What do you do for a living? How do you answer that question? I am a doctor? I am a policeman? I am a lawyer? I am a programmer?  All these answers will get you a nod from the person asking the question and some sort of acknowledgement; oh that’s so cool! Wow that’s interesting!

Every time I answered that question, all I got was a confused look, which basically meant “nice title, but what does that mean?”

This article will be an introduction to the Business Analysts world, while other articles in later issues will develop different skills and responsibilities.

Now, going back to the subject - what does a Business Analyst do? In a nutshell, or if I was to create slogan it would read: “We help businesses do business better.” A Business Analyst helps organizations improve, innovate and continue improving and innovating, knowing that there’s always another few steps to go on the road to success.

Like any career, there are those who do their jobs and those who excel at it. Great business analysts recognize that asking the right questions of the right people is crucial to eliciting requirements that are on target and actionable. They know that sometimes they have to go back to the source a number of times to ensure mutual understanding. And sometimes, new sources are necessary to frame a complete picture. Ultimately, it’s how the smart business analyst interprets and uses the information they’ve gathered that goes a long way to ensuring the success of a project. And that’s what we try to do as we carry along a title called Business Analyst.

Stay tuned for the next issue of OrtivusTALK where we will discuss some of the following topics:

• We don’t need to explore requirements, we know what we need!
• We’ve got this covered; we’re using agile development methods!
• My staff already knows what good practices are
• It will take too much time to do things differently
• Users don’t know what they want
• Customers are busy to participate in requirements work with us
• Our users are distributed; we can't get everyone's requirements