Notes

The Role Of A SMALL BUSINESS Analyst
Business Analyst Role Description

A business analyst is a member of a project team who's responsible for analysing a small business and gathering requirements to improve business processes.

The IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis) defines a business analyst as:

a liaison among stakeholders so that you can understand the structure, policies, and operations of a business, and to recommend solutions that enable the business to accomplish its goals.

I think this is a good description of what a BA is. The primary things to note from this description are:

A liaison among stakeholders - the BA is responsible for being a sort of "middleman" between the business stakeholders (your client, the users) and the technical team (project manager, development and testing teams).

Understand the structure, policies and operations - the business enterprise analyst should aim to understand and understand how the business operates and how it does what it needs to do.

Recommend solutions - the role of the business analyst is to recommend a remedy to a small business problem, or to improve a small business process.
Why Do We Need A Business Analyst?

A simple way to look at IT project is to have two main sets of people - the customers who know what they need, and the developers who build the IT system to provide them with what they need. This is, well, a straightforward view and not totally possible in reality. This is because of few reasons:

Developers can't gather requirements as effectively. Yes, it's possible for a developer to determine just what a business needs, however they run the risk of experiencing a narrow-minded design. Also, developers are often (not necessarily, but usually) trained and experienced in their own role and not confident or comfortable communicating with business users to get requirements

Business users can't document their own requirements. Sure, the business users are the best people to have the ability to determine what they want, because it's their process or system that they want to be analysed. However, the business enterprise users aren't experienced in this, and don't have the technical knowledge to learn what is available and what can be achieved. Business analysis is about asking questions, and there are things the analysts can ask that the users are not aware of.
For these reasons, there must be someone who can be an expert in analysis. Someone who has some technical knowledge, communication skills, not to mention the ability to analyse and gather requirements. This can be a role of a small business analyst.

The Role Of A SMALL BUSINESS Analyst Is Varied

The BA can be involved in more than just gathering requirements and putting them right into a Word document. A great many other tasks and areas of a project are involved:

Gathering business and system requirements
Advice about user or system acceptance testing at this stage of the project
Involvement with implementation of a system
Creation or advice about training documentation and manuals
Can be involved in the project management tasks of a project if needed, such as for example creation of project plans.
The Steps Of A SMALL BUSINESS Analyst

The tasks of a BA in a project are:

Understand what the business enterprise or organisation does, and how it performs these operations.
Determine how to boost the existing business or system processes
Gather requirements for process or system improvement
Determine which steps can and really should be automated or improved for obtain the most
Document certain requirements of the machine, both at a higher level and a more detail
Act as a contact point, or "translation" between technical teams and business users.
Association of Business Analyst with testing, implementation and training, as stated above.
Here's my website: http://apbmma.com