These are a form of Requirement  that must be met to give a solution, feature, or functionality a pass or fail. You should expect to do this a lot as a BA as it is core to writing requirements.

The BRD or business requirements document is one of the original standard business analysis deliverables in a waterfall methodology. It is typically the result of weeks or months of work. As you will see, it represents a very formal document that essentially becomes a contract between the business owners who want the software or features and the designers and developers who will be creating it.  

Business Analysis Template (Google Doc)

10.26 Item Tracking is really just following or monitoring something until completion. It could be requests, issues, or any work you are doing. It usually helps keep you or the team focused and if shared it creates transparency. A user story moving from creation through completion is an example of item tracking.

10.27 Lessons Learned is basically something you do after the completion of a project or program to talk about everything that basically sucked about the project or program. Things that could have been done better. This is analogous to the retrospective in agile scrum

10.28 Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are basically what you keep track of to ensure something is performing well. As a BA part of your job is making sure the right things get measured. For example, many people who begin exercising to achieve a smaller waist will measure how much they weigh instead of the change in circumference of their waist, which is a poor indicator if you are increasing muscle as you decrease fat.

10.29 Mind Mapping is a form of concept modeling that basically shows parent-child relationships of ideas or concepts. It’s helpful in getting organized especially at the beginning of an initiative and its one of the easier style of models to create live with a group of people to keep them focused

10.30 Non-Functional Requirements Analysis is basically about making sure the functionality or systems meet requirements that are kind of outside what something does and more concerned with the how. It usually has to do with future-proofing, quality, and compliance. Examples might be scalable, portable, maintainable, usable, have good performance, compliant, etc. 

10.31 Observation is pretty straight forward. It basically means to watch a process happen live to understand it. This can be valuable because people who have been a part of a process for so long can overlook parts that they just take for granted and not mention whereas you’d see it for yourself if you were observing.

10.32 Organizational Modelling is basically like creating a family tree of your organization. There are a few different versions and styles depending on what you want to get out of it and are typically created to help gain and facilitate understanding of how things are aligned in your business. Also, knowing who people report to will also help you understand their priorities and communicate better with them.

10.33 Prioritization is exactly what it sounds like but from a BAs perspective, its finding and providing the right information so that decision-makers can make good decisions in prioritizing things. It can sometimes include negotiating with stakeholders and the importance of things and the more information you have the better you can lead the discussion.

10.34 Process Analysis is looking at a process and determining how to make it more efficient. There are a few techniques to do this and process analysis is kinda the whole shebang with lean and six sigma. If you are interested in process analysis, certifications in those spaces might be a good choice

10.35 Process Modelling is a specific technique to visually model a process for process analysis. Process models can be created in many ways, but if you want to benefit from tools that simulate your process to find efficiencies, it would be valuable to learn BPMN standard notation.

10.36 Prototyping is creating a light version of something to essentially test out something. A prototype can be as light as a sketch on a piece of paper or a fully functioning application that just isn’t connected to real data. Prototyping is one of the most valuable and reliable ways to save time and effort on rework and should be something more BAs should explore.

10.37 Reviews are a pretty basic technique, but it’s basically asking someone else to look at something to give an opinion or confirm that it what they expect. It could be a requirement, user story, prototype, etc. Reviews can be informal like hey does this look right, or very formal with a documented process and method for approval common in the water development lifecycle. 

10.38 Risk Analysis and Management involves documenting major things that can make the project go wrong a basically how screwed you’d be if they did. Basically if things change or don’t change when you need them to, if something is late or doesn’t get done, if people aren’t available, etc how it will impact the project. Usually, this is communicated up to the powers that be to try to reduce the chances of impacts of those risks.

10.39 Roles and Permissions Matrix is basically a way to document features or activities in an application and which user roles can see or use those features. Valuable for comprehensive testing later on

10.40 Root Cause Analysis is just like it sounds, it’s to figures out why something might be happening. This is another big part of process analysis and leans six sigma. You should expect to do a lot of root cause analysis in your detective work as a business analyst

10.41 Scope Modelling is a way to keep people focused on a project. It basically says these are the areas we are willing to change or in scope, vs areas we can’t or won’t change aka out of scope. A simple real-life example is if the project was to make someone look better. Exercise, diet and a haircut might be in-scope, but plastic surgery might be out of scope

10.42 Sequence Diagrams is a form of a diagram that basically depicts several things that have to happen in conjunction and the timing of those things can be important. Think if something starts happening, halfway through triggers another thing, but is still happening. Process models don’t do a great job of depicting such timings visually.

