Business Analyst Job Description Template

The following job description may be tailored for use by a Business Analyst without any people management responsibilities:

Business Analyst Role Description:

1:To develop a sound knowledge of and the effect of the requested changes.
2: To liaise with business managers and low-level users to understand and document business requirements across affected business areas.
3: To understand, document and prioritise business requirements across affected business areas.
4: To work with business owners and delivery workstreams to develop optimal solutions.
5: To develop complete and accurate business models including process, data and organisation.

Business Analyst Working Relationships:

Work with project sponsor to understand and document project objectives and scope.
1: Work with business owners from affected business areas to understand current processes and to document and prioritise requirements.
2: Work with delivery workstreams to communicate business objectives and requirements, make decisions on delivery options and produce delivery costs and timescales.
3: Work with projects to understand and manage project dependencies.
4: Work with project manager/s to plan analysis work and highlight risks and issues.
5: Work with Finance to define accurate, meaningful and measurable business cases.
6: Work with the business owners to define acceptance criteria.

Business Analyst Deliverables:

1: Project initiation documents defining high-level scope.
2: Business requirements document describing the project's objectives, how the work was done and listing the requirements for each business area prioritised into mandatory, desirable and optional categories. Desirable and Optional requirements will have an associated business case which will allow the project sponsor to make informed decisions about delivery of the project.
Detailed requirements that enable the chosen solution to be developed and tested with minimal analysis support.
3: Business cases defining the costs and benefits associated with requested changes.
4: User Acceptance test plans.
5: Business models incorporating process and data models.

Business Analyst Reporting:
Weekly reports will be produced for the project manager showing progress against outstanding milestones, status, resource requirements, issues, risks and dependencies.

Business Analyst

Business Analysis is the process of understanding business change needs, assessing the impact of those changes, capturing, analysing and documenting requirements and then supporting the communication and delivery of those requirements with relevant parties.

Who is a Business Analyst?
"Today's Business Analyst may reside within any part of an organisation and this has a direct effect on the way they work and the deliverables they produce"

"Business Analysis is the process of understanding business change needs, assessing the impact of those changes, capturing, analysing and documenting requirements and then supporting the communication and delivery of those requirements with relevant parties."

A Bit of History: Requiring straightforward automation of repetitive administrative tasks and conversion from paper to electronic data storage, IT projects of the seventies and early eighties could not fail to be successful and reap financial rewards.

Systems Analysts took responsibility for documenting existing manual paper based processes, identifying problems and new business requirements, and then automating these processes through computerised systems. This provided significant savings in staff as well as improvements to customer service through access to electronic information in fractions of a second.

Throughout the late 1980's and 1990's, companies started to evolve their IT systems to take advantage of new technology as they attempted to make further savings or improvements in service. However, IT projects in this era continually failed. They either failed to deliver at all, or were delivered without providing any significant business benefits.

The reasons for failure were that projects became unfocussed, receiving (sometimes conflicting) demands from different business departments. Systems were developed with unrealistic business cases, without clear objectives, with unmanaged expectations of performance or merely to follow the 'emperors new clothes syndrome' of jumping on the latest technology bandwagon.
Business users became increasingly frustrated with the barriers that limit their ability to implement change promptly and effectively. As PC and server technology evolved, business users became wise to IT and started to purchase and build their own localised systems. This has left many companies in a position where as well as their existing 'legacy' systems, they have hundreds of different systems which often link in an uncontrolled fashion with no real documentation to explain the links.

The Business Analyst has Evolved:
Throughout this period, the role of the Systems Analyst evolved into the Business Analyst. This role encompasses more than the ability to document processes and apply technological expertise.

While the Systems Analyst belonged to the IT department, Business Analysts can now be found within a number of places in organisation structures:
1: Within the IT department acting as a conduit to and from the business
2: Within individual business units with responsibility for identifying business needs
3: Within a change management department coordinating and managing change across the whole business.

But wherever they sit, Business Analysts must be great communicators, tactful diplomats, problem solvers, thinkers and analysers - with the ability to understand and respond to user needs in rapidly changing business environments.

We define the purpose of the role of the Business Analyst as being ultimately responsible for ensuring that organisations get the most from their limited IT and change management resource.

Business Analysts are responsible for identifying change needs, assessing the impact of the change, capturing and documenting requirements and then ensuring that those requirements are delivered by IT whilst supporting the business through the implementation process. Business Analysts should not just write specifications and then leave them to be delivered. The development lifecycle is an iterative one and the Business Analyst must be involved from initial concept through to final implementation.

