How Business Analyst contribute to project success

Business analyst act as a bridge between stakeholders and technical team. Business analyst has very important role throughout the project development life cycle. A business analyst from beginning to ending of a project. During pre-project stage BA identify business need, stakeholders and discuss feasibility of implementation of the project. BA prepares stakeholders list through stakeholder analysis. BA participates in defining project scope, find risk and prepares project scope document. A well-defined project scope keeps stakeholders, project manager, technical team align. This alignment gives the actual outcome of the project. During requirement gathering phase BA sits with the stakeholders to understand their expectation from the project about what and how they want. BA collects detailed requirements through elicitation technique like workshops, surveys, interviews etc. BA creates prototype using tools like Axure so that client can get visibility of the product. While analyzing the requirements BA prioritize them based on business need and stakeholders priority. It helps minimizing ambiguities and reduces rework. This make-sure project delivers maximum value. UML diagrams like use case diagrams are prepared so that clients get to know about interaction. Activity diagrams illustrate end to end process flow. After finalizing requirements Business Requirement Specification document is created. BA obtains approval from client before proceeding to next stage. BA coordinates with architect to review design of the product and ensures it aligns with business requirements. This helps in project success. During development BA brings the prototype of the product into discovery phase. Business analyst supports developers by clarifying the requirements. Development team refer use case, activity diagrams, SRS prepared by BA during early phase. It helps technical team to prioritize their work, understand the requirements completely. So, development time will be reduced which means project can be delivered on time. Also, the cost of development decreases as issues and logic gaps are found before writing the code. BA creates backlog and helps development team when MVP is implemented. For the testing BA helps testing team to prepare test cases based on approved use cases which verify all requirements get full testing coverage. Business Analyst participate in high level testing to check whether critical and important features has met its business need. BA prepares requirement traceability matrix and updates it to maintain traceability between requirements, use cases and test cases. BA ensures test team prepares both positive and negative test cases which makes the project successful and defects can be found easily and easily debug by the development team. After the completion of successful testing BA helps clients and stakeholders in Unit Acceptance Testing. UAT provides stakeholder a clear idea about the project. They can check every features by themselves and changes can be done if requires. This is the final step for checking the final outcome and project can be go to deployment phase. BA collects all sign off documents from stakeholders so that project can go live. During production RTM is handed over to client which shows they have accepted the final product. BA coordinate with the development team during deployment. Once the project is live BA shares end users manuals to stakeholders, arranges training session so that they can understand the system properly and can use it smoothly. Feedbacks are taken from clients during training session and documented for future improvements.