10.43 Stakeholder List, Map, or Personas are a few more ways to document the people impacted by your project. Stakeholder lists and maps typically include all players involved so they can have a good communication plan. Personas tend to be end-user of the system you are designing.

10.44 State Modelling is a technique used to understand the states of particular entities within a system. The purpose is to understand all the different states a thing can exist and the rules and how or why it might change. For example, something might go from open, to pending, to closed. What determines how it shifts between those states? 

10.45 Survey or Questionnaire are pretty familiar concepts for most of us. As a BA you might use one if you need to get information from lots of people once. It’s great for quantifiable data. The only caveat is that you need to be 100% sure your questions are super clear otherwise your data could be off because people misunderstood the question.

10.46 SWOT Analysis is basically an ungraded or robust version of a pros and cons list. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This is another activity that typically happens early on to help determine the strategy and direction for an initiative.

10.47 Use Cases and Scenarios are to model interactions with a system and are very valuable to developers and testers if a BA takes the time to write these well. Each use case or scenario should center around one task and layout the back and forth between the user and system to complete the tasks. It should also include what happens if there is a failure, like an invalid credit card number, not old enough, or etc.

10.48 User Stories are basically the format of agile requirements. They require the writer to document who the requirement is for, what they want to happen, and why they want it to happen. Traditional requirements often just have the what, which doesn’t always help you design the best solution if you don’t know who is using it and why they need it. 

10.49 Vendor Assessments as a business analysis usually involve documenting what the business needs and then evaluating different solutions from vendors on how well they meet them. This would use evaluation criteria which were in the first technique of this video series. Usually, the organization will have a defined process for this, but you will be likely responsible for creating the evaluation criteria.

10.50 Workshops are another mechanism to get a group of people together to reach a specific goal. Often times is the many stakeholders coming together to agree on a future state of a process that likely impacts all of them in some way. Being able to facilitate something like this is an extremely valuable skill and something you should practice whenever possible. They even have certifications for meeting facilitation

Transcript of 1-25

10.1 acceptance & or evaluation criteria. These are really just requirements that must be met in order to give a solution, feature, or a pass or fail. The difference between the two is that acceptance criteria are typically used for something under development, as a user story in a sprint and evaluation criteria are more common when you are comparing features of different software that you are potentially acquiring. You should expect to do this a lot as a BA.

10.2 Backlog management is basically how your scrum team manages your backlog in terms of definitions of ready, definitions of done, and so forth. I would definitely look into researching scrum backlog practices for this one.

10.3 Balanced scorecard is a technique intended to gauge the health of your organization. It involves measuring 4 categories. Customer Satisfaction, Employee Growth, Business Process Efficiency, and Financials. I honestly can’t imagine an entry-level business analyst being asked to do this, because it might include some tough conversations with some high-level people. In fact, to truly be unbiased, I could see a consulting agency doing this for a company

10.4 Benchmarking and marketing analysis is simply a way of comparing how you are doing to industry standards. The important thing here is to make sure you are comparing the right measures, but otherwise, conceptually it is pretty straight forward. If every competitor does A, B, and C, you have to measure how well you are doing A, B, and C.

10.5 Brainstorming is an umbrella term for coming up with ideas. You can brainstorm alone or you can facilitate brainstorming with a group.It involves good preparation with context areas and having the right people involved. It involves creating an environment for all people to share and explore freely and without judgment and finally, it involves outputting everything that was collected in a valuable manner.

10.6 Business Capability Analysis is similar to benchmarking in that you are essentially comparing to a standard of some kind. This is another thing I’d expect to happen with an experienced business analyst and likely from a consulting company. Often times its depicted as a bunch of boxes which organized by category and color-coded for like a pass, fail, and maybe some nuances in between.

10.7 Business Cases is basically something you write to justify spending time, resources, and money for a project to change something or buy something. It would likely include items from the balanced scorecard and how it’ll improve them.

10.8 Business Model Canvas is just a standard way to essentially show what your organization does and how it produces value. It very is reminiscent of what Enterprise Architects do which is a common career path for business analysts.

10.9 Business Rules Analysis basically documents the policies in which a business operates and helps inform how to formulate a business process. For example, a business rule might be that you don’t sell to people under 18. That might mean that the business process needs to have a step to validate age and paths for passing or failing age verification.

10.10 Collaborative Games are basically activities the help groups of people essentially create focus and direction for what the group needs to accomplish. In my own experience, I’ve used affinity mapping many times since its easy for people to understand and participate. It also gets people up and moving around.

