BA Activities — “What Steps & Actions a BA Must do during a project” ?

As a business analyst, the steps involved in working on a project typically follow a logical flow. Here is an expanded and correct flow of the steps, including additional actions that a business analyst must undertake:

Let’s Dive in…

Identify Stakeholders:
Identify all relevant stakeholders involved in the project, including business users, subject matter experts, project managers, and technical teams.
Understand their roles, responsibilities, and expectations regarding the project.

Conduct Stakeholder Analysis:
Analyze and prioritize stakeholders based on their influence, interest, and level of involvement in the project.
Determine their communication preferences and establish effective channels for collaboration.

Elicit requirements:
Conduct interviews, workshops, and meetings with stakeholders to gather their needs, objectives, and constraints.
Employ various elicitation techniques such as brainstorming, document analysis, and prototyping to capture comprehensive requirements.

Analyze Requirements:
Analyze and prioritize the gathered requirements to determine their feasibility, impact, and alignment with business goals.
Identify dependencies, conflicts, and potential risks associated with the requirements.

Document Requirements:
Create clear, concise, and structured documentation of the requirements, including functional and non-functional requirements, use cases, and user stories.
Use appropriate documentation techniques such as requirements traceability matrices, data models, and process flows to ensure clarity and completeness.

Validate Requirements:
Collaborate with stakeholders to review and validate the documented requirements.
Seek feedback, clarify ambiguities, and address any discrepancies or gaps in understanding.

Verify Requirements:
Conduct formal reviews and walkthroughs to verify that the requirements accurately represent stakeholders’ needs and align with business objectives.

Always obtain sign-off or approval from relevant stakeholders to ensure consensus and agreement on the requirements.

Manage requirements changes:
Establish a robust change management process to handle requirement changes throughout the project lifecycle.
Assess the impact of proposed changes, communicate them to stakeholders, and update the documentation accordingly.

Perform requirements traceability:
Establish traceability links between requirements, business objectives, and project deliverables.
Ensure that requirements are traceable throughout the project, from initial gathering to final implementation.

Facilitate requirements communication:
Continuously communicate and collaborate with stakeholders, development teams, and other project participants to ensure a shared understanding of the requirements.
Use effective communication techniques such as prototypes, visual models, and presentations to facilitate comprehension and alignment.

Support solution design:
Work closely with the development team and other stakeholders to translate requirements into a solution design.
Collaborate on system architecture, user interface design, and data models to ensure the solution meets the documented requirements.
Provide ongoing requirements management:
Continuously monitor and manage requirements throughout the project lifecycle, addressing any changes, conflicts, or new requirements that may arise.

Support the development team in clarifying requirements, providing guidance, and resolving any requirements-related issues.
By following this flow of steps and performing these additional tasks, business analysts can effectively gather, document, validate, and manage requirements, ensuring successful project outcomes and stakeholder satisfaction.