Kevin Brennan is leading a tutorial about Business Analysis.

He introduced the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA at theiiba.org) as a relatively young organization for Business Analysis.

Business Analysis is:

• Analysis is
  • Taking a thing, breaking it into its components parts to build a useful model of the organization.
• About a Business
  • (no kidding!) 🙂

The value of Business Analysis

• Understanding
  • how an organization works
  • why it exists
  • what are its goals and objectives
  • how it accomplishes those objectives
  • how it needs to change to better accomplish objectives or to meet new challenges
• It’s about
  • meeting business needs
  • ensuring investment in the right solutions

The IIBA create the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) reference. A lot of the contents relates to the PMBOK and it shows that there needs to be a relative closeness between the Project Manager and the Business Analyst.

The Body of knowledge relates to:

• BA Planning and Monitoring
• Elicitation
• Requirements Management and Communication
• Enterprise Analysis Structure
• Requirements Analysis Structure
• Solutions Assessment and Validation

Underlying competencies that are required (the slides were more detailed, but the main categories were):

• Analytical Thinking and Problem Solving
• Behavioural Characteristics (ethics, personal organization, trustworthiness)
• Business Knowledge
• Communication Skills
• Interaction Skills
• Software Applications

Core Business Model of an organization that a BA must work on:

• Decisions and Rules
• Tasks and Processes
• Roles
• Concepts and Relationships
• Events

The presentation then covered other topics, looked at some numbers used to prompt the topics of discussion, all of it very interesting but which I thought was difficult to blog about properly. Good presentation overall.

My takeaways from that session:

• I got a quick overview of the contents of the BABOK
• I have a better understanding of the competencies that a BA should have