An Overview of Business Systems Analysts

A Business system analyst may be employed by an IT department within an organization or may work within his or her own department. Some analysts will work on a freelance basis and are hired for specific projects or for specific periods of time. Those people in this role may be experts in banking, financial services, stocks and shares, manufacturing process or many other business areas.

The requirements for change are normally documented in a Business Requirements Document. The analyst will discuss the proposed requirement with the departments involved and with any external agencies before finalizing the document. All stakeholders should review the document and give approval for the change request to move forward to the next phase.

The person in the role of the analyst will assess the requirements and will document any required system or process changes, to fulfill the business requirement. Typically this is called a specification although the terminology varies from one company to the next. There may be a series of changes required to a computer system, for example, in order to deliver the customer's requirements. The analyst may therefore have to generate a number of detailed specifications at a level which clearly defines the functionality required within software packages. These may be modifications to software and systems which are already in use or may be to define functionality to be incorporated in a bespoke software system.

Development, unit testing, QA testing and related project management will be estimated once the specifications have been completed. These will be considered by all stakeholders and if acceptable they will be signed off so that the development work can be scheduled.

The analyst will normally be responsible for planning the testing of the delivered software changes. A test script will be created showing each step of testing the user will need to complete to prove that the new functionality works in the same way as defined in the business requirements document and specification.

When the estimates for software development are accepted by the customer and the development work is scheduled, the analyst will normally be responsible for producing a test plan and test scripts. Each element of the requested change should be tested to ensure it meets with the requirements and therefore a test script is required for each function.

The final phase of a project includes User Acceptance testing and gives the users the opportunity to test the functionality to ensure it meets requirements and is fit for purpose. Following the successful completion of User Acceptance Testing the company or department will normally sign off the project allowing the implementation of the change. Most often a post implementation review is undertaken. The business system analyst will typically participate in this review.

Once all software development has been tested by developers and members of the project team the business users are required to perform User Acceptance Testing. This is the final test phase and is the opportunity for users to validate the changes and make sure no faults exist. Once this has been successfully completed the changes are applied to production or live systems.