Improving the delivery of critical project milestones through requirements specificity by means of greater specialization of the role of Business Analyst in Information Technology.

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Improving the delivery of critical project milestones through
requirements specificity by means of greater specialization of the role
of Business Analyst in Information Technology.
By Claude Sajous
Yes, that is a mouthful. That is my assertion arrived at from years of experience and
observation. Greater requirements specificity through specialization that will enable the
Development team to laser focus on the detailed project requirements so much so that code
can be delivered within a shorter time frame and with far fewer bugs!
Let’s dig deeper.

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Historically, the role of a Business Analyst in Information Technology has been to elicit or gather
project requirements from the Business Users and/or the Regulatory entity that may be
involved and then to undergo critical analysis that would produce in the end a well written and
detailed as well as a well vetted Business Requirements document.
Once completed, the BA (Business Analyst) would then walk the Dev team through this
document (BRD) and strategically partner with the Dev team to ensure that the project
requirements are indeed being developed as planned, and answer any questions or resolve any
issues that may come up during the development phase.
Given today’s complex and high impact projects your standard BRD is quite often supplemented
by an FRD - - functional requirements document - - and may even evolve into a JRD - - joint
requirements documents - - where a team of business and subject matter experts collaborate
to elicit and document the core requirements of the project.
This is all good and proper and will continue for the foreseeable future.
However, one does not move a BRD or FRD or JRD into production no matter how excellent the
result may be. What does get moved into production is code! That is the bottom line:
executable code.
Yes, they may be, and will be, supporting infrastructure components such as databases,
networks, file transfer protocols, but it is the executable code that will drive all this.
To that end, and given the complex and high impact nature of today’s projects, anything and
everything that can help the development team obtain greater specificity of requirements that
can lead to greater clarity of understanding will result in code having far fewer bugs as well as
code developed within a relatively shorter timeframe. Notwithstanding, the role of QA and UAT
will never be replaced. However, anything that can shorten the timeframe to market and
ensure minimal errors will play a strategic role now and going forward.
Historically, the role of Business Analyst has encompassed the following duties:
 Requirements gathering
 Business case analysis
 Reference data analysis
 Data query analysis and data mining using an SQL based tool against a database
 Endless meetings to review and vet the documented requirements with business users
and other team members
 Getting business user signoff of the business requirements document
 Partnering with the Development team in disseminating the business requirements,
conducting detailed walk-throughs and maintaining a close watch over what is
developed verses what was requested via the BRD/FRD/JRD.
 Participating in the initial phase of testing

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 Helping the QA team understand the requirements and to review the test plan and test
cases
 Manage User expectations and respond to any perceived deviation from the project
plan as it relates to the requirements
Today, the role of the Business Analyst has evolved and will never be the same. It has evolved
due to Technology as well as due to the increasing demands placed on the Development team
to bring to market code within a shorter time frame, and at the same time, code that is bug
free.
With that in mind, the BA today is called upon to play an increasing role as an Application
Modeler. This will allow the BA team to provide the development team with far greater
specificity of what is being asked to be developed. In turn, the greater specificity requested is
requiring the BA to undergo greater specialization.
Just as in modern medicine, the General Practitioner will always be in demand. However, when
critical cases are involved the Specialist will rule the day.
To the rescue comes Technology with a plethora of tools such as wireframes, e.g. Balsamiq, and
ETL tools, e.g. Alteryx. Bear in mind there are numerous other wireframes and ETL tools. I just
mentioned these two as examples.
In addition to wireframes and ETL tools, sophisticated data analysis by those who are experts in
formulating SQL queries will play an increasing role. EXCEL also has its place in terms of data
crunching and its enormously useful VLOOKUP function, as well as its graphing and charting
capability.
With wireframes a BA can mockup in greater detail what a screen or report should look like.
This in turn will be enormously useful to the Dev team. With an ETL tool, such as Alteryx, a BA
can create very detailed and complex workflows that can actually build end solutions
incorporating very complex business requirements. These workflows would not be moved to
production, but they can and will guide and direct the Development team on the right track and
allow them to compare the output from the workflow with what their code is producing.
The greater specificity that these tools allow the BA to provide the Dev team with is truly
awesome. However, it comes at a cost. The cost is greater specialization of skills on the part of
the BA. Nevertheless, it is well worth pursuing. My thesis is that greater specificity through
specialization leads to shorten timeframe to market critical code that is functionally correct and
bug free.
To the extent we can lift the cloud of uncertainty and provide greater confidence to those who
are actually building the code to ensure that the requirements that the business demands are
indeed the requirements that the code reflects is the extent to which we will provide an

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enormous benefit to all the project stakeholders as well senior management overseeing the
project.
However, greater specificity from greater specialization comes at a cost! There is some cost in
the actual purchase of the licenses for these tools. Yet, that cost although real is the least cost.
The greater cost is in the individual effort required to properly use and master these tools. Have
you ever heard someone who tried to play the piano but who did not know how to play? It
sounded terrible, right? What about the violin? It sounds even worse! If the time and effort to
master the skills needed is not exerted the results will be disastrous. Therefore, substantial
effort and skill are both required to achieve the state of specialization.
As for an ETL tool such as Alteryx it requires an enormous amount of attention to detail, a huge
amount of patience and a fair amount of some Dev skill acquired either from a previous life or
newly acquired. Once knowledge of these tools has been acquired one must go beyond the
basics to understand what the best practices are and then to apply these and move forward to
the point of optimizing the workflows for speed of execution.
These are great tools that are transforming the BA into a BA that can to a great extent perform
Application Modeling and therefore provide the Dev team with far greater specificity of
requirements than any BRD or FRD could ever provide.
In addition, and as an added bonus, the bond between Business Analyst and Developer is
greatly enhanced. In my opinion, fusion takes place and the two roles become inexorably
linked.
With the new and enhanced BA role as Application Modeler, the Development team will have
greater confidence in bringing their code to market within a shorter timeframe and with greater
confidence of the code being bug free.
What about QA and UAT? These roles will always remain. However, upfront we get to
supercharge the pre-build phase from greater specificity resulting from greater specialization of
the BA function. All this because of Technology.