I'm working as a Business Analyst from past 2.5 years which means i'm very new to this field though have done BA job with 2 different companies so far and learnt a lot.
There are different definations of a Business Analyst and my own simple defination of a Business Analyst is "A person who works as a liasion between business teams and development teams".
The International Institute of Business Analysis has the following definition of the role:
"A business analyst works as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems. The business analyst understands business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements and recommends solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals."
The British Computer Society defines BA as:
"An internal consultancy role that has the responsibility for investigating business systems, identifying options for improving business systems and bridging the needs of the business with the use of IT."
My 1st BA role invloved in managing stakeholders mainly business clients from different companies. I used to write Business Proposals to submit for a tender to get a project, conducting interviews and workshops to gather requirements, analyse and document those requriements to present to both IT and business teams. Once i get the final sign off for the proposed solution of a project, i used to forward those requirements on to development team. Once the expected solution is developed then i had to verify that the developed system meets busienss objectives. I used to conduct UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and then the successful implementation of the system.
As documentation, I had to write SRS, use cases, test cases, user training manuals, system guides, presentations etc.
From above you could see that a BA has to work on full Business Life Cycle using any BA methodology and in my case i used RUP.
In my current BA role I m working on processes and policies. It's kind of a bit different task as above though it involves managing stakeholders and gathering requirements.
A precious thing i learnt from my experience is that always manage your stakeholders/business clients very carefully. There are different type of people in different roles and different organizations and its not a childs' play to keep everybody happy.
Once you have learnt this skill then consider yourself a successfull Business Analyst.
I think its enough about a BA so far. I will write more about BA skills in my future posts.