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The Eight Competencies of Highly Effective IT Business Analysts By Prasad Kamath Email: prasadavkamath1@yahoo.com, Tel: +91-9833990271, Mumbai, India. According to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge, Second Edition, 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 is any person who performs business analysis activities, no matter what their job title or organizational role may be. In the context of the above definition, put simply, a Business Analyst is a problem solver. The problem need not necessarily be related to software. The success in the role of a Business Analyst primarily depends on the Business Analysts ability to clearly identify business problems (or opportunities) from his / her elicitation sessions with the key stakeholders and obtain consensus on them. The need for this ability cannot be emphasized enough considering the fact that: 1. Most stakeholders dont understand their own problems but they certainly think they do. Very often, you see stakeholders specifying solutions when asked to articulate their problems. I remember a key project stakeholder mentioning in one of the first project meetings that he needed a Supply Chain Management system, when asked about the business problems he was facing, being blissfully ignorant of the fact that what he specified was actually a solution and not a problem. 2. The stakeholders who do understand their problems are rarely able to articulate them clearly. Try asking a stakeholder to document a business problem he is encountering and youll see the difficulty he faces. If stakeholders exactly knew their business problems and could clearly articulate them, the role of a Business Analyst would be redundant. The Business Analyst adds value by helping stakeholders understand their problems and recommending the best solution that would enable them to meet their business goals and objectives. In the Indian context, when someone refers to a Business Analyst, he actually refers to an SME (Subject Matter Expert). 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 (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) 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 Business Analyst should possess in order to do justice to his / her role, primarily on software projects in the Indian context. Figure 1 shows the eight major competency areas of a Business Analyst, many 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 IIBAs and ESI Internationals 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.

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It is imperative for any Business Analyst 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 v2.0 includes a knowledge area (discipline) called Enterprise Analysis, that requires the Business Analyst 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, Capital Markets or the Healthcare domain. That is the value the BABOK provides to an SME a set of global business analysis best practices. Business Analyst Competencies
1. Business Analysis Practices 5. Documentation

(E.g. Requirements Documents)

(E.g. BABOK)
2. Usability Engineering

(User-Centered Analysis and Usability Testing)

3. Object-Oriented Analysis

5. Documentation (E.g. Insurance, Banking etc) (E.g. Requirements Documents) 7. Business Process Management (BPM)

6. Business Domain

(UML Modeling)

(E.g. BPM CBOK)

4. Quality Control

(Reviews, System Testing, UAT)

8. Technology Awareness

(E.g. SDLC and IT technologies)

Figure 1: Business Analysis Competency Areas 2. Usability Engineering More often than not, project teams tend to develop solutions, systems 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 project 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 once made available to them, typically during user acceptance testing 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 user interface 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 usability engineering lifecycle, right from UCA (User-Centered Analysis), through UCD (User-Centered Design) and Usability Testing that ensures that the solution is developed in close

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collaboration with the appropriate end-user representatives. In fact, user-centered analysis is an integral part of business analysis that keeps the end-user at the center of all the 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 Business Analysts to have a strong understanding of the usability engineering lifecycle, particularly, user-centered analysis and usability testing. User-centered design does not fall within the scope of work of a Business Analyst. 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 objectoriented analysis. Considering the fact that most software systems today are based on object-oriented technologies, it is important for Business Analysts to be wellversed with techniques relevant to their scope of work. UML (Unified Modeling Language) enables Business Analysts 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-tounderstand 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 Business Analyst and the Development or project team that converts the requirements specified by the Business Analyst 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 lowlevel design, using simple UML tools. Most Business Analysts I have seen stay a mile away from UML, thinking that it is technical and hence meant for the System Analyst or Technical Analyst. UML includes a set of over 10 types of models or diagrams that are developed at various stages of the system development lifecycle. What many Business Analysts probably dont know but need to know is that the initial set of diagrams are the responsibility of the Business Analyst (though this sometimes overlaps with the responsibility of the System Architect), whereas these diagrams developed by the Business Analyst get further converted by Technical Designers to lower-level diagrams that form part of the low-level technical design. The BABOK v2.0 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 Business Analysts work and hence the Business Analyst must certainly know them. Again, as I have proved to Business Analysts 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 nontechnical Business Analysts, if they do away with their mental block towards UML. The industry certainly prefers Business Analysts with an understanding of UML. 4. Quality Control Since its a Business Analysts responsibility to ensure that the solution delivered to stakeholders meets the business need(s) for which the project was undertaken, its important for the Business Analyst to verify and validate the requirements