Business Analysts are likely to be the key change facilitators within your organisation. They must deliver effective solutions which provide tangible business benefits usually within short timescales.

Business Analysis

Business analysis helps an organization to improve how it conducts its functions and activities in order to reduce overall costs, provide more efficient use of resources, and better support customers. It introduces the notion of process orientation, of concentrating on and rethinking end-to-end activities that create value for customers, while removing unnecessary, non-value added work. The person who carries out this task is called a business analyst or BA.
Those BAs who work solely on developing software systems may be called IT Business Analysts or Technical Business Analysts.

Business analysis sub-disciplines:

Business analysis, as a discipline, has a heavy overlap with requirements analysis, but focuses on identifying requirements in the context of helping organizations to achieve strategic goals through internal changes to organizational capabilities, including changes to:

policies, processes, and information systems.

Some professional business analysts believe that business analysis can be broken down into six major knowledge areas:
Enterprise Analysis: focuses on understanding the needs of the business as a whole, its strategic direction, and identifying initiatives that will allow a business to meet those strategic goals.
Requirements Planning and Management: involves planning the requirements development process, determining which requirements are the highest priority for implementation, and managing change.
Requirements Elicitation: describes techniques for collecting requirements from stakeholders in a project.
Requirements Analysis: describes how to develop and specify requirements in enough detail to allow them to be successfully implemented by a project team.
Requirements Communication: describes techniques for ensuring that stakeholders have a shared understanding of the requirements and how they will be implemented.
Solution Assessment and Validation: describes how the business analyst can verify the correctness of a proposed solution, how to support the implementation of a solution, and how to assess possible shortcomings in the implementation.

Roles of Business Analysts:

As the scope of business analysis is very wide, there has been a tendency for business analysts to specialize in one of the three sets of activities which constitute the scope of business analysis.

1. Strategist: Organizations need to focus on strategic matters on a more or less continuous basis in the modern business world. Business analysts, serving this need, are well-versed in analyzing the strategic profile of the organization and its environment, advising senior management on suitable policies, and the effects of policy decisions.
2. Architect: Organizations may need to introduce change to solve business problems which may have been identified by the strategic analysis, referred to above. Business analysts contribute by analyzing objectives, processes and resources, and suggesting ways by which re-design (BPR), or improvements (BPI) could be made. Particular skills of this type of analyst are "soft skills", such as knowledge of the business, requirements engineering, stakeholder analysis, and some "hard skills", such as business process modeling. Although the role requires an awareness of technology and its uses, it is not an IT-focused role.
Three elements are essential to this aspect of the business analysis effort: the redesign of core business processes; the application of enabling technologies to support the new core processes; and the management of organizational change. This aspect of business analysis is also called "business process improvement" (BPI), or "reengineering".

3. Systems Analyst: There is the need to align IT Development with the systems actually running in production for the Business. A long-standing problem in business is how to get the best return from IT investments, which are generally very expensive and of critical, often strategic, importance. IT departments, aware of the problem, often create a business analyst role to better understand, and define the requirements for their IT systems. Although there may be some overlap with the developer and testing roles, the focus is always on the IT part of the change process, and generally, this type of business analyst gets involved, only when a case for change has already been made and decided upon.

In any case, the term "analyst" is lately considered somewhat misleading, insofar as analysts (i.e. problem investigators) also do design work (solution definers).

Business process improvement:

A business process improvement (BPI) typically involves six steps:
1. Selection of process teams and leader: Process teams comprising 2-4 employees from various departments that are involved in the particular process, are set up. Each team selects a process team leader, typically the person who is responsible for running the respective process.
2. Process analysis Training: The selected process team members are trained in process analysis and documentation techniques.
3. Process analysis Interview: The members of the process teams conduct several interviews with people working along the processes. During the interview, they gather information about process structure, as well as process performance data.
4. Process documentation: The interview results are used to draw a first process map. Previously existing process descriptions are reviewed and integrated, wherever possible. Possible process improvements, discussed during the interview, are integrated into the process maps.
5. Review Cycle: The draft documentation is then reviewed by the employees working in the process. Additional review cycles may be necessary in order to achieve a common view (mental image) of the process with all concerned employees. This stage is an iterative process.
6. Problem Analysis: A thorough analysis of process problems can then be conducted, based on the process map, and information gathered about the process. At this time of the project, process goal information from the strategy audit is available as well, and is used to derive measures for process improvement.

