets the defined requirements. As a BA, it is your responsibility to coordinate UAT with stakeholders to ensure that the solution meets business expectations and addresses any issues or defects identified during UAT.

  The BA is critical to the success of any project, I hope this summary of how you approach a project helps get you started! Good luck!