Business Analysis - Business Analysis Sub-disciplines

Business Analysis Sub-disciplines

Business analysis as a discipline has a heavy overlap with requirements analysis sometimes also called requirements engineering, but focuses on identifying the changes to an organization that are required for it to achieve strategic goals. These changes include changes to strategies, structures, policies, processes, and information systems.

Examples of business analysis includes:

Enterprise analysis or company analysis

Focuses on understanding the needs of the business as a whole, its strategic direction, and identifying initiatives that will allow a business to meet those strategic goals. It also includes:

• Creating and maintaining the business architecture
• Conducting feasibility studies
• Identifying new business opportunities
• Scoping and defining new business opportunities
• Preparing the business case
• Conducting the initial risk assessment

Requirements planning and management

Involves planning the requirements development process, determining which requirements are the highest priority for implementation, and managing change.

Requirements elicitation

Describes techniques for collecting requirements from stakeholders in a project. Techniques for requirements elicitation include:

• Brainstorming
• Document analysis
• Focus group
• Interface analysis
• Interviews
• Workshops
• Reverse engineering
• Surveys
• User task analysis
• Process mapping

Requirements analysis and documentation

Describes how to develop and specify requirements in enough detail to allow them to be successfully implemented by a project team. The major forms of analysis are:

• Architecture analysis
• Business process analysis
• Object-oriented analysis
• Structured analysis
• Data warehouse analysis, storage and databases analysis

Requirements documentation can take several forms:

• Textual - for example, stories that summarize specific information
• Matrix - for example, a table of requirements with priorities
• Diagrams - for example, how data flows from one structure to the other
• Wireframe - for example, how elements are required in a website,
• Models - for example, 3-D models that describes a character in a computer game

Requirements communication

Describes techniques for ensuring that stakeholders have a shared understanding of the requirements and how they will be implemented.

Solution assessment and validation

Describes how the business analyst can verify the correctness of a proposed solution, how to support the implementation of a solution, and how to assess possible shortcomings in the implementation.