A day in the life of a Business Analyst

Ever wondered how a day in the life of Business Analyst would look like? Well, in basic terms, the daily duties of a Business Analyst on any given day in his designation would typically involve the following:

1) Understanding of the project: This means understanding through questioning and clarification with the client, what his expectations and needs are from the project.

2) Describing existing state: A description of the existing systems in the clients’ premises will ensure a good idea of why and how the client expects the new system to be developed by the technical team.

3) Specification of project:  This would mean defining the client’s problems that need to be resolved through the project, in a format that the technical team of software developers and programmers identify with, so that they can start the project.

4) Supervising the work: This indicates that once the technical team has started doing the project, and the programmers and coders are working on the client’s project, a Business Analyst, should duly supervise their work, so that he is aware of the progress they are making and be around to help them out with any queries or problems that they may have, with regards to the project.

5) Execution of the project: Once, the software team has finished the project, the project has to be executed to check if it is running fine and as per the expectations of the client. This is done by the Business Analyst and then communicated to the software team of programmers and coders about the results of their work.

6) Checking for bugs: while running the project’s code, there may be some errors or bugs as they are called in technical language that may crop up. These have to be resolved with the help of the technical team, and then ensured that they won’t cop up again in future.

7) Mapping the project to client expectations: The resultant software developed by the software team, needs to be mapped with the client’s expectations so as to check if there is a proper match. The Business Analyst is responsible for a proper match.

8) Checking for modifications:  Sometimes, it may be found that there is a slight or some other degree of mismatch with the clients expectations from the project and the software developed by the technical team. In this case, medications in the project code may be required and has to be done.

9) System Run: Finally the system is then ran under test conditions in front of the client, and later in live conditions, as per client’s approval, to check if the system is working fine.

10) Project Completion:  If the system is found to be working fine, as per client’s expectations, then the project can be declared as completed, to the client’s satisfaction.

This is of course a very rough and basic idea of how a day in the life of a Business Analyst would be. On a typical day in the life of a Business Analyst, the Business Analyst could be in any one of these phases.