Goal of business analysts:
Ultimately, business analysts want to achieve the following outcomes:
1: Reduce waste
2: Create solutions
3: Complete projects on time
4: Improve efficiency
5: Document the right requirements

One way to assess these goals is to measure the return on investment (ROI) for all projects. Keeping score is part of human nature as we are always comparing ourselves or our performance to others, no matter what we are doing. According to Forrester Research, more than $100 billion is spent annually in the U.S. on custom and internally developed software projects. For all of these software development projects, keeping score is also important and business leaders are constantly asking for the return or ROI on a proposed project or at the conclusion of an active project. However, asking for the ROI without really understanding the underpinnings of where value is created or destroyed is putting the cart before the horse.

Pre Sales - How Does It Work ?

Clients or companies that need software services and project implementations generally call for proposals from a pool of preferred vendors. Although it is hard to generalize on the nature of or the contents of such proposals, most documents follow a structured framework: detailing the project, asking vendors for suggestions or solutions or proposals along with cost estimates regarding the work to be done.

RFP responses would generally involve two components:
I: The Technical Solution: A typical response to an RFP or proposal will include a substantial technical component. People responding to RFPs at service firms generally follow a well-defined operating process involving plugging the response documents with common templates about the company and its capabilities. The customization process kicks in when it comes to project and client specific responses; and here is where someone with a technical background is really valuable. Technical subject matter experts are needed to analyze the client's problem, think through a framework to create a solution based upon their knowledge and experience. Such skills can be especially useful while preparing a proof of concept or technical demo.

The focus areas include:
1: Demonstrate to the client that you Get their problem and showcase how you will approach the solution: During Pre-sales phase, technical solutions could include a mockup of the end-state technical view, reference architecture, approach or framework to solve the client's specific problem.

2: Demonstrating organizational capabilities: Organizations typically demonstrate their capabilities by referencing past successes (Case studies, whitepapers etc), and may also develop proof-of-concept (POC), demonstrations or mockups.

II : Commercials and Administrative Aspects: Commercial and administrative aspects include a whole gamut of activities involved in responding to clients with specific reference to the processes involved in executing the engagement / project. Cost is definitely a key criteria organizations use while evaluating a proposal though depending on the nature of problem being sourced, the credentials of the vendor and the solution may take a higher priority. The administrative aspects include a high-level estimate of the effort involved in terms of duration (time), effort (people/resources) and additional resources including infrastructure etc required to successfully provide the required solution. Estimating the level-of-work involved may include formal estimation techniques based on expertise from past projects or could be a very heuristic process, especially for newer technologies without adequate benchmarks.

The focus areas may include:
1: Cost, budget and financials: What is the total cost to the client, how often will they be invoiced and the mode of payment etc? This may include defining the billing model: Time and Material (T&M), Fixed Price (FP) or other blended models.
2: Staffing plan, resource management: Responses to proposals typically include staffing plans (how many people, skills they bring to the table, roles etc) and may also include other resources needed including specific systems, hardware, software etc.
3: Credentials, testimonials and references from past clients: There are instances where clients may ask for specific testimonials from existing/past clients of service firms. Staff engaged in pre-sales activities should be able to arrange for such references.

The "What Is" of Pre Sales

I came across this piece on http://www.offshoringmanagement.com/ and this is not my own composition but an attempt to understand pre sales as a career option. Hope you gain an insight into it as well..

What is Pre Sales?

Pre Sales includes the entire gamut of activities involved in preparing to engage with prospects, clients and others and includes specific responses to client requests. Clients or companies that need software services and project implementations generally call for proposals or expect responses from their vendors and service providers. Although it is hard to generalize on the nature of or the contents of such proposals, most documents follow a structured framework: detailing the project, asking vendors for suggestions or solutions or proposals along with cost estimates regarding the work to be done.

Typical Pre-sales support activities include:

Responding to client requests: Responses to clients could include informal responses, pointers to publications, colleterals or other references or take more specific forms like responses to proposals including: Request for Proposal (RFPs), Request for Information (RFI) and specific Statement of Work (SoW) or Work Orders

Supporting client visits: In some cases, clients or prospective clients may make a trip to offshore vendor's offices for a personal visit prior to engaging with them. This could include offshore client visits targeted at offshoring

Visiting clients and/or making presentations: Engaging clients for larger, complex deals involves a number of activities, including making presentations, meeting with clients to discuss specific aspects of their (client's) initiatives, to get a better understanding of the context in order to make specific recommendations in proposals. This may also include preparing proof-of-concept demonstrations and solution mockups.

