Jacques Du Preez, Systems Analyst at Entelect Consulting, talks about the golden thread of business analysis in solution delivery with Charlene Seini, in business analysis and the systems analyst.
Job titles don’t always necessarily reflect responsibilities. Please tell us what you do and what your role entails?
My role is to engage business and development teams to translate the business requirements into functional designs, which can become working software. Currently we are on a journey of becoming an Agile development team. This puts a unique spin on the role of the analyst, and I have had to adapt my role to help put development processes in place, as well as sprint planning.
In what way does business analysis interface, support and / or enable your accountabilities and responsibilities?
Business analysis has a vast set of modelling tools and requirement-gathering techniques. Knowledge of these different tools and techniques has supported me to select the appropriate one for the situation I am in. Ultimately it has supported me in tailoring my solutions to meet the customer’s needs.
In what way does poor quality business analysis impact and / or limit your ability to deliver effectively?
In my experience developers can give you what you ask for. The biggest problem the software industry faces is that developers are given ambiguous requirements that constantly change without deadlines changing. If quality analysis is done upfront to ensure clear and specific requirements, then the delivery process will be much more effective.
How could business analysts optimally focus and deliver in order to better support your capability?
Business analysts need to try and understand the technical implementation of their requirements.
If developers can understand the business domain, then BAs need to try and understand the development world as well.
This mutual understanding will lead to better solutions and faster project delivery.
Business analysis is not exclusive to business analysts; it is a discipline performed throughout the business change. What business analysis activities do you perform as part of your role?
As a systems analyst, my role encompasses a broad set of business analysis activities, from performing requirements elicitation, technical document writing, business process design, solution modelling and graphical user interface design.
‘Business Analysis And The Systems Analyst with Jacques Du Preez‘ was first published in the 2016 Inter-View Report. You can learn more about business analysis and the systems analyst by chatting on Twitter with @CharleneSeini.
