The tip of the spear - the BI Business Analyst

The first contact with the business should be your Business Analyst.   This is one of the most crucial positions to fill in your Business Intelligence organization.  The face of your BI organization has to have excellent communication skills.   Not only communication skills but technical skills because this person  needs to sit between the business and IT.

What does the BI Business Analyst do?   The PM will take a project, determine scope and then engage the appropiate BA.  Then the BA will interface with the business and document the needs of the business in a BRD or Business Requirements document for each project.   This person should have a good handle on what data you currently have and then document what the business wants.  That's the key.  The BA will then take the BRD and work back with the PM, IT Developers/, IT architects, and the business to determine if the requirements/budget and timeline are realistic or need to be tweaked.

For example: The business may have a budget of 500k and want 10 requirements in 6 months.  Technology may reply that for 500k, you can have 5 requirements in 6 months. 

Typically the BA will create a Design document or a Technical Requirements Document at this point by working with IT and the business.   After the BA attains the sign off then coding will begin.   After coding begins, the development team will perform system testing, regression testing and then hand off for a Pre-UAT/UAT (User Acceptance Testing) performed by the BA and the business.  Often the BA will perform the Pre-UAT before the business and log any issues.

NOTE: Sometimes the BA is also the PM serving as a hybrid PM/BA depending on the size of the organization.

In Waterfall development, the phases of the development are sequential.   In an Agile development, the development is performed in iterations so the Business would have more involvment on the development of the product of the BI Dashboard/Report/DB.  The BA will be more involved along the life cycle of this project in order to produce the artifacts and capture changes to artifacts.

Some of the BI BA Technical Skills/Tools

HP Quality Center - Defect Tracking tool/Test case

OBIEE/SQL - Database query

QlikView/Tableau/Microstrategy/Business Objects/Cognos/Hyperion

Sharepoint - Document repository

MS Office - Documentation

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