Business Analysis Career

Many of us dreaded of IT career due to conventional

career path of doing coding job for initial years. The ultimate goal of

programmer is to reach at project manager or program manager level.

However, there is a non-conventional route to this career for those who

actually would like to contribute towards IT field without having to

start as programmer.

This article, we are focusing the Business Analysis that is related to

application development process in information technology

Concept: "Business Analysis" is a relatively new role in Information

technology / system development process. Although, previously this role

existed informal manner where it was performed partly or fully by either

the Business Experts, or project manager or the project coordinator or

the business/stake holder representative and QA personnel.

As per IIBA, "Business Analysis is the process of understanding business

change needs, assessing the impact of those changes, capturing, analyzing

and documenting requirements and then supporting the communication and

delivery of those requirements with relevant parties."

Role: Although, this role has evolved over a period of time to and recent

years its taken a definite shape, the role still defers company to

company or industry to industry. The major role of managing requirement

and coordinating with various functions remains unchanged.

A Business Analysis (breaking the activities /tasks into small parts

before bringing out the solutions) is comprehensive activities of

understanding problem, finding solutions, managing requirement,

documenting requirements, designing/prototyping requirement, conducting

User Acceptance Testing, designing user manuals and so on"...

In large size project, if there are 4-5 business analysts, the lead

business analyst usually responsible for overseeing the complete

activities and the team member are responsible for one of the activities

such as requirement management, data analyst, QA coordination, report

management, documentation, writing prototypes, preparing flow

chart/process diagrams, writing Use cases. All these functions are

performed using various tools - Visio, Enterprise Architect, UML,

Rational Rose, Requisite Pro, Mercury Quality Center, SQL...

Those BAs who work deal extensively technical people may be known as IT

Business Analysts or Technical Business Analysts or Business System

Analyst and these analysts can easily move from one industry to another.

It may not true for the business analyst coming from a particular domain

such as Finance background Business Analyst usually takes up job in

Finance Industry...

Career path: A Business Analyst could build a successful career path

moving upwards as a project manager and then as a program manager or a

Lead business analyst or Subject matter expert. Program manager or lead

business analyst could be at senior management level position. SME

(Subject Matter Experts) could be at par with division head in large

company.