Why is a Business Analyst Required on a Project Team?

Another popular interview question for junior to mid-level Business Analysts is “What role does a Business Analyst play in a project?”.   It is expected that both aspiring and more experienced Business Analysts are able to articulate how their roles are crucial to the success of projects, delivering value from idea conception to implementation. 

No matter what the focus, all projects aim to make a change to the way a business operates. The projects a Business Analyst works on typically have a 4-stage project life cycle:  initiation, planning, execution and closure.  Every stage has different types of activities and requires some form of support. From understanding the big picture to metric measurement, Business Analysts wear a variety of hats as each project progresses through its stages.

Below are just some examples of the type of projects Business Analysts might be involved in:

• New opportunity and strategic projects: These types of projects often involve benchmarking and market analysis, strategy analysis, understanding current capabilities and changing organisational cultures. Such projects may involve updating the current IT systems as well as potentially being a people-oriented project.
• IT projects: In order to improve business processes and/or customer experience, many organisations may be required to upgrade their core IT infrastructure or enhance their existing IT systems. A Business Analyst needs to understand the technology involved, what problem the business faces and what the ideal solution will be.
• Operational improvement projects: These are people-oriented projects that includes enhancing process flows, updating standard operating procedures, and/or moving the location where processes are currently being performed. Business Analysts will start with a current state analysis, review options, recommend solutions and see the project through to implementation.

The following section breaks down each major project stage in a high-level project lifecycle and elaborates on how Business Analysts adds value at each step.

1. Initiation

At the Project Initiation stage, Project Manager engages the Business Analyst to discuss and agree the project scope and definition of the business need, expected project outcomes, expected benefits and project acceptance criteria.

The joint efforts between the Business Analyst and Project Manager results in the production of two key project documents, which are the Project Vision and Solution Vision. The former contains the problem statement, desired outcome statement, acceptance criteria for deliverables, stakeholder analysis, business context, assumptions, constraints and scoping definitions (in scope/out of scope). The latter describes the problem statement, solution statement, provides a solution overview, stakeholder summary, determines “to be” capabilities and business context, defines what is in and what is out of solution scope.

These two documents support the Business Case document in medium and large projects, supporting project sponsor or project committee’s decision making on whether to proceed with the project.

2. Planning

While the Project Manager works on drafting a project plan, the Business Analyst is accountable for establishing the Business Analysis approach, outlining business analysis deliverables, communication approaches with stakeholders, requirements management approach and effort estimations. The Business Analyst then agrees the business analysis plan and requirements management plan with the Project Manager.

Once the plans are agreed, the Business Analyst works closely with the project stakeholders on clarifying the business need, specifying high-level business requirements, conducting stakeholder analysis, identifying risks, assumptions and constraints, as well as tolerances to a solution. The Business Analyst determines solution scope, high-level requirements, solution approach, reusable and new components to be used in the final solution. The Business Analyst works closely with the Project Manager to align solution scope with project scope. The Business Analyst communicates the identified and potential risks to the Project Manager, who then maintains the risk register and develops mitigation strategies for the identified risks.

Lastly, during this stage, the Project Manager and Business Analyst collaborate together to develop a work break structure to ensure that the solution can be assembled in a way that enables cost efficiency and adherence to project time and resource constraints.

3. Execution

This stage involves close collaboration with the Project Manager on the delivering requirements workshops to prioritise and validate requirements. They conduct workshops with vendors of components to the solution (where applicable).  The Business Analyst structures and organises requirements discovered during elicitation activities, specify and model requirements and designs, validate and verify information, identify solution options that meets business needs and estimate the potential value that could be realised for each solution option. During the stage, the Business Analyst also explains requirements to the development team and clarify doubts and concerns regarding the solution to be developed.

Should there be any changes to solution scope, the Business Analyst will discuss and prioritise project scope changes, which subsequently leads to changes in project scope.  By communicating the change to the project team, the Project Manager applies the relevant change management process to ensure that only the necessary and justified changes will scoped into the project.

Although most projects will have dedicated testing teams, Business Analysts can also be involved in conduct unit testing and verify the development is aligned to the requirements, as well as creating test scripts for initial testing. 

Business Analysts are also expected to communicate with solution architects, software developers and other third parties such as vendors with regards to solution validation activities. The same is true with user acceptance testing to measure and analyse solution performance and limitations, ensuring that the solution acceptance criteria will be met within the predefined tolerances, and recommend actions to increase solution value where possible. The Business Analyst facilitates solution implementation to ensure a smooth transition to business as usual.

Reporting on project progress is one of crucial requirements by the likes of project sponsors and the steering committees, amongst other interested parties.  Business Analysts’ performance reporting and progress trackers are widely seen as a fundamental ingredient in project-level progress reporting, which involves high-level statistics and metrics. Business Analysts are also known to provide further context or commentary to such reports, or offer explanations when challenged.

4. Closure

After project deliverables are accepted by the organisation, the Business Analyst facilitates the project closure by assisting the Project Manager in project closeout planning. The Business Analyst reports on how well the solution had met the business requirements and ensure that all necessary details are captured on the Lessons Learned log so that valuable information is available to be applied in future projects.

Finally, the Business Analyst hands over artefacts such as business requirements, functional requirements, use cases, non-functional requirements and solution technical specification to the organisation. These artefacts form a basis for business documentation on how to use the solution.  The Business Analyst will mainly be a technical liaison, running down any issues, working the project technical team in issue resolution and solution handoff. As the Business Analyst was heavily involved during requirements, design and configuration of the project solution, they will usually be leading such efforts on the ground during project rollout to the end user community.

When the project has been formally closed, the Business Analyst files all approved  artefacts in a central repository for future reference.

So, Why is a Business Analyst Required on a Project Team?

Most perceive Business Analysts to be amongst one of the best equipped professionals to deal with complexity, with their ability to ‘deep dive’ and discover key themes and their ability to cope with rapid changes to their environment. Project success involves the Business Analyst and project team collaborating effectively in tandem towards the finish line.  The Business Analyst are often seen as team players in the wider project team as they can often find themselves wearing different hats/ playing a variety of roles whilst leading on business analysis activities throughout project.  Moreover, Business Analysts offers crucial support to  Project Managers throughout the project lifecycle by applying their soft skills such as conflict resolution, stakeholder management and communication skills to manage the expectations of their stakeholders.

Most importantly, a Business Analyst are also known for looking beyond their project.  A Business Analyst continues searching for benefits and value for the organisation as a whole, demonstrating leadership by communicating strategic insights to organisations’ management team which may in turn lead to future initiatives or projects.