Assignment No.

4
Summary of BABOK

Submitted by
Priyanka V. Chandane

Summary of BABOK:
This book is all about guide to the profession of business analysis. It
describes globally recognised standards for the practice of business
analysis. It also describes techniques for eliciting, analysing and managing
requirements that are in widespread use around the world, and provides a
comprehensive description of the key competencies that business
analysts should have. It clarifies more contentious areas like stakeholder
analysis and scope control, within almost every task within every
knowledge area, the interaction between the business analyst and the
project manager, along with other key stakeholders, is explicitly
described. It also serves as a common denominator across the profession,
setting a consistent standard of what business analysis encompasses.
Since the guide is global, it offers a comprehensive overview of the entire
business analysis profession, regardless of region or industry. It's essential
preparation for the CBAP (Certified Business Analysis Practitioner)
designation.
Business analysis is the set of tasks and techniques used to work as
a liaison among stakeholders in order to understand the structure,
policies, and operations of an organization, and recommend solutions that
enable the organization to achieve its goals.
Business analysis helps organizations to define the optimal solution
for their needs, given the set of constraints (including time, budget,
regulations, and others) under which that organization operates.
Knowledge Area
A knowledge area groups a related set of tasks and techniques. The
knowledge areas within the BABOK are as follows:

Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring

Requirements elicitation

Requirements management and communication

Enterprise analysis

Requirements analysis

Solution assessment and validation

Underlying competencies

Technique

Business analysis planning and monitoring:

This explains the approach associated with the planning and monitoring of
business analysis activities. This includes tasks such as identification of
stakeholders, defining roles and responsibilities of stakeholders,
estimating tasks, planning communication with stakeholders, planning
how requirements will be approached, traced and prioritized,
determination of deliverables as well as business analysis processes. It
also describes work involved in monitoring the process.

Elicitation: This explains details for eliciting business, stakeholder,

solution or requirements. Elicitation is the process of formally
drawing out responses from various stakeholders at the client
organization about the project requirements. This process includes
tasks like prepare of elicitation, conduct elicitation, document
elicitation results, and confirm elicitation results. This can be done
by identifying as well as ensuring resources available, using
elicitation techniques (meeting, brainstorming, interviewing,
questionnaires, focus group etc.), documenting information provided
by stakeholders, validating those stated information.

Requirements management and communication: The main

objective of requirement management is to manage changing
requirements of clients/ stakeholders. This process includes tasks
like manage solution and requirements scopes, manage requirement
traceability, maintain requirements for reuse, prepare requirement
package, and communicate requirements. This can be done by
approving requirements from clients/ stakeholders, tracing those
requirements,
reusing
implemented
requirements,
creating
appropriate format and package of those requirements such as
executive summary, formal documentation, RFI, RFP etc. and
continuous interaction with stakeholders as well with developers to
understand
requirements
are
correctly
understood
and
implemented.

Enterprise analysis: this explains the business analysis activities

that take place for an enterprise to identify business opportunity,
build business architecture, determine optimum project investment
path for that enterprise and finally implement new business and
technical solution. This process includes tasks like define business
need, assess capability gaps, determine solution approach, define
solution scope, create and maintain business architecture, preparing
decision package, conduct initial risk assessment. This can be done
3

by determining what organization wants to be able to do to improve

efficiency and to provide better quality of service, determining
workable solution approach to meet the business need, identifying
capability that will be implemented and methodology that will be
used to deliver, creating and maintaining business architecture
helps in aligning the problem and opportunity to the business
objectives, enhancing business case report, recommendations and
rating initial and proposed risk responses.

Requirement analysis: this explains a process of understanding

the stakeholders needs and expectations from the modified or new
product. This includes processes like prioritize requirements,
organize requirements, specify and model requirements, define
assumptions and constraints, verify requirements and validate
requirements. This can be done by prioritising requirements
according to business case and logical dependencies, organizing
those requirements into logical sets, specifying or modelling those
requirements by creating models or diagrams and writing those
requirements, considering stakeholders statements and analysing it
whether their needs are not properly requirements but rather they
are based on some assumptions and capturing those assumptions,
verifying those requirements and validating it.

