What is Business Analysis. Role of BA in an IT Project

What is business analysis? It forms the foundation for the successful development and implementation of an IT project, helping to bridge the gap between IT and business and build a profitable workflow model.

The all-around comprehensive analysis enables one to understand in-depth how technical and organizational issues can affect development processes. It can be used to identify and quantify opportunities for IT project management. The analysis also allows revealing criticality and volumes of necessary resources. That’s why it should be conducted only by experienced professionals.

If you want to launch a software development project, you must have a team that can assess the scale of the project, set requirements and standards, facilitate communication with the development team, and support its implementation.

At Axisbits, we put data analytics at the core of evaluating software development processes, defining Agile methodology requirements, and providing quality reports and recommendations for developers and IT businesses.

What is IT Business Analysis (BA)?

BA in IT helps establish the proper relationship between internal and external development processes to be automated, as well as connect customers and supply chains of finished software products.

It allows determining the criticality of business operations and related resource requirements to ensure the stability of operations and continuity of the IT project.

Role of an analyst in software development

The main goal of conducting BA is to develop initiatives and strategies to optimize processes, efforts, and costs at all stages of the project.

This is done by a business technology analyst who works with project managers and users to understand how to increase the efficiency and value of software solutions. This specialist formulates ideas and balances them with what is technologically feasible, financially and functionally sound.

What is a role of a business analyst? One must be able to:

• Conduct a thorough analysis highlighting issues and ways to solve them;
• Analyze flaws and errors and investigate requirements;
• Compose reports and business analysis approach documents;
• Visualize numbers and statistics (with layouts);
• Research competitors;
• Calculate, plan, and monitor development costs;
• Define business requirements as well as promotion and marketing recommendations;
• Define prioritization of technical and functional client requirements.

The key role of a business analyst in a project is to create a consistent and complete model of business requirements for software development. The specialist receives specific requirements from the client, and then on their basis:

• Composes terms of reference;
• Documents the software architecture of an IT product;
• Assigns development and testing tasks.

On top of that, BA also tackles:

• Definition of high-level and user-level business requirements;
• Business process modeling;
• Management of unfulfilled requirements;
• Testing and quality assurance team assistance;
• Assessment of return on investment and profits.

An IT business analyst often deals with automation tasks, collecting information from all development process participants, studying it, and describing in detail the desired software functionality. When a project is implemented, the specialist provides a tutorial for users and solves functional problems at all stages of the development life cycle.

Benefits of IT Business Analysis

Business analysis is a critical component of software development. And analysts are fundamental members of the team, providing the IT business with benefits such as:

• Cost- and time-efficiency. Once the requirements are systematized, analyzed, and evaluated, the cost of the project will be shared with all stakeholders. You won’t miss a single requirement with a good analyst by your side (which, otherwise, can result in huge unnecessary expenses). The development team and stakeholders quickly get results, test the first versions of the software product, and adapt to changing requirements.
• Full requirements compliance. Layouts allow all involved project parties (usually, the client and the development team) to see what the finished project will look like on the basic level. This helps avoid serious mistakes and misunderstandings at the very beginning of the project.
• Process optimization. A high-quality analysis will help set priorities, choose the best strategy for the development and promotion of an IT product, as well as the right pricing policy.
• Cybersecurity boost. The analysis also helps identify trends, potentially useful features, and possible issues in the perception of applications by future users. An analyst creates a BA interface by collecting, analyzing, and prioritizing user types, passing this info on to developers. The BA interface can be used by clients to document and ensure that the software complies with regulatory requirements. A business analyst can work with project stakeholders to analyze software during development. Understanding the requirements and expectations of the project ensures that testing is conducted correctly. Empathy card analysis will allow you to create a personalized IT product for different target audiences.
• Increase in profits. Identifying truly essential functionality, reducing costs, development time and the number of modifications increases the profitability of the project as a whole.

Conclusion

BA is a must at every stage of the development process. The business analyst role in agile and other workflow models is equally high. And yet, today, many IT departments don’t hire individual in-house specialists for the project, preferring to turn to specialized companies with experienced workers. 

Entrust your idea to seasoned professionals at Axisbits and we’ll transform your concept into a profitable product to reckon with in the smoothest way possible.