The role of a business analyst

A business analyst (BA) bridges the business and the delivery team (developers, vendors, operations). The BA makes sure the team builds the right thing: something that solves a real problem, delivers value and is clearly understood by everyone.

What BAs do

• Understand business goals, problems and the current process.
• Identify stakeholders and their needs.
• Elicit, analyse, document and validate requirements.
• Model processes and data.
• Recommend solutions and evaluate options (including "don't build anything").
• Work with developers and testers through delivery; support UAT and rollout.
• Measure whether the solution delivered the expected value.

BA vs other roles

• Product manager: owns the product vision and decides what to build and why (prioritisation, outcomes).
• Business analyst: deep on requirements, processes and details of how the solution must behave; often in IT services, consulting, banking and enterprise teams.
• Data/business intelligence analyst: focuses on analysing data and reporting.
• Project manager: owns schedule, budget, resources and risks.

In smaller companies these roles blend; in interviews, show you understand the differences.

Types of requirements

• Business requirements: the high-level goals ("reduce loan approval time from 5 days to 1").
• Stakeholder/user requirements: what users need to do ("A loan officer needs to see all applicant documents on one screen").
• Functional requirements: what the system must do ("The system shall auto-calculate EMI from amount, tenure and rate").
• Non-functional requirements: qualities: performance, security, availability, usability, scalability, compliance ("Search results load within 2 seconds for 95% of requests").
• Transition requirements: what's needed to move from the old state to the new (data migration, training).

Check yourself

• Classify: "The page must load in 3 seconds" and "Users can reset their password by email".
• How is a BA different from a product manager?