10.11 Concept Modelling at a high level is just taking a bunch of terms or concepts from your domain and modeling out how they all relate to each other. I find them fun to make and extremely useful in understanding a new domain or helping others understand a domain. It is what I recommend BA when they first start a new project

10.12 Data Dictionary is basically a glossary for all your data. It often uses slightly more complex organization structures than say a dictionary and helps create an understanding of all the elements involved in a system. For example, you might define a person as a thing, and define a child as a subcategory of a person defined by an age range, then adult… you get the idea. Facilitates clarity.

10.13 Data Flow Diagrams are pretty key business analyst diagrams. They basically illustrate applications and what data flows between them. It helps create a sort of context in understanding what teams need to be worked with when something is going to change. 

10.14 Data Mining comes in two forms, looking at data to find an answer to a question, or look at data with no question to answer just to see what it tells you. Data helps inform a lot of decisions, so you should be comfortable doing some degree of data analysis to better perform your job as a business analyst. 

10.15 Data Modelling is a way to document how data is organized typically using standard notations. It often is used to model how databases structures will actually be organized. There is value in understanding data modeling to better understand and communicate constraints or opportunities in making decisions related to data.

10.16 Decision Analysis is about organizing information to make it easier to make a decision. There are different ways to accomplish this, but a common method is a scorecard with all the variables listed, values assigned and weighted, and seeing how different choices stack up side by side.

10.17 Decision Modelling is more focused on visualizing how the decisions are made and the outcomes. A decision model would theoretically be a big cascade of business rules.

10.18 Document Analysis is probably the most boring and one of the most used techniques of a business analyst. It’s literally learning from looking at existing documentation. Could be manuals, help documents, or documents created by a previous business analyst. It typically helps you build a degree of understanding so you can make the best of your time when in meetings and such.

10.19 Estimation for a business analyst is another big umbrella category of many techniques to estimate the future value of something. Most organizations have standards for how they prefer to estimate things, but if it’s something that impacts your work a lot, it could be valuable to explore different methods of estimation.

10.20 Financial Analysis revolves around assessing the benefit to the bottom line, usually over time and is one reason by business analyst new hires are business majors focused in IT because they would have had to take some finance and accounting classes. The more senior you become the more likely you’ll have to deal more and more with the financial aspects of projects.

10.21 Focus Groups are typically used to basically ask a group of people how they feel about something. For example, and HR business analyst working on a project for new hires onboarding might have a focus group with a bunch of new hires to ask how they felt about their experience.

10.22 Functional Decomposition is basically breaking down a high-level thing into its lower-level parts. This might mean breaking down a business requirement into the functional requirements for each part or system that needs to change, or Epics/Features down into user stories. You’ll be doing this a lot as a business analyst. It’s kinda like your main thing.

10.23 is a Glossary. Basically, if you have a bunch of nuanced terms or acronyms in your space, keeping a glossary will help you and anybody new to space.

10.24 Interface Analysis for a business analyst is looking at any interface whether its data interfaces, user interfaces, application interfaces, and basically documenting what’s there and why it exists. Very important to know before making changes to something.

10.25 is Interviews. Its how you learn stuff from people and I really hope you already knew that. The only thing I’ll say here is to make sure you have a goal for the interview before conducting it to help focus the conversation.

Examples of Mind Maps

From ResearchGate – Mind Map Order Subsystem

From SimpleMind: How to Mindmap

From MindMap Art – Health

Examples of Concept Models

From UIE – Concept Models 

From Medium – The Concept Model (I recommend checking this site out)

Decisions for most BAs aren’t typically a matter of the right or wrong decision, but deciding on a path based on pros and cons. Being able to show the cost and benefits of a decision whether it is in terms of numbers, aligning to initiatives like improving customer loyalty, or whatever it might be will allow your stakeholders, to move to decisions quickly and keep work moving along

What confused me was that a lot of what I read said requirements should be written as “system must do this” and “system shall do that”. So when I came across business rules for the first time, they had a similar structure, so I thought business rules were just another way to write requirements, which isn’t entirely true.

Business rules are not quite requirements

Business rules are meant to convey a state of affairs, much like a process diagram does. They describe how the business works (or how it should work in the future). They are NOT system/solutions requirements. For example, a business rule might be “Customers must be 21 to make a purchase”. This is a rule set by the business outside of any system. 

Now if this was a new rule the business wants to implement, then as a BA your goal is to write solutions requirements against this rule. For example, “the system must be able to validate the age of a customer”. 

Business rules should be kept to represent how the business operates, and in most cases where companies don’t specifically document business rules, you can actually find them embedded within process diagrams. For example:

So just to bring back to what you are supposed to do with them, business rules help you document the current or future state and are meant to represent how a business operates, and the system or application should work to make the business rule happen.