What is Business Analysis? Process & Techniques

What is Business Analysis?

Business Analysis can be understood as a research discipline that helps you to find the business needs and identify solutions to business problems. These solutions may include the development of a software or system component, improvements in process, organizational changes or strategic planning and policy development. The purpose of business analysis is to identify solutions that meet the need for improvement.

Business Analysis process offers concepts and insights into the development of the initial framework for any project. It stores the key to guide stakeholders of a project who performs business modeling in an orderly manner.

In this Business Analysis tutorial, you will learn:

Why use Business analysis?

Here are important reasons for using Business analysis methods:

• It helps you to understand the structure and the dynamics of the company
• It allows you to understand current problems in the target organization.
• It helps you to identify improvement potentials and recommending solutions to enable an organization to achieve goals.
• It helps you to identify and articulate the need for change.
• To maximize the value delivered by an organization to its stakeholders.

Steps involved in Business Analysis Process

Here are the steps for Business Analysis:

1. Enterprise analysis
2. Requirement planning and Management
3. Requirement Elicitation
4. Requirement analysis and Documentation
5. Requirement Communication
6. Solution Evolution and Validation.

Step 1) Enterprise Analysis

This area covers a collection of pre-project activities that leads to up to project selection guided by the Business Analyst.

This area covers a collection of pre-project activities that leads to up to project selection guided by the Business Analyst.

The activities are as follows:

• It helps to maintain Business Architecture
• Allows you to prepare the Business Case
• Preparing for Decision Package

Step 2) Requirement Planning & Management

In this step, you need to define the tasks and resource which are associated with the planning and management of requirements. This helps you to ensure that the set of activities that are undertaken is appropriate according to the specific project. It is also important to capture changes correctly and consistently.

Step 3) Requirement Elicitation

The requirement elicitation phase consists of researching and discovering the requirements of a system from users, customers, and other stakeholders.

Step 4) Requirements Analysis & Documentation

This stage describes how stakeholder needs to analyse, structure, and specify the design and implementation of a solution. Requirements analysis helps you define the methods and tools used to structure the raw data.

Step 5) Requirements Communication

This phase is the collection of activities for expressing the output of the requirement analysis. Moreover, every requirement needs to be packaged, evaluated, and approved before the solution is implemented.

Step 6) Solution Evaluation and Validation

This phase ensures that a solution should able to meets the stakeholder objectives.

Common Business Analysis Techniques

Here are the most important business analysis techniques:

MOST

Most is a short form of Mission, Objectives, Strategies. It allows business analysts to perform thorough internal analysis of what is the aim of an organization to achieve and how to tackles such issues.

PESTLE

Pestle stands for (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal, and Environmental). This model helps business analysts to evaluate all the external factors which can possibly impression their organization and determine how to address them.

SWOT

SWOT is a full form of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This technique helps you to find areas of both strength and weakness. It also allows for the proper allocation of resources.

MoSCoW

Must or Should, Could or Would process is a long-form of MosCow. This technique allows prioritization of requirements by presenting a framework in which every individual requirement should be evaluated relative to the others.

CATWOE

CATWOE is an acronym for Customers, Actors, Transformation Process, World View, Owner, and Environmental. This technique helps you to recognize processes that may be affected by any action the business undertakes.

The 5 Whys

This technique is a backbone of both Six Sigma and business analysis techniques. It consists of leading questions that allow business analysts to single out the root cause of an issue by asking why such a situation arises.

Six Thinking Hats

This process helps you to consider alternate perspectives and ideas. The ‘six hats’ in a technique which his categorized as:

• Green (creative thinking)
• Blue talk about big-picture overview.
• White (logical, data-driven thinking)
• Yellow (positive thinking, which mainly focused on pros)
• Red (emotion-based reactions)
• Black (opposing thinking, which is focused on cons)

Summary:

• Business analysis is a research discipline that helps you to find the business needs and defining solutions to business problems
• It helps you to understand the structure and the dynamics of the company
• Here are the steps for Business Analysis: 1) Enterprise analysis 2) Requirement planning and Management 3) Requirement Elicitation 4) Requirement analysis and Documentation 5) Requirement Communication and 6) Solution Evolution and Validation.
• Important business analysis techniques are: 1) MOST 2) PESTLE 3) SWOT 4) MoSCoW 5) CATWOE 6) The 5 Whys and, 7) Six Thinking Hats
• Most is a short form of Mission, Objectives, Strategies
• SWOT is a full form of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
• Must or Should, Could or Would process is a long-form of MosCow
• CATWOE is an acronym for Customers, Actors, Transformation Process, World View, Owner, and Environmental
• This technique is a backbone of both Six Sigma and business analysis techniques
• This process helps you to consider alternate perspectives and ideas