Business Analyst: What is the Job?

the Real Job of the BA is to help the customer accurately and succinctly define problems (or issues, the preferred term for business-side people).

There are as many levels of business issues as there are types of requirements, and in fact we can  map them nicely.

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What is the different between a business policy and a business rule?

A policy is:

• A non-actionable directive
• Often requires employees to translate into specific statements of what to do (business rules)
• Supports a business goal
• Supported by one or more business rules

A business rules is:

• Actionable
• Specific
• Testable
• Supports a policy

Examples of policies for a car rental company:

• Maintenance must be performed in a manner which maximizes the life and value of the car
• Renters must have valid insurance

Example of business rules that may support these policies:

• All vehicles are required to have a 58 point inspection after every 3 months of use before re-renting.
• A car which has accumulated more than 3500 miles must have its oil changed before re-renting.
• Tires with less than 1/16th inch of tread must be replaced.
• Renters in the state of Texas must have insurance covering $100,000 of liability or more.
• Renters in the state of Arizona must have insurance covering $50,000 of liability or more.

Notice that each of the business rules are written as a level which is actionable, specific, and testable.

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The Changing Paradigm: the New Breed of Information Systems

The Changing Paradigm: the New Breed of Information Systems

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Using Context Diagram to describe a Bank System

This diagram shows the entirety of our proposed Bank System encapsulated as a single process that sends data to, and receives data from, various external interfaces.

The interfaces to the right represent human actors of the kind you might find on a UML Use Case Diagram, who will interact with our system in various ways. Customers can send deposit and withdrawal requests to our system and can receive statements from it. Bank Managers can sendopen and close account requests to the system and can receive management reports from it.Third Parties can send third party deposits to the system, but obviously not mkae withdrawal requests.

The first interface on the left of our diagram represents the Other Banks which may send or receivemoney transfers when interacting with our system. These other banks are likely to be system actors (i.e. computer programs) rather than human actors.

The second interface on the left of our diagram represents the Sales Agents, which are external affiliate companies or individuals who generate customer introductions for our system.

Note that while the context diagram shows the kind of data that is exchanged between our system and the external interfaces, it implies nothing at all regarding the sequence in which those data exchanges take place.

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Basic Principles for Business Analysis

Always seek to ask the right question in the right way of the right people at the right time.

Use no term in talking with business people about the business they wouldn’t use naturally.

• Avoiding all ITspeak is hard. Many familiar terms assume development of software systems. Two examples: use case and data model. Both terms originated from IT and imply a system. In developing business models you don’t need those terms(!).

Never say ‘user’.

• Here’s a related point. ‘Users’ exist only if you’re thinking about building an IT system. We avoid the term. In the business context, business people are not ‘users’, they are the central actors in the day-to-day drama of business activity. Anyway, everybody is a ‘user’ of some system these days, so ‘user’ doesn’t much discriminate anything.

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