Role: Business Analyst
An individual within an organization who defines, manages, or monitors Business Processes

This role leads and coordinates business requirements elicitation by outlining and delimiting the organization being modeled, and by describing how the business must operate in order to achieve its goals and objectives.

Role Sets: Business
Relationships
Main Description
A Business Analyst is an individual within an organization who defines, manages, or monitors Business Processes. They are usually distinguished from the IT Specialist or programmers who implement the Business Process.

This role leads and coordinates business use-case modeling and business architecting by outlining and delimiting the organization being modeled. For example, by establishing what business actors and business use cases exist and how they interact.

This role also has overall responsibility for the business architecture. This includes identifying and documenting the architecturally significant aspects of the business system that falls under the scope of the business modeling exercise.

Staffing
Skills
  • Identifying and understanding business problems and opportunities
  • Assessing the situation of the target organization where the project's end-product will be deployed
  • Collaborating effectively with stakeholders and customers.
  • Performing cost/benefit analyses for recommended changes in the target organization 
  • Excellent communication skills
  • Knowledge of the business and technology domains or the ability to quickly absorb and understand such information
  • Modeling organizations, for example through use-case models or BPEL
Assignment Approaches

The following are some suggested assignment approaches:

  • Assign this role and the business architect or business designer roles to the same person. These roles interact a lot, so it can be more efficient to have a single person responsible for both roles.
  • Assign this role and the system analyst role to the same person. This is useful when the business context needs to be understood, but the organization doesn't have existing business analysis skills. Many common skills exist between these roles. One concern is that this person might find it difficult to separate business needs from possible solutions, as the system analyst works with requirements for automated systems.
  • Assign this role and the test analyst role to the same person. This is useful where customers are actively involved in the project definition and ongoing assessment.