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The Eight Competencies of Highly Effective IT BAs By Prasad Kamath Email: prasadvkamath1@yahoo.com, Tel: +91-9833990271, Mumbai, India. According to IIBAs Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK), v2.0, business analysis is the set of tasks and techniques used to work as a liaison among stakeholders . to recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals. A Business Analyst (BA) is any person who performs business analysis activities, no matter what their job title or organizational role may be. When someone refers to a Business Analyst, he often means an SME. However, over the years, the industry realized that simply having subject matter expertise is not enough for effective business analysis. The methods and practices used by the SME are equally important. This fact, along with the release of the BABOK v2.0, made organizations work towards enhancing their business analysis practices beyond simply recruiting subject matter experts. This article aims at highlighting the important competency areas a BA should possess in order to do justice to his role, primarily on IT projects. The Figure shows the eight major competency areas of an IT BA, some of which overlap with IIBAs Business Analysis Competency Model V2.0 and ESI Internationals Business Analysis Competency Model. The intent of this article is not to present a new competency model but to expand on the existing competency models. 1. Business Analysis Practices By business analysis practices, I mean primarily the 32 tasks (same as processes) described in IIBAs BABOK v2.0. The BABOK focuses on the processes to effectively perform business analysis on any project. Hence, as one would expect, the BABOK is not specific to any business domain and can be applied equally well to any business domain. It is imperative for any BA to internalize the BABOK tasks and techniques in order to produce consistent results on projects, as far as business analysis is concerned. For instance, many projects directly begin with a discussion of requirements, without first obtaining a consensus on the business problems being encountered by the key stakeholders. The BABOK includes a knowledge area called Enterprise Analysis that requires the BA to perform problem analysis (or opportunity analysis) and arrive at a Business Needs Statement, before the solution requirements can be fleshed out. This approach remains the same, irrespective of whether its the Insurance, Healthcare or any other business domain. That is the value the BABOK provides to an SME a set of global business analysis best practices.

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Business Analyst Competencies 1. Business Analysis Practices 2. Usability Engineering 6. Business Domain 5. Documentation (E.g. Requirements Documents) 7. Business Process Management (BPM) 5. Documentation

3. Object-Oriented Analysis

4. Quality Control

8. Technology Awareness

2. Usability Engineering Very often, project teams tend to develop solutions or products for the stakeholders who communicate requirements to them, without being cognizant of the fact that no matter who communicates the requirements, if the end-users cannot use the system effectively, the project fails! The Standish Group, a popular research organization that publishes the top 10 success factors on projects, every year, based on its analysis of a large number of projects in North America, has been including the success factor user involvement in the top 5 factors every year. Its strange to see that, in spite of that, a large number of systems continue to be rejected by end-users, either partly or wholly, once made available to them, typically during UAT or post-deployment. Usability engineering is the answer to this issue. Most people who dont understand usability engineering invariably think that it is nothing more than designing UI screens and their look-and-feel. However, to be precise, that is part of user-centered design, which is just one subset of usability engineering. Usability engineering includes the entire lifecycle, right from UCA (UserCentered Analysis), through UCD (User-Centered Design) and Usability Testing that ensures that the solution is developed in close collaboration with the appropriate enduser representatives. In fact, user-centered analysis is an integral part of business analysis that keeps the end-user at the center of all business analysis activities. It focuses on the end-users mental model, which is their sub-conscious way of doing things. It is absolutely essential for all BAs to have a strong understanding of the usability engineering lifecycle, particularly, user-centered analysis and usability testing. Usercentered design does not fall within the scope of work of a BA. 3. Object-Oriented Analysis The BABOK v2.0 includes a set of 34 generic techniques that can be applied to multiple business analysis tasks. Many of these techniques are relevant to object-oriented analysis. Since most software systems today are based on object-oriented technologies, it is important for BAs to be well-versed with object-oriented techniques relevant to their scope of work.