Competitor Analysis and market scanning: This is a crucial aspect of pre-sales since many clients evaluate responses from multiple vendors, and responses should address such competitive scan. The analysis could include using online tools, subscribing and analyzing research reports, analyst studies, market research data etc.

Sales Support: Such activities may include supporting sales and account teams in responding to general client queries about solutions and capabilities. This could include partnering with onsite/client facing Sales or Business Development Managers to identify and convert prospects into customers.

Interfacing with other internal groups (within the organization): while responding to client requests. This is especially true of larger software service firms where Pre-sales people from one group/division may have to rope in Subject Matter Experts from other groups while responding to a client request or proposal

Marketing support: Large service firms work hard at differentiating themselves from others by formulating marketing messages and evolving Go-to-market solutions or customized offerings. This may also take a form of alliances with other software product development firms or niche vendors. Pre-sales activities may include leveraging such alliances to showcase extended capabilities to clients.

Sales

The Sales Cycle is the time / process between when the 1st contact with the customer is made to the time the deal is closed.

A Product Sale or a Service Sale usually would begin with maybe an enquiry from the prospective customer on the pricing of the product or the timelines for the delivery of a certain service to the point when the Prospect either accepts the terms and signs a deal or declines the offer.

A typical Sales Cycle can take anywhere from a few days to over a year! Sales Cycle times and processes vary enormously depending on the company, type of business (product/service), the effectiveness of the sales process, the market and the particular situation applying to the customer at the time of the enquiry.

The Sales Cycle time is also referred to as the Sale Gestation Period (ie from conception to birth - enquiry to sale). The sales cycle in a sweet shop is less than a minute; in the international aviation sector or civil construction market the Sales Cycle can be many months or even a few years.

A typical Sales Cycle for a moderately complex product might be:

1. Approach

2. Qualification

3. Agreement On Need

4. Sell The Company

5. Fill The Need

6. Act Of Commitment

7. Present proposal and CLOSE sale.

Sales Funnel - describes the pattern, plan or actual achievement of conversion of prospects into sales, pre-enquiry and then through the sales cycle. So-called because it includes the conversion ratio at each stage of the sales cycle, which has a funelling effect. Prospects are said to be fed into the top of the funnel, and converted sales drop out at the bottom. The extent of conversion success (ie the tightness of each ratio) reflects the quality of prospects fed into the top, and the sales skill at each conversion stage. The Sales Funnel is a very powerful sales planning and sales management tool.

More on this later...

It Ain't Easy Being an HR Professional

I have absolutely no idea what motivates me to write on this topic. Maybe it’s the fact that I have moved across and been astounded by the HR Professionals that I have interacted with.

At times, when I put myself into their shoes I think – its way too taxing to be the bridge between the Higher Management and your Employees. Depending on what you are asked to communicate, you might almost always (if the communication is not pretty much in favor of the employees) run the risk of being criticized to the core!

I’ve had the pleasure of having interacted with at least a quarter dozen HR Professionals who are a part of my social circle. I’ve seen them all go through their own set of ups n downs. So where do the challenges really stem from and in what circumstances. And while attrition is the most obvious of all the varied challenges HR Professionals look to tide over, I think it is worth thinking about the other factors as well.

One: Maybe you have the responsibility of downsizing, right sizing or even ramping up the workforce. These are challenges in themselves. Issuing Pink Slips isn’t easy and neither is it easy to meet recruitment targets when you have people accepting an offer and not joining you.

Two: At times you may not always be empowered to take decisions. There may be situations when the Job you do, may not be truly strategic in the sense of completing the triad of the Business Leaders, the Finance Guys and The HR. You may be desperate to be participating in driving key business decisions, but instead might be asked to focus on other administrative functions.

Three: There will be days you feel not one soul is happy with the work you do. While you do wish to keep the employee interests in mind on one hand, you may be constrained by the company policies on the other.

Four: You might run the risk of carrying the emotional burden of the concerns your employees have. While it’s always wise to be practical, it’s not always possible.

Five: You might be misguided by incorrect feedback. Well when training is being conducted, and you ask in person for a feedback people might be nice to smile and say things are perfect. It may turn out to be the exact opposite when you start going through the feedback forms.

I’ve always heard people say that “HR is the most cursed of all the functions within an organization” – well may be, but it surely is a key driving force in keeping your staff satisfied. And while these 5 paragraphs might lead someone to think against pursuing a career in HR, I’d vouch that there definitely are more motivating factors to truly consider this as a career option – of course only if a passion for communication, people, and teamwork figured bold on your inherent skill set.