What Do Business Analysts Do?

Tom Hathaway
Managing Partner
Requirements Solutions Group, LLC

Premier Edition of the RSG Noiseletter

Business and Systems Analysts of the world! This is the first of an ongoing series to keep you apprised of what is happening in the world of Business Analysis, System Analysis, Requirements Analysis and whatever else we are calling this vital function today. We want you to be informed about what is available to help your in your never-ending search for truth, wisdom and the perfect requirement. (We suspect that finding truth and wisdom will be the easier quest, but we, like you, will never stop trying). Our objective is to keep each of these "insight" messages short and to the point with information that will inform and help (or, at the very least, entertain) you.

Requirements Solutions Group, LLC.

What Do Business Analysts Do?

We thought that a good place to start might be by trying to find an answer to the often asked question "What does a (Business / System / Process / Data / Requirements) Analyst do?" To find the answer, we googled around the web and discovered enough studies, surveys and opinions to piece together a state-of-the-practice report. It is a rounded-off and rolled-up summary of what those of us who are involved with defining business requirements for information technology solutions do.

Before you look at it, it might be interesting for you to take a moment to brainstorm and jot down the 7+/-2 things you spend the most time on. Then take a look and compare your responses with the results of our research.

Click here to check out our full report "What Do Business Analysts Do?".

WARNING: This is not a full-blown, managed survey. It is an intelligent blending of many sources, extracting the data, comparing and reducing it to an informative chart.

Training Impact

When we were done with our research, we asked ourselves if the results made sense to us (they did!). Then we asked ourselves if we were teaching the right stuff in our courses. This caused us to make some modifications to our courseware by adding or expanding some material and deleting or reducing other material.

For an in-depth look at how our training maps to the activities that you do, check the Training Coverage section of the report.

You can download a course catalog from our website. It is designed to print double-sided but works fine either way.

JAD White Paper

Lastly, we noted item #6 "Facilitating Requirements Sessions" in the report scored fairly high. Coupled with the high number of JAD-related search terms that people used to find our web site, we decided to make our white paper on what JAD’s are and how they work available as a download.