centerbottom ITM115-01 Assignment 1- Create a Study Guide
Canadore College of Applied Arts & Technology
Wendy DegagneBUSINESS ANALYSIS KEY CONCEPTS
What is Business Analysis?
Business Analysis is the process of study any business or any other organization to identify the business opportunities or problems areas and suggest the potential solutions.
Business Analysis is a research discipline of identifying business needs and determining solutions to business problems.
Business Analysis is a disciplined approach for introducing and managing change to organizations, whether they are for profit businesses, governments or non-profits.
It is used to identify and articulate the needs for change in how organizations work, and to facilitate that change.
It is the set of tasks and techniques which work as a connection between stakeholders.
Perspectives in Business Analysis:-
Perspectives are used within business analysis work to provide focus to tasks and techniques specific to the context of the initiative. Many initiatives will involve one or more perspectives.
The five perspectives are:-
The Agile Perspective
The Business Intelligence Perspective
The Information Technology Perspective
The Business Architecture Perspective
The Business Process Management Perspective
Who is a Business Analyst and what does business analyst do?
A business analyst is someone who analyzes an organization or business domain and documents its business or processes or systems, assessing the business model or its integration with technology.
Business Analyst’s task is to define the solution which helps the organization achieve its goal.
Business Analyst is responsible to document the business requirements for the IT system support using appropriate documentation standards.
Business analyst is responsible for discovering, synthesizing and analyzing information. Eliciting the actual needs from stakeholders. Investigating and clarifying the express desires of stakeholders. Determining underline issues and their causes.
Some of the common jobs for people who perform Business Analysis are:-
Business System Analyst
The Business Analysis Core Concept Model:-
The business Analysis Core Concept Model (BACCM) is a tool for analyzing change at any level in any organization. It helps project teams and process designers to solve the right problems by linking the work being done back to the business goal and objectives. It helps the product owner effective priority decisions.
All the concepts are equally necessary, there is no prime concept, and they are all defined by the other Core Concept. This model communicates about business analysis with a common technology.
The Business Analysis Core Concept Model consists of six Core Concepts, related through a dynamic conceptual system.
The Core Concepts are:-
Change: A controlled transformation of an organization.
Need: a problem, opportunity, or constraint with potential value to an organization.
Solution: a specific way of satisfying a need in a context.
Value: the importance of something to a stakeholder in a context.
Stakeholder: a group or individual with a relationship to the change or the solution.
Context: the part of environment that encompasses the change.
The Core Concept model is shown below:-
Some Important KEY TERMS:-
Business Analysis:- Business Analysis is the process of study any business or any other organization to identify the business opportunities or problems areas and suggest the potential solutions.
Business Analysis Information:-It produces a requirements specification. This specification states the project goal and the related data storage, data movement, security, quality, usage, functional and non- functional requirements that must be achieved in order to achieve the business goal stated in the business case.
Design:- The design documents are about how the system will be built, not how it will work. This includes how the functions will be split between various code modules, the interfaces between the modules, and the physical data base structures.
Enterprise:- It is a system of one or more organizations and the solution they use to pursue set of common goals. An enterprise may include any number of business, government, or any other type of organization.
Organization:- A business organization is an individual or group of people that collaborate to achieve certain commercial goals. Some business organizations are formed to earn income for owners. Other business organization called nonprofits, are formed for public purposes.
Plan:- A business plan is a document demonstrating the feasibility of a prospective new business and providing a roadmap for its first several years of operation. Business plans are an important part of creating new businesses, whether as a startup or an offshoot of an existing business.
Requirements:- Requirements are the specification which once delivered, provide value, its describe the characteristics of the proposed system from the view point of systems end user. Business requirements often include business context, scope, and background including reasons for change.
Risk:- Risk is the effect of uncertainty on the value of a change, a solution, or the enterprise. Business risk is the possibility a company will have lower than anticipated profits or experience a loss rather than taking a profit. It is influenced by numerous factors, including sales volume, per unit price, input cost, competition, the overall economic environment and government regulations.
