Assignment No. 4

Summary of BABOK

Submitted by

Priyanka V. Chandane

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Summary of BABOK:

This book is all about guide to the profession of business analysis. It describes globally recognised standards for the practice of business analysis. It also describes techniques for eliciting, analysing and managing requirements that are in widespread use around the world, and provides a comprehensive description of the key competencies that business analysts should have. It clarifies more contentious areas like stakeholder analysis and scope control, within almost every task within every knowledge area, the interaction between the business analyst and the project manager, along with other key stakeholders, is explicitly described. It also serves as a common denominator across the profession, setting a consistent standard of what business analysis encompasses. Since the guide is global, it offers a comprehensive overview of the entire business analysis profession, regardless of region or industry. It's essential preparation for the CBAP (Certified Business Analysis Practitioner) designation.

Business analysis is the set of tasks and techniques used to work as a liaison among stakeholders in order to understand the structure, policies, and operations of an organization, and recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.

Business analysis helps organizations to define the optimal solution for their needs, given the set of constraints (including time, budget, regulations, and others) under which that organization operates.

Knowledge Area

A knowledge area groups a related set of tasks and techniques. The knowledge areas within the BABOK are as follows:

Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring

Requirements elicitation

Requirements management and communication

Enterprise analysis

Requirements analysis

Solution assessment and validation

Underlying competencies

Technique

Business analysis planning and monitoring:

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This explains the approach associated with the planning and monitoring of business analysis activities. This includes tasks such as identification of stakeholders, defining roles and responsibilities of stakeholders, estimating tasks, planning communication with stakeholders, planning how requirements will be approached, traced and prioritized, determination of deliverables as well as business analysis processes. It also describes work involved in monitoring the process.

Elicitation: This explains details for eliciting business, stakeholder, solution or requirements. Elicitation is the process of formally drawing out responses from various stakeholders at the client organization about the project requirements. This process includes tasks like prepare of elicitation, conduct elicitation, document elicitation results, and confirm elicitation results. This can be done by identifying as well as ensuring resources available, using elicitation techniques (meeting, brainstorming, interviewing, questionnaires, focus group etc.), documenting information provided by stakeholders, validating those stated information.

Requirements management and communication: The main objective of requirement management is to manage changing requirements of clients/ stakeholders. This process includes tasks like manage solution and requirements scopes, manage requirement traceability, maintain requirements for reuse, prepare requirement package, and communicate requirements. This can be done by approving requirements from clients/ stakeholders, tracing those requirements, reusing implemented requirements, creating appropriate format and package of those requirements such as executive summary, formal documentation, RFI, RFP etc. and continuous interaction with stakeholders as well with developers to understand requirements are correctly understood and implemented.

Enterprise analysis: this explains the business analysis activities that take place for an enterprise to identify business opportunity, build business architecture, determine optimum project investment path for that enterprise and finally implement new business and technical solution. This process includes tasks like define business need, assess capability gaps, determine solution approach, define solution scope, create and maintain business architecture, preparing decision package, conduct initial risk assessment. This can be done by determining what organization wants to be able to do to improve efficiency and to provide better quality of service, determining workable solution approach to meet the business need, identifying capability that will be implemented and methodology that will be used to deliver, creating and maintaining business architecture helps in aligning the problem and opportunity to the business objectives, enhancing business case report, recommendations and rating initial and proposed risk responses.

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Requirement analysis: this explains a process of understanding the stakeholder’s needs and expectations from the modified or new product. This includes processes like prioritize requirements, organize requirements, specify and model requirements, define assumptions and constraints, verify requirements and validate requirements. This can be done by prioritising requirements according to business case and logical dependencies, organizing those requirements into logical sets, specifying or modelling those requirements by creating models or diagrams and writing those requirements, considering stakeholders statements and analysing it whether their needs are not properly requirements but rather they are based on some assumptions and capturing those assumptions, verifying those requirements and validating it.

Solution assessment and validation: This explains the tasks that are performed in order to ensure that solution meet the business need and facilitate their successful implementation. This process includes tasks like assess proposed solution, allocate requirements, assess organizational readiness, define transition requirements, validate solution and evaluate performance. This can be done by determining solution design assessment from possible options, allocating those requirements in such a way that the possible release options will increase the possible business value, conducting organizational readiness assessment and recommending ways to optimize the change in an organization, validating verified and deployed solution by analysing the solution and identifying defects, conducting cost/benefit analysis.

Underlying competencies: this explains the awareness about various basic skills required for business analysts. This includes skills like analytical and problem solving, behavioural characteristics, business knowledge, communication skills, interaction skills, software application.

Techniques: techniques alter the way a business analysis task is performed or describes a specific form the output task they may take. Techniques used by business analysts to carry out their tasks are as follows:

o Acceptance and evaluation criteria: It defines the requirements that must be met in order for a solution to be considered acceptable to stakeholders.

o Benchmarking: it is used to compare the strengths and weaknesses of an organization against its peers and competitors.

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o Brainstorming: it is used in a group by focusing a topic or problem.

o Business rules analysis: defines rules that govern decision in an organization.

o Data dictionary and glossary: it defines the key terms and data relevant to a business domain.

o Data flow diagrams: it is used to show how data flows into the system.

o Data modelling: it describes the relationship between information associated with domain and its concepts.

o Decision analysis: it describes decision making with complex system.

o Document analysis: it is used to elicit requirements by analysing previous documents.

o Estimation: it is used to forecast cost and effort involved in process.

o Focus groups: it used to learn people’s attitude, expressions, and desire about certain product or service.

o Functional decomposition: it is used to break process into several sub processes.

o Interface analysis: it is used to identify the interfaces between solution and its components and also describes how they will interact with each other.

o Interviews: it is formal or informal process to ask relevant questions to stakeholders and documenting their responses.

o Lessons learned process: It is a document prepared by business analyst to identify opportunities for further improvements.

o Metrics and key performance indicators: it measures the extent to which a solution meets its objective.

o Non- functional requirement analysis: it describes required qualities of system such as its performance, security, database, hardware etc.

o Organization modelling: it describes the roles and responsibilities within an organization as well as defines organizational structure of an organization.

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o Problem tracking: it is organized methods of tracking, managing, resolving issues and risk in an organization.

o Process modelling: it defines workflow in an organization.

o Prototyping: it is used as user interface to identify, describe and validate stakeholder’s needs.

o Requirements workshop: it is a well structured way to capture requirements of stakeholders.

o Risk analysis: It is done to avoid uncertainty in a course of business.

o Root cause analysis: it is a method to identify root causes of identified problems and ensures that it is corrected.

o Scenarios and use cases: it describes interaction between actors and systems.

o Scope modelling: it determines in scope and out scope of requirements.

o Sequence diagrams: it is a kind of interaction diagram. It shows how information is passes between objects in system.

o State diagrams: it is a behavioural diagram that shows behaviour of concepts, entities and objects.

o Structured walkthrough: it is effective method to communicate, verify and validate requirements with stakeholders.

o Survey/ questionnaire: it is a method used when there are many people and time is short.

o SWOT analysis: It is a tool for audit and analysis of overall course of business.

o User stories: it is a non-functional description of requirement.

o Vendor assessment: effective vendor assessment helps to establish long term relationship with stakeholders.

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