MIRAÑA ANGELICA S.

BSAIS 2C

Purpose for having a Business Analysis Standards

What is Business Analysis?

By definition, business analysis is the discipline of recognizing business needs and findings
solutions to various business problems. In simpler words, it is a set of tasks and techniques
which work as a connection between stakeholders. These help them understand organizations
structure, policies, and operations. They can also recommend solutions to help the business
reach its goals.

Business analysis is about understanding how your organization functions to fulfil its purposes.
It entails defining the abilities the firm needs to provide products to the external stakeholders.
You will have to understand how the organizational goals connect to specific objectives. You
will also have to make a detailed plan to help achieve the goals and objectives. In your business
analysis, you will define how the stakeholders and different organizational units interact.

Strategic business analysis plays a central role in creating better business outcomes. Strategic
business analysis facilitates the creation of the guiding strategies that enable organizations to
move from strategy to execution.

With the changing market forces and increasing technology innovation and usage, business
leaders are thinking more strategically and are looking at ways of transforming their business.
Organizational transformations are building new core business capabilities and include changes
to products, services, capabilities, and culture.

Standards define how the company acts, which, in turn, builds trust in their brand. They can be
guidelines that describe quality, performance, safety, terminology, testing, or management
systems, to name a few. They can comply with authoritative agencies or professional
organizations and be enforceable by law, such as required medical degrees for doctors or
credentials for financial planners. Or they can be voluntary rules the company establish to
create confidence among their clients that the business operates at a high and consistent
quality level, such as a restaurant only using the highest quality, locally-sourced ingredients.

Standards must align with your mission, business objectives, and organizational leadership, and
be implemented consistently across your enterprise. Employees need to buy into the value of
adhering to standards so everyone is pulling in the same direction and reinforcing your brand.

Business analysis professionals from every level of experience and competency, regardless of
where they report functionally, require a business analysis standard that can be universally
applied in any size organization, industry, or region of the world. Business analysis professionals
need a standard that recognizes generally accepted good practices to support the practice of
business analysis efficiently, effectively, and consistently to deliver solutions that provide the
most value.

This guide identifies business analysis practices that are generally recognized as good practice.
These terms are defined as follows:

 Generally recognized. Generally recognized means the knowledge and practices

described are applicable to most portfolios, programs, and projects most of the
time, and there is consensus about their value and usefulness.

 Good practice. Good practice means there is general agreement that the
application of the knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques when performing
business analysis contributes to the successful delivery of the expected business
values and results across portfolios, programs, and projects.

Good practice does not mean that the knowledge described should always be applied uniformly
to all portfolios, programs, or projects; the business analysis professional, working with
stakeholders and the product team, determines what is appropriate for given situations. This
guide is different from a methodology. A methodology is a system of practices, techniques,
procedures, and rules used by those who work within a discipline. The guide, on the other
hand, is a foundation upon which organizations can build methodologies, policies, procedures,
rules, tools, and techniques needed to practice business analysis effectively. This guide aligns
the global community on what comprises the business analysis profession and aims to help
organizations realize improvements in business analysis capabilities by ensuring that business
analysis is commonly defined and understood.

Knowledge areas represent areas of specific business analysis expertise that

encompass several tasks.

The six knowledge areas are:

Each knowledge area includes a visual representation of its inputs and outputs.

Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring: describes the tasks that business analysts perform
to organize and coordinate the efforts of business analysts and stakeholders. These tasks
produce outputs that are used as key inputs and guidelines for the other tasks throughout the
BABOK® Guide.

Elicitation and Collaboration: describes the tasks that business analysts perform to prepare for
and conduct elicitation activities and confirm the 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: describes the tasks that business analysts perform in
order to manage and maintain requirements and design information from inception to
retirement. These tasks describe establishing meaningful relationships between related
requirements and designs, and assessing, analyzing and gaining consensus on proposed
changes to requirements and designs.

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 (the business
need), enable the enterprise to address that need, and align the resulting strategy for the
change with higher- and lower-level strategies.

