Role of the Business Analyst
The RealityA Business Analyst is someone who:
- Can sort through the chaos and ambiguity of what is told to them by many people and
extract a concise description of the business.
(often from widely varying perspectives who: see
multiple/conflicting parts of the problem, have an inconsistent vocabulary, and prioritize
things differently)
- Works with business users and IT professionals as a business problem solver.
(with users who may or may not know how to express their needs
because their expertise lies in doing the business, not in translating the business into
systems requirements)
- Acts as a liaison between the technical and business worlds.
(even when IT "knows" what the system needs and wonders if
they really need input from the users)
- Is capable of analyzing the business to identify problems and/or opportunities and to
define solution characteristics.
(while being pressured by management to shortcut the process)
- Is not intoxicated by technology.
(and therefore wont go off talking about HTML vs. XML vs.
J-script; the differences between reusability, inheritance, and polymorphism; or the pros
and cons of normalized design vs. star schema design vs. multi-dimensional cubes)
- Is not the user
(realizing if they were the user in the past they are no longer)
- Does not jump to designing the solution
(although there is often pressure to "start coding now"
even before they find out what is really needed)
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