8 Steps to Being an Effective Business Analyst

Being assigned to a new project is an exciting time as a business analyst, but it can also be nerve-wracking. Depending on the size and complexity of your project, you can go through these steps quickly or slowly.

Get Oriented

Often as business analysts we are expected to dive in to a project and start contributing as quickly as possible to make a positive impact. We face a lot of ambiguity as business analysts and it’s our job to clarify the scope, requirements, and business objectives as quickly as possible.

Your key responsibilities:

• Clarifying your role as the business analyst.
• Determining the primary stakeholders to engage
• Understanding the project history
• Understanding the existing systems and business processes

Discover the Primary Business Objectives

It’s very common for business analysts to jump right in to defining the scope of the project.

Your key responsibilities

• Discovering expectations from your primary stakeholders
• Reconciling conflicting expectations
• Ensuring the business objectives
• Discovering the primary business objectives.

Define Scope

A clear and complete statement of scope provides your project team the go-forward concept to realize the business needs. .

Your key responsibilities

• Defining a solution approach
• Drafting a scope statement and reviewing it with your key business and technology stakeholders
• Confirming the business case to ensure that it still makes sense for your organization to invest in the project.

Formulate Your Business Analysis Plan

Your business analysis plan will bring clarity to the business analysis process. It’s going to answer many questions for you and your project team.

Your key responsibilities

• Choosing the most appropriate types of business analysis deliverables.
• Defining the specific list of business analysis deliverables
• Identifying the timelines for completing the business analysis deliverables.

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Define the Detailed Requirements

Detailed requirements provide your implementation team with the information they need to implement the solution.

Your key responsibilities

• To understand what the business community wants from a specific feature or process change.
• Analyzing the information you’ve discovered
• Reviewing and validating each deliverable with appropriate business and technology stakeholders and asking questions to fill in any gaps.

Support the Technical Implementation

During the technical implementation, there are many worthwhile support tasks for you to engage in that will help drive the success of the project and ensure the business objectives are met.

Your key responsibilities,

• Reviewing the solution design
• Updating and/or repackaging requirements documentation to make it useful for the technology design and implementation process.
• Engaging with quality assurance professionals to ensure they understand the business context for the technical requirements.
• Help resolve any issues that surface during the technical design, technical implementation, or testing phases of the project.

Help the Business Implement the Solution

Your technology team can deliver a beautiful shiny new solution that theoretically meets the business objectives. Business analysts are increasingly getting involved in this final phase of the project to support the business.

Your key responsibilities,

• Analyzing and developing interim
• Training end users to ensure they understand all process and procedural changes
• Collaborating with business users