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UML (Unified Modeling Language) enables BAs to convert requirements into different types of models or diagrams, each of which describes a particular aspect of the requirements. Additionally, use cases are a very simple, easy-to-understand technique to document requirements, primarily, functional specifications (though they can be used to document business requirements as well), such that it becomes easy and much less error-prone to convert it to technical design and subsequently, to code. It is important to acknowledge that one of the biggest communication gaps on projects is between the BA and the project team that converts the requirements specified by the BA to working software. UML makes it easy to communicate requirements specifications in a form that is easy for the project team, especially System Developers, to interpret and convert to low-level design, using simple UML tools. Most BAs I have seen stay a mile away from UML, thinking that it is technical and hence meant for the System or Technical Analyst. UML includes a set of over 10 types of models or diagrams that are developed at various stages of the SDLC. What many BAs probably dont know but need to know is that the initial set of diagrams is the responsibility of the BA (though this sometimes overlaps with the responsibility of the System Architect). These diagrams developed by the BA get further converted by Technical Designers to lower-level diagrams that form part of the low-level technical design, during the Low-Level Design activity. The BABOK includes Scenarios and Use Cases as well as 5 other UML diagrams in its Business Analysis Techniques section. If the techniques are described in the BABOK, they come within the scope of the BAs work and hence the BA must certainly know them. Again, as I have proved to BAs in every Business Analysis class of mine, UML is no rocket science and there is nothing technical about it. It can be easily mastered by the so-called non-technical BAs, if they do away with their mental block towards UML. The industry certainly prefers BAs with an understanding of UML. 4. Quality Control Since its a BAs responsibility to ensure that the solution delivered to stakeholders meets the business need(s) for which the project was undertaken, its important for the BA to verify and validate the requirements (part of the requirements review activity) as well as validate the solution (typically part of UAT) to confirm that it actually does meet the business need(s). These activities are a subset of Quality Control activities. A BA must be skilled at planning and facilitating user acceptance tests. This includes ensuring that all the right stakeholders are included in the test and the right aspects of the solution are validated as part of the test. I have seen many UATs that are nothing different from System Testing, except that they are performed by end-users, that too, not the right ones. Its not very surprising then that in spite of an apparently thorough UAT, the solution throws up many problems in the production environment that are not really related to the environment. System Testing does not fall within the scope of a BAs work, as there is no corresponding task or process in the BABOK. However, a BA might often be required to support the System Testing activity. Whether a BA is involved in System Testing or not, it is certainly important for the BA to understand how functional and more importantly, non-functional testing (such as performance testing, security testing, usability testing etc) are performed. This is because it is the BAs primary responsibility to elicit and document testable non-functional specifications, a requirements-related activity that I have seen many BAs not even familiar with. It would be difficult for a BA to write testable non-functional specifications, if he does not understand how they will be tested.

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5. Documentation This is one competency area that I would say, is the single biggest contributor to effective and successful business analysis, though the others are certainly very important. It is a known fact that a large percentage of the defects discovered during the System Testing and UAT activities are associated with poor quality requirements documentation. One of the major reasons for this is that the BA invariably assumes that the consumer of the documentation, primarily, the System Development team that actually builds the solution, possesses the same level of understanding of the business domain, as him or her. This makes him subconsciously exclude a lot of important details that deserve to be specified. This problem gets compounded by the fact that most project team members, including BAs, detest documentation, if I may use that word. The interesting aspect of an ambiguously written requirement is that the individual reading and interpreting the requirement might believe that he has perfectly understood the requirement, when his interpretation might actually be quite different from what was meant by the BA who documented the requirement. Unfortunately, the only time both might get to know that is during the UAT, or worse, during the production run, that leads to an unacceptable amount of rework. That explains the need for unambiguous documentation. 6. Business Domain By business domain, I mean industry verticals like finance, insurance, banking etc. Though the BABOK explicitly mentions that the role of an SME is distinctly different from that of a BA, it also mentions that often both might be performed by the same person. That is very true, on many IT projects. The BA would probably not be called a BA if he is not an SME in the relevant business domain. And to a great extent, a BA is likely to be more effective in his role if he possesses a fair amount of breadth and depth of knowledge and experience in the business domain relevant to the project.

7. Business Process Management (BPM)

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, a BA is primarily a problem-solver. One of the things that enable him to identify and analyze problems (or opportunities) and to recommend the best solution is his ability to understand and analyze business processes. Modeling and analyzing the as-is business processes in scope and then the to-be processes is one of the key business analysis activities. Hence, it is essential for a BA to have a good understanding of BPM concepts and techniques. The ABPMPs (Association of BPM Professionals) BPM CBOK (Common Body of Knowledge) describes nine different knowledge areas of BPM that a BA must understand well. Though some aspects of BPM like business process modeling and process analysis (to a smaller degree) have been addressed in the BABOK, there are other aspects of BPM like process design, transformation and performance management that are equally important and central to the role of a BA. They are essential in order to solve a business problem. 8. Technology Awareness Though a solution need not necessarily have an IT component, in all probability, most of them will, because most businesses today are IT-enabled. Hence it is imperative for every BA to possess the ability to understand how IT systems and technology can help solve business problems. In addition, since an IT BA works within the context of a software or IT project, a good understanding of the SDLC is essential to perform business analysis activities effectively. In fact, the SDLC methodology (waterfall, iterative, agile etc) selected for the project directly influences what business analysis activities would be performed and how.

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