Action Plan for the Business Analyst – Analysis Activities

Specific analysis activities include the following:

Context diagramming to ensure that the scope of the change initiative and the boundaries of the project are fully understood by all stakeholders
Studying requirements feasibility to determine whether the requirement is viable technically, operationally, and economically
Trading off requirements to determine the most feasible requirement alternatives
Assessing requirement risks and constraints and modifying requirements to mitigate identified risks. The goal is to reduce requirement risks, often through early validation prototyping techniques
Modeling requirements to provide a visual depiction of relationships and dependencies
Prototyping interfaces and solution subcomponents to provide a visual model of the proposed solution
Decomposing requirements to capture business needs in enough detail for use by the solution development team
Clarifying and restating requirements in multiple ways to ensure that they describe the real needs of the customers
Deriving additional requirements in multiple ways to ensure that they describe the real needs of the customers
Prioritizing requirements to reflect the fact that not all requirements are of equal value to the business. Prioritization is required to ensure that the most valuable features and functions are delivered to the business first
Defining terms in a glossary or data dictionary in natural (non-technical) language to ensure that the stakeholders are truly communicating
Creating test cases at a high level to ensure that the requirement is testable. If requirements are particularly difficult to define, it is sometimes necessary to start by designing the test that will verify that the requirements had been met and then backing into the actual requirement
Allocating requirements to subsystems to ensure that they are satisfied by components of the system
Developing business scenarios as a technique to ensure an understanding of requirements. A business scenario is an outline of a hypothesized chain of events. A use case is a special kind of scenario that breaks down system requirements into user functions. Each use case is a sequence of events performed by a user