What is Business Analysis? 

Business analysis can be described as the  sequence of activities which are implemented in order to assess the business requirement needs and to fit the required solution so as to bring around the success of the organization and business. So, this sequence of task is normally performed by a “Business Analyst” or BA. Business Analysis can cater to different industries and so there are specialists created among business analysts. For e.g the business analysts who solely work on developing IT systems are the Technical Business Analysts, and the ones which cater to the functional parts of the business processes and their improvement or re- engineering are known as Process Analysts.

Business Analysis is as such a vast subject and hence we will categorize it into subsets for better understanding of the various stages in any business process or software management. Business or Enterprise Level Analysis is the study and analysis of the business needs and the identification of initiatives to steer the organization on the path towards its strategic goals. This can include the finalization of the project scope, purpose and objective. This is the stage where the actual feasibility analysis occurs wherein the actual cost benefit analysis(CBA) of the project occurs and its evaluated whether the project should go ahead or not. Requirements elicitation and communication

is vital to the basis of business analysis as it involves the actual collection of data from the stakeholders and ensuring that their requirements are clearly illustrated and conveyed to each and every member involved in the project. This is the level at which the actual requirement needs are captured using using various requirement methodologies like Zachman framework etc. Requirements analysis or engineering has been synonymous with Business Analysis always and represents the requirements planning, development and management processes. At this stage the actual analysis of the requirements is done wherein the raw requirements are processed into functional objectives. The documentation of the requirements is done at this stage and may include the functional as well as the non-functional documents together with supplements like prototypes or UML diagrams. Finally,we come to Solution assessment and validation which ensures that the proposed solution design is in line with the requirements and there are no gaps in understanding which will trickle down the software development life cycle. At this stage, the requirements have taken form and have been converted to a solution design which can be developed and implemented as an application or software system. So its essential that analysis of the solution is done properly to ensure that the requirements are in synchronization with the solution. Business Analysis is not limited to this stage and can extend to the other parts of the project life cycle with significant contributions at the design, development, testing as well as implementation stage.

 Business Analysis, in summary, is the art of managing the requirements and the business needs and synchronizing them in line with the strategic objectives of the organization. In order to implement this management methodology, one needs to understand that Business Analysis forms the base of the successful implementation of any business process or software management event in an organization.