Solution assessment and validation: This explains the tasks

that are performed in order to ensure that solution meet the
business need and facilitate their successful implementation. This
process includes tasks like assess proposed solution, allocate
requirements, assess organizational readiness, define transition
requirements, validate solution and evaluate performance. This can
be done by determining solution design assessment from possible
options, allocating those requirements in such a way that the
possible release options will increase the possible business value,
conducting organizational readiness assessment and recommending
ways to optimize the change in an organization, validating verified
and deployed solution by analysing the solution and identifying
defects, conducting cost/benefit analysis.

Underlying competencies: this explains the awareness about

various basic skills required for business analysts. This includes
skills
like
analytical
and
problem
solving,
behavioural
characteristics,
business
knowledge,
communication
skills,
interaction skills, software application.

Techniques: techniques alter the way a business analysis task is

performed or describes a specific form the output task they may
take. Techniques used by business analysts to carry out their tasks
are as follows:
o Acceptance and evaluation criteria: It defines the
requirements that must be met in order for a solution to
be considered acceptable to stakeholders.
o Benchmarking: it is used to compare the strengths and
weaknesses of an organization against its peers and
competitors.
o Brainstorming: it is used in a group by focusing a topic
or problem.
o Business rules analysis: defines rules that govern
decision in an organization.
o Data dictionary and glossary: it defines the key
terms and data relevant to a business domain.
o Data flow diagrams: it is used to show how data flows
into the system.
o Data modelling: it describes the relationship between
information associated with domain and its concepts.
o Decision analysis: it describes decision making with
complex system.
o Document analysis: it is used to elicit requirements by
analysing previous documents.
o Estimation: it is used to forecast cost and effort
involved in process.
o Focus groups: it used to learn peoples attitude,
expressions, and desire about certain product or service.
o Functional decomposition: it is used to break process
into several sub processes.
o Interface analysis: it is used to identify the interfaces
between solution and its components and also describes
how they will interact with each other.

o Interviews: it is formal or informal process to ask

relevant questions to stakeholders and documenting
their responses.
o Lessons learned process: It is a document prepared
by business analyst to identify opportunities for further
improvements.
o Metrics and key performance indicators: it
measures the extent to which a solution meets its
objective.
o Non- functional requirement analysis: it describes
required qualities of system such as its performance,
security, database, hardware etc.
o Organization modelling: it describes the roles and
responsibilities within an organization as well as defines
organizational structure of an organization.
o Problem tracking: it is organized methods of tracking,
managing, resolving issues and risk in an organization.
o Process modelling:
organization.

it

defines

workflow

in

an

o Prototyping: it is used as user interface to identify,

describe and validate stakeholders needs.
o Requirements workshop: it is a well structured way to
capture requirements of stakeholders.
o Risk analysis: It is done to avoid uncertainty in a
course of business.
o Root cause analysis: it is a method to identify root
causes of identified problems and ensures that it is
corrected.
o Scenarios and use cases: it describes interaction
between actors and systems.
o Scope modelling: it determines in scope and out scope
of requirements.
o Sequence diagrams: it is a kind of interaction
diagram. It shows how information is passes between
objects in system.
6

o State diagrams: it is a behavioural diagram that shows

behaviour of concepts, entities and objects.
o Structured walkthrough: it is effective method to
communicate, verify and validate requirements with
stakeholders.
o Survey/ questionnaire: it is a method used when
there are many people and time is short.
o SWOT analysis: It is a tool for audit and analysis of
overall course of business.
o User stories: it is a non-functional description of
requirement.
o Vendor assessment: effective vendor assessment
helps to establish long term relationship with
stakeholders.