As a part of CBAP Training, at Education Edge we believe in providing our course participants with content that leads to learning and retention. Especially, in case of CBAP Certification when the subject is elaborate and complex, it is important that we go over the BABOK guide atleast 3 times before we attempt the CBAP Certification or CCBA Certification Exam. Here is the office read as a part of our CBAP Training for Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of BABOK.
BABOK Chapter 1 – Introduction
Purpose of the BABOK Guide
The primary purpose of the BABOK Guide is to define the profession of business analysis and provide a set of commonly accepted practices.
The BABOK® Guide is a common framework for all perspectives, describing business analysis tasks that are performed to properly analyze a change or evaluate the necessity for a change. Tasks may vary in form, order, or importance for individual business analysts or for various initiatives.
The six knowledge areas of the BABOK® Guide (Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring, Elicitation and Collaboration, Requirements Life Cycle Management, Strategy Analysis, Requirements Analysis and Design Definition (RADD), and Solution Evaluation) describe the practice of business analysis as it is applied within the boundaries of a project or throughout enterprise evolution and continuous improvement.
What is Business Analysis?
Business analysis is the practice of enabling change in an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders. Business analysis enables an enterprise to articulate needs and the rationale for change, and to design and describe solutions that can deliver value.
Business analysis is performed on a variety of initiatives within an enterprise. Initiatives may be strategic, tactical, or operational. Business analysis may be performed within the boundaries of a project or throughout enterprise evolution and continuous improvement. It can be used to understand the current state, to define the future state, and to determine the activities required to move from the current to the future state.
Who is a Business Analyst?
A business analyst is any person who performs business analysis tasks described in the BABOK® Guide, no matter their job title or organizational role. Business analysts are responsible for discovering, synthesizing, and analyzing information from a variety of sources within an enterprise, including tools, processes, documentation, and stakeholders.
Business analysts play a role in aligning the designed and delivered solutions with the needs of stakeholders. The activities that business analysts perform include:
- understanding enterprise problems and goals,
- analyzing needs and solutions,
- devising strategies,
- driving change, and
- facilitating stakeholder collaboration.
Knowledge Areas
Knowledge areas represent areas of specific business analysis expertise that encompass several tasks.
The six knowledge areas are:
Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring: describes the tasks that business analysts perform to organize and coordinate the efforts of business analysts and stakeholders. These tasks produce outputs that are used as key inputs and guidelines for the other tasks throughout the
BABOK® Guide.
Elicitation and Collaboration: describes the tasks that business analysts perform to prepare for and conduct elicitation activities and confirm the results obtained. It also describes the communication with stakeholders once the business analysis information is assembled and the ongoing collaboration with them throughout the business analysis activities.
Requirements Life Cycle Management: describes the tasks that business analysts perform in order to manage and maintain requirements and design information from inception to retirement. These tasks describe establishing meaningful relationships between related requirements and designs, and assessing, analyzing and gaining consensus on proposed changes to requirements and designs.
Strategy Analysis: describes the business analysis work that must be performed to collaborate with stakeholders in order to identify a need of strategic or tactical importance (the business need), enable the enterprise to address that need, and align the resulting strategy for the change with higher- and lower-level strategies.
Requirements Analysis and Design Definition: describes the tasks that business analysts perform to structure and organize requirements discovered during elicitation activities, specify and model requirements and designs, validate and verify information, identify solution options that meet business needs, and estimate the potential value that could be realized for each solution option. This knowledge area covers the incremental and iterative activities ranging from the initial concept and exploration of the need through the transformation of those needs into a particular recommended solution.
Solution Evaluation: describes the tasks that business analysts perform to assess the performance of and value delivered by a solution in use by the enterprise, and to recommend removal of barriers or constraints that prevent the full realization of the value.
Each task in the BABOK® Guide is presented in the following format:
- Purpose
- Description
- Inputs
- Elements
- Guidelines/Tools
- Techniques
- Stakeholders
- Outputs
Requirements Classification Schema
For the purposes of the BABOK® Guide, the following classification schema describes requirements:
Business requirements: statements of goals, objectives, and outcomes that describe why a change has been initiated. They can apply to the whole of an enterprise, a business area, or a specific initiative.
Stakeholder requirements: describe the needs of stakeholders that must be met in order to achieve the business requirements. They may serve as a bridge between business and solution requirements.
Solution requirements: describe the capabilities and qualities of a solution that meets the stakeholder requirements. They provide the appropriate level of detail to allow for the development and implementation of the solution. Solution requirements can be divided into two sub-categories:
- functional requirements: describe the capabilities that a solution must have in terms of the behaviour and information that the solution will manage, and
- non-functional requirements or quality of service requirements: do not relate directly to the behaviour of functionality of the solution, but rather describe conditions under which a solution must remain effective or qualities that a solution must have.
Transition requirements: describe the capabilities that the solution must have and the conditions the solution must meet to facilitate transition from the current state to the future state, but which are not needed once the change is complete. They are differentiated from other requirements types because they are of a temporary nature. Transition requirements address topics such as data conversion, training, and business continuity.
