The Art of Business Analysis

Business analysis is the practice of enabling change in an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders. It also enables an enterprise to articulate needs and the rationale for change, and to design and describe solutions that can deliver value.

Business analysis & knowledge areas:

Business analysis planning and monitoring:

describes the tasks that business analysts perform to organize and coordinate the efforts of business analysts and stakeholders.

• Elicitation and collaboration: describes the tasks that business analysts perform to prepare for and conduct elicitation activities and confirm the results obtained. It also describes the communication with stakeholders once the business analysis information is assembled and the ongoing collaboration with them throughout
  the business analysis activities.
• Requirements life-cycle management: trace, maintain, prioritize, assess, and approve.
• Strategy analysis: describes the business analysis work that must be performed to collaborate with stakeholders in order to identify a need of strategic or tactical importance.
• Requirements analysis and design definition: use of Balsamiq for wire framing
• Solution evaluation

Business analysis & the core concept model:

• Change: act of transformation in response to a need.
• Need: A problem or opportunity
• Solution: Specify way of satisfying one or more needs
• Stakeholder: Group or individual with relationship to the change, need or solution
• Value: worth, importance or usefulness of something (business value)
• Context: this is the business scenario

Requirement classification schema

Requirements or solution recommendations can be classified as the following to help create a structure:
Business requirements: statements of goals, objectives, and outcomes that describe why a change has been initiated. They can apply to the whole of an enterprise, a
business area, or a specific initiative.

Stakeholder requirements: describe the needs of stakeholders that must be met in order to achieve the business requirements. They may serve as a bridge between business and solution requirements.

Solution requirements

Functional requirements: describe the capabilities that a solution must have in terms of the behavior and information that the solution will manage. Non functional requirements: do not relate directly to the behavior of functionality of the solution, but rather describe conditions under which a solution must remain effective or qualities that a solution must have.