Requirement Classification Schema:-
The requirements classifications schema places the requirements in one of the following categories:
Business Requirements: – It defines the goals and objectives of business at the enterprise level. These are the requirements that apply to organization as a whole rather than a specific group within the organization. Business requirements are developed or documented as part of ongoing enterprise analysis activities.
Stakeholder Requirements: – It describes the goals and objectives of a particular group within an organization. Like Business Requirements, they are intended to provide a higher level direction for the stakeholder group, but often they are developed while considering the contending goals and objectives of other areas of the organization that interact with each other.
Solution Requirements: – It describes the various characteristics of a solution that must be met. The solution may be a process solution or a system solution. Solution requirements should be written in a way that they also support and align with the Stakeholder and Business Requirements.
Functional Requirements: – It describes the behavior and information that the solution will manage. In the case of a non-system solution, the behavior typically refers to a workflow and the information refers to the inputs and outputs of the workflow.
Non-functional Requirements: – It describes the qualities of the process or system. Instead of describing what the solution must do non-functional requirements describe how well the solution must do something. Non-functional requirements often describe qualities of a process or system such as its repeatability, usability, reliability, interoperability, scalability, extensibility, etc.
Transition Requirements: – It describes any capabilities of the solution that aren’t permanent but instead exist only to facilitate the transition from the current state to the future state. Once the process or system has been developed and the transition of users and information from the current solution to the new solution has occurred, these capabilities will no longer be needed or supported. Transition requirements cannot be developed until both the current state and the future solution have been defined.
Stakeholder:- A Stakeholder is a person or group who can affect or be affected by a given project. Stakeholders can be individuals working on a project, group of people or organizations, or even segments of a population. A stakeholder may be actively involved in a project’s work, affected by the project’s outcome, or in a position to affect the project’s success. Stakeholders can be an internal part of a project’s organization, or external, such as customers, creditors, unions, or members of a community.
Business Analyst: – Business Analyst is a person who is responsible and accountable for the execution of all the activities which are required to perform in business. The business analyst is inherently a stakeholder in all business analysis activities.
Customer: -A customer is a recipient of a good, service, product or an idea obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration.
Domain Subject Matter Expert: – A domain subject matter expert is a person who is an authority in a particular area or topic. The term domain expert is frequently used in expert systems software development, and there the term always refer to the domain other than the software domain.
End User : – An end user is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user is used to distinguish the person for whom a hardware or software product is designed from the developers, installers, and services of the product.
Implementation Subject Matter Expert: -An implementation subject matter expert is any stakeholder who has specialized knowledge regarding the implementation of one or more solution components.
Operational Support: -Operational support is responsible for the day-to-day management and maintenance of a system or product. Some of the most common roles are: operations analyst, product analyst, help desk, and release manager.
Project manager: -A project manager is a professional in the field of project management. Project managers have the responsibility of the planning, procurement and execution of a project, in any undertaking that has a defined scope, defined start and a defined finish; regardless of industry. Project managers are first point of contact for any issues. Project management is the responsibility of a project manager.
Regulator: -Subsystem or independent device that determines and maintains the operating parameters of a system, usually within certain prescribed or preset limits.
Supplier: – A party that supplies goods or services. A supplier may be distinguished from a contractor or subcontractor, who commonly adds specialized input to deliverables.
Tester: – Testers are responsible for determining how to verify that the solution meets the requirements defined by the business analyst, as well as conducting the verification process.
Requirements and design : -Requirements are focused on the need; designs are focused on the solution. The following cycle describes how the cycle may be viewed in the requirements and design cycle.
SOME BEST PRACTICES:-
Swot Analysis: – The Swot Analysis is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats and Opportunities analysis. It is an enterprise level analysis technique of assessing an organization against these four dimensions. It ultimately drives decision making for changes and improvements to an organizations position in the market. Swot analysis is so popular because it is a simple technique to apply in either a quick and straightforward way or in-depth analysis of an organization or situation. It is therefore versatile as an analysis technique. It is also a technique, which is applied across many different business areas and is not limited to being an exclusive Business Analysis Technique. This means a lot of people are very familiar with what this technique means and hence makes this technique even more popular.
