A business analyst (BA) is a specialist responsible for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting various data. The results of their work are necessary for companies to further develop and make informed decisions on expanding their operations, launching digital products, and much more.
Stages where a business analyst is involved
Business analysts are an important part of both the preparation and direct development of a digital solution. That’s why they are involved in all phases of the project. The algorithm of BA actions at each of them has many common features, so experts have developed a standardized scheme:
- Initiation
The initial phase in which the needs, stakeholders, existing solutions, competitors, etc. are analyzed. The business analyst’s job is to define the goal and idea of the development. Thanks to its results, the company gets a preliminary understanding of who will need the future product, why and how it will differ from others.
As a result of the initiation, the company will be able to decide whether to start development or abandon it and focus on other options.
- Discovery and planning
The discovery phase can last from two weeks to two months (depending on the size of the project) and aims to determine the project baseline. This is a basic plan – a set of documents that describes the scope of work and a list of work tasks. - Development and testing
At this stage, the software is actually created. Engineers write code, test it, and integrate it with third-party systems. The goal of the development phase is to create a product that functions correctly based on the requirements previously collected by the business analyst. - Release
The BA’s job is to prepare release documentation, perform user acceptance testing (UAT), develop metrics, and collect feedback from a focus group. Success metrics can be set separately for each feature. For example, developers have written a feature and submitted it to users for testing. The role of the analyst is to analyze the usage of the new feature and determine its feasibility in the final version of the digital solution. Thus, the goal of the release phase is to make the product available to users and make sure it is successful.
The BA’s responsibilities also include the development of a User Manual, i.e. instructions for users. Typically, such documents are created for large-scale enterprise software or multifunctional, multi-level products.
- Support
At the support stage, a business analyst acts as a contact person who filters user requests and divides them into:
bugs that need to be fixed;
ideas that can be used to implement new functionality;
training deficiencies that require the development of additional instructions.
The main goal of the fifth phase is to develop additional functionality, refactor the code, maintain and improve the current digital product.