How does a day of a business analyst go by? The lack of a straightforward answer is the beauty of Business Analysis for me. Each day is different and it depends on the stage the project is in. 

Some of the main and most common BA activities are: 

  • Conduct interviews with stakeholders.
  • Facilitate meetings with stakeholders or the team – brainstorming, solutionizing, requirements workshops; 
  • Prepare requirement documents
  • Create visuals – diagrams and models to describe business processes and workflows
  • Write user stories, spikes and bugs
  • Manage backlog
  • QA

1.Understand

BAs need to understand the business problem and the business needs. A BA would meet with stakeholders in various formats  to understand the requirements, current and ideal business processes and used workflows or use cases  :

  • Interviews which would be a more focused way to elicit information and build rapport with the stakeholders. 
  • Workshops which would bring  a wider group of stakeholders to the table, spark divergent thinking, capture different perspectives and establish common ground.

2. Analyse

Then BAs analyse the gathered information, document and visualise business processes. Commonly used visualisation techniques are Business Process Modelling and Notation Diagrams (BPMN Diagrams), context diagrams, UML diagrams or any other. Sharing visuals with the stakeholders is a great way to confirm that you both understand the problem and the process the same way. Diagramming tools I like to use are Miro (my favourite by that moment because it is simple, flexible and FREE!) , Lucidchart or Microsoft Visio.  

BAs prepare a requirements document where all the requirements are listed and then validated with stakeholders. If you work in an agile team as I did, I would recommend stating the main requirements in this document and keeping it 1-2 pages, not going into too much detail but highlighting all the important points. This doc can be shared with the internal team, so that they can refer to it to capture the bigger picture. 

3. Discuss

BAs would present the requirement to the engineers and the designers. They might need to facilitate  brainstorming and solutionizing sessions with the team to come up with a good solution to meet the requirements.

4. Create tickets

BAs  would then write user stories and spikes to describe what is needed in more detail. User stories should be always value oriented and state what is the value the user gets when the ticket is done. Spikes are functional research which engineers need to do in order to understand what needs to be technically done so that we can meet the requirements and bring the value to the user. Out of spikes often come up user stories or dev tasks.

The role of BA is often integrated with that of a product owner. BAs manage the backlog, they prepare user stories, bugs, spikes, remove obsolete ones and order them by priority to ensure that the next thing engineers pick up will be the most important one.

During meetings with engineers the tickets are discussed in detail. Sometimes BAs might need to gather additional clarifications on the requirements and address questions raised by engineers (who are really good at thinking about edge cases!)

5. Review

Sometimes BAs act as QAs , they test the product in a test environment and communicate frequently with engineers to validate the end results. 

Be There for the team

During the whole process, what is vital is for a BA is to remain approachable and to be always there  🙂 for the team: 

– for the engineers who will constantly approach you  once the development process starts; 

– for the product and delivery managers who will often consult with you

– for the stakeholders who will reach out with questions and new ideas