Pestle : – Pestle analysis is a framework of macro-environmental factors used in environmental scanning component of strategic management.
The PESTLE basically includes following factors:
Political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental.
Raci Chart : – The raci chart is relatively straightforward tool that can be used for identifying roles and responsibilities during an organizational change process. It is useful to describe what should be done by whom to make transformation process happen.
RACI is an abbreviation for : –
R= Responsible –owns the problem or project.
A=Accountable- who must sign off on work before it is effective.
C=Consulted-has information and/or capability necessary to complete the work.
I=Informed-must be notified of results but not be consulted.
Example of RACI CHART:-
Requirements Interviews And Workshops: –
Requirement Interviews: – It is the activity of performing a structured interview where the Business Analyst questions, captures, interprets and understands the intention of requirements requested by the interviewee for a particular solution. The Requirements Interview is typically applied during the early stages of a project when stakeholder requirements are being gathered, analyzed and validated.
Requirement Workshops: – The purpose of requirement workshop is to elicit requirements from business stakeholders about what they believe a new solution need to be able to do in order to meet their needs. The Requirements Workshop is typically applied during the early stages of a project when stakeholder requirements are being gathered, analyzed and validated.
Business Process Modeling :- Business process modeling in business process management and systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analysed, improved, and automated. It is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analyzed and improved. It is a diagrammatic representation of the sequential workflow of information, processes and decisions for a particular business process. There are many opportunities for a Business Analyst to apply this Business Analysis Technique. This technique is so popular because of a variety of reasons. Firstly, it is an easy and clear way to show how a business process should logically be executed by different roles within a business to perform a certain function.
Use Case Modeling: – Use case modeling is a modern approach for describing system requirements by focusing on “actors” to describe that interaction. Within the Unified Object Modeling approach, one of the early steps involves building a use case model. The essence of this model is to capture user requirements of a new system, whether it’s being developed from scratch or based on an existing system, by detailing all the scenarios that users will be performing.
The Diagram of Use case Modeling is as shown: –
Data Modeling: -It is the analysis of data objects and their relationships to other data objects. Data modeling is often the first step in database design and object oriented programming as the designer first create the conceptual model of how data items are relate to each other. Data modeling involves a progression from conceptual model to logical model to physical schema. Data Modeling is applied during the Analysis and Design stages of a project that requires updates to be made to how, what and where data is to be stored. This could be in the context of software development, reporting development or data analytics focused project.
User Stories: – A user story is a very high-level definition of a requirement, containing just enough information so that the developers can produce a reasonable estimate of the effort to implement it. A user story is one or more sentence in the everyday or business language of the end user that captures what the user wants to achieve. A user story is also a placeholder for conversation between the users and the team. User stories should be written by or for the customers for a software project and are their main instrument to influence the development of the software. User stories could also be written by developers to express non-functional requirements (security, performance, quality, etc.)
Non Functional Requirements Analysis: -Non-functional requirements define the criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, in contrast to functional requirements that define specific behavior or functions.
Categories of non functional requirements can be:
Configurability ; Flexibility: Software is configurable if it has the ability to handle a wide variety of system configuration sizes. On the other hand, flexibility is applied when the software intends to increase or extend the functionality after its deployment.
Performance: The performance constraints specify the timing characteristics of the software. Efficiency specifies how well the software utilizes scarce resources: CPU cycles, disk space, memory, bandwidth, etc.
Reliability: Reliability specifies the capability of the software to maintain its performance over time.
Availability: A system’s availability or “uptime” is the amount of time that it is operational and available for use.
Portability: Portability specifies the ease with which the software can be installed on all necessary platforms and the platforms on which it is expected to run.
Quality: About procedures, test plan, validation and verification.