Role: System Analyst
This role leads and coordinates requirements elicitation by outlining the system's functionality and delimiting the system.
Role Sets:  Analysts
Relationships
Main Description

In the systems engineering context, the System Analyst role continues the work done at the enterprise or mission level to establish the boundaries of the system-of-interest and to describe the motivation for change, whether this is the construction of new capability or modification to existing capability. The System Analyst defines the interactions and identifies the input and output entities that flow between actors and system, and formally defines the context for system operation. The System Analyst also defines the required performance, physical and other nonfunctional characteristics of the system for compliance with the demands of the mission or business context.

Staffing
Skills

A person acting in this role needs to be, above all else, an expert in identifying and understanding problems and opportunities. This includes the ability to articulate the needs that are associated with the key problem to be solved or opportunity to be realized.

In addition to this, a person playing this role needs to be a good facilitator and must have above-average communication skills. Knowledge of the business and technology domains are useful additional skills for those acting in this role. However, these skills may be of less importance if the individual has the ability to absorb and understand new information quickly. As a core role in the project team, a person playing this role must be able to collaborate effectively with other team members.

For systems engineering, the System Analyst has strong analytic skills and a solid background in requirements modeling using UML. The System Analyst also needs systems engineering process skills, for example, in the performance of trade studies on the proposed capabilities and their impact on various stakeholders.

Assignment Approaches

This role can be assigned in the following ways:

  • Assign one or more staff members to perform this role only. This is a commonly adopted approach and is particularly suitable for large teams or where the requirements are particularly complex, difficult to elicit or where the requirements are particularly challenging to define and manage.
  • Assign one staff member to perform this role and the Role: Test Manager or  Role: Deployment Manager. This strategy is a good option for smaller or resource constrained test teams. A person filling both these roles needs to have strong management and leadership skills as well as a prerequisite understanding of the domain or the ability to develop that understanding.
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