A Business Analyst (BA) analyzes the organization and design of businesses, government departments, and non-profit organizations. They also assess business models and their integration with technology.

There are at least four tiers of business analysis:

• Planning Strategically - The analysis of the organization business strategic needs
• Operating/Business model analysis - the definition and analysis of the organizations policies and market business approaches
• Process definition and design - the business process modeling (often developed through process modeling and design)
• IT/Technical business analysis - the interpretation of business rules and requirements for technical systems (generally IT)

The duties of a client developer are wide-ranging and vary widely from one organization to another. Within the systems development life cycle domain (SDLC), the business analyst typically performs a liaison function between the business side of an enterprise and the providers of services to the enterprise. A common alternative role in the IT sector is business analyst, systems analyst, and functional analyst, although some organizations may differentiate between these titles and corresponding responsibilities.
The Business Analyst is responsible for the following things:

The following section focuses on the IT sector perspective around business analysis, where much of the deliverables are around requirements. The BA will record requirements in some form of requirements management tool, whether a simple spreadsheet or a complex application.

(Project Initiation Document), what the needed achievements will be, and the quality measures. They are usually expressed in terms of broad outcomes the business requires, rather than specific functions the system may perform. Specific design elements are usually outside the scope of this document, although design standards may be referenced. Example: Improve the readability of project plans.

These describe what the system, process, or product/service must do in order to fulfill the business requirements. Note that the business requirements often can be broken up into sub-business requirements and many functional requirements. These are often referred to as System Requirements although some functionality could be manual and not system-based, e.g., create an application to track company purchases.

An example that follows from previous business requirement example:

• The system shall provide the ability to enter company purchasing information.
• The system shall allow the user to produce reports regarding company purchases.

These are a very important part of the deliverables, the needs of the stakeholders will have to be correctly interpreted. This deliverable can also reflect how the product will be designed, developed, and define how test cases must be formulated.

These are requirements that do not perform a specific function for the business requirement but are needed to support the functionality. For example: performance, scalability, quality of service (QoS), security and usability. These are often included within the System Requirements, where applicable.

These are capabilities or behaviors required only to enable the transition from the current state of the enterprise to the desired future state, but that will thereafter no longer be required.

These define the purpose of a report, its justification, attributes and columns, owners and runtime parameters.

This is a cross matrix for recording the requirements through each stage of the requirements gathering process. High-level concepts will be matched to scope items which will map to individual requirements which will map to corresponding functions. This matrix should also take into account any changes in scope during the life of the project. At the end of a project, this matrix should show each function built into a system, its source and the reason that any stated requirements may not have been delivered.


Business Analysts must understand the business and 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 to recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.