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(typically 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 Business Analyst 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 very 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 Business Analysts work, as there is no corresponding task or process in BABOK v2.0. However, within the Indian context, a Business Analyst is often required to support the System Testing activity. Whether a Business Analyst is involved in System Testing or not, it is certainly important for the Business Analyst to understand how functional and more importantly, nonfunctional testing (such as performance testing, security testing, usability testing etc) are performed. This is because it is the Business Analysts primary responsibility to elicit and document testable non-functional requirements specifications, a requirements-related activity that I have seen many Business Analysts not even familiar with. It would be difficult for a Business Analyst to write testable nonfunctional requirements if hedoes not understand how they will be tested. 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 Business Analyst 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 Business Analysts, 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 Business Analyst 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. In all my business analysis classes, I emphasize the need for a Business Analyst to focus on developing his documentation skills, whether he likes it or not, because ultimately what gets incorporated into the solution is whats in the requirements document! I also know of some Business Analysts taking a course in Technical Writing. While that might not be absolutely necessary, it only demonstrates their commitment towards being a better Business Analyst. 6. Business Domain By business domain, I mean industry verticals like finance, insurance, banking, healthcare etc. Though BABOK v2.0 explicitly mentions that the role of an SME

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(Subject Matter Expert) is distinctly different from that of a Business Analyst, it also mentions that often both might be performed by the same person. That is very true, especially in the Indian context. The Business Analyst would probably not be called a Business Analyst if heis not an SME in the relevant business domain. And to a great extent, a Business Analyst 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 Business Analyst 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 modeling the to-be processes is one of the key business analysis activities. As a result, it is essential for a Business Analyst to have a good understanding of BPM concepts and techniques. The ABPMPs (Association of BPM Professionals) Business Process Management CBOK (Common Body of Knowledge) describes nine different knowledge areas (or disciplines) of BPM that a Business Analyst 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 v2.0, there are other aspects of BPM like process design, process transformation and process performance management that are equally important and central to the role of a Business Analyst. In any case, 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 Business Analyst to possess the ability to understand how IT systems and technology can help solve business problems. In addition, since an IT Business Analyst works within the context of a software or IT project, a good understanding of the SDLC (System Development Life Cycle) 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. The eight competency areas described above can be used by a Business Analyst, new as well as experienced, as a self-assessment checklist. The assessment would highlight those areas that either need to be entirely developed or enhanced further. ______________________________________________________________________________ I hope this article has been insightful as well as useful and also hope that it helps good Business Analysts get better! If you have any comments, please feel free to write to me at prasadvkamath1@yahoo.com. Prasad Kamath, MBA, CBAP, PgMP, PMP, MCTS (Project 2007), CSM, CUA, Six Sigma Green Belt, ITIL (V3 F), CISSP, is a Consultant, Auditor & Corporate Instructor possessing over 17 years of overall industry experience in both the IT and BPO industries, with strong competencies in program and project management, business analysis, usability engineering, software delivery, information security and business continuity. He possesses strong experience in managing multiple concurrent projects and programs and is experienced in all phases of the SDLC. He has delivered a large number of project management and business analysis skill building workshops as well as certificationoriented programs for the CBAP, PMP and ITIL V3 Foundation certifications.

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