Requirements Analysis and Design Definition: describes the tasks that business analysts
perform to structure and organize requirements discovered during elicitation activities, specify
and model requirements and designs, validate and verify information, identify solution options
that meet business needs, and estimate the potential value that could be realized for each
solution option. This knowledge area covers the incremental and iterative activities ranging
from the initial concept and exploration of the need through the transformation of those needs
into a particular recommended solution.
 Solution Evaluation: describes the tasks that business analysts perform to assess the
performance of and value delivered by a solution in use by the enterprise, and to recommend
removal of barriers or constraints that prevent the full realization of the value.

Tasks

A task is a discrete piece of work that may be performed formally or informally as part of
business analysis. The BABOK® Guide defines a list of business analysis tasks. The definition of a
given task is universally applicable to business analysis efforts, independent of the initiative
type. A business analyst may perform other activities as assigned by their organization, but
these additional activities are not considered to be part of the business analysis profession.

Tasks are grouped into knowledge areas. Business analysts perform tasks from all knowledge
areas sequentially, iteratively, or simultaneously. The BABOK® Guide does not prescribe a
process or an order in which tasks are performed. Tasks may be performed in any order, as long
as the necessary inputs to a task are present.

A business analysis initiative may start with any task, although likely candidates are Analyze
Current State (p. 103) or Measure Solution Performance (p. 166).

Each task in the BABOK® Guide is presented in the following format:

Purpose

Description

Inputs

Elements

Guidelines/Tools

Techniques

Stakeholders

Outputs
1. Purpose

The Purpose section provides a short description of the reason for a business analyst to
perform the task, and the value created through performing the task.

2. Description

The Description section explains in greater detail what the task is, why it is performed, and
what it should accomplish.

3. Inputs

The Inputs section lists the inputs for the task. Inputs are information consumed or transformed
to produce an output, and represent the information necessary for a task to begin. They may be
explicitly generated outside the scope of business analysis or generated by a business analysis
task. Inputs that are generated outside of the business analysis efforts are identified with the
qualifier '(external)' in the input list. There is no assumption that the presence of an input
means that the associated deliverable is complete or in its final state. The input only needs to
be sufficiently complete to allow successive work to begin. Any number of instances of an input
may exist during the life cycle of an initiative.

The Inputs section includes a visual representation of the inputs and outputs, the other tasks
that use the outputs, as well as the guidelines and tools listed in the task.

4. Elements

The Elements section describes the key concepts that are needed to understand how to
perform the task. Elements are not mandatory as part of performing a task, and their usage
might depend upon the business analysis approach.

5. Guidelines and Tools

The Guidelines and Tools section lists resources that are required to transform the input into an
output. A guideline provides instructions or descriptions on why or how to undertake a task. A
tool is something used to undertake a task. Guidelines and tools can include outputs of other
tasks.

6. Techniques

The Techniques section lists the techniques that can be used to perform the business analysis
task.

7. Stakeholders
The Stakeholders section is composed of a generic list of stakeholders who are likely to
participate in performing that task or who will be affected by it. The BABOK® Guide does not
mandate that these roles be filled for any given initiative.

8. Outputs

The Outputs section describes the results produced by performing the task. Outputs are
created, transformed, or changed in state as a result of the successful completion of a task. An
output may be a deliverable or be a part of a larger deliverable. The form of an output is
dependent on the type of initiative underway, standards adopted by the organization, and best
judgment of the business analyst as to an appropriate way to address the information needs of
key stakeholders. As with inputs, an instance of a task may be completed without an output
being in its final state. Tasks that use a specific output do not necessarily have to wait for its
completion for work within the task to begin.

This guideis intended to enable business analysis to be effectively performed regardless of the
project life cycle, whether a predictive, iterative, adaptive, or hybrid approach is used, and
provide guidance for business analysis regardless of the job title of the individual performing it.
This guide:

 Defines what the work of business analysis is and why it is important;

 Describes the competencies, processes, tools, and techniques needed to effectively

perform business analysis tasks and activities;

 Defines concepts related to business analysis that can be applied consistently across all
product and project life cycles, product types, and industries to deliver successful
business outcomes within portfolios, programs, and projects;

 Highlights collaboration points between those who perform business analysis activities
and other roles that business analysts typically need to work with collaboratively; and

 Provides and promotes a common business analysis vocabulary for organizations and
business analysis professionals.