Business Management by Business Analysts Free-Sample for Students

Questions: Create an E-journal Focusing on the topics: 1.Leadership and Team building Skills required by a Business Analyst 2.Key Processes Involved in understanding the Business Context 3.Briefly describe the Suitability and Appropriateness of four of the Investigation Techniques in Requirement Elicitation. Answers: Introduction: A business runs on the foundation of a number of skills and principles, that allows it overcome any challenges put forth in the way and excel. There are a lot of different skills that a business analyst has to acquire to cope with the challenges that arise on a daily basis in the cutthroat corporate world (Eberius et al. 2012). This report in three different sections will evaluate different skills needed in the business world to survive and sustain the business in the dynamic market changes and determine the value of the skills in the same. 1.Leadership and team building skills: Leadership and teambuilding skills are required to work within the industrial sector of any domain nowadays and with the market trends inclining heavily towards the team culture is imperative for a business team to have good leadership and team management skills. Along with that the concept of business analysis came through driven by the need of successful monitoring business operations and quality decision making from the administrative end (Northouse 2012). The major part of business operation management and careful decision making is carried out by business analyst profile is carried out by the business analyst profile in the corporate world. The concept of business analysis arose from the complications of outsourcing and competitive IT management (Ottensooser et al. 2012). The business analyst has to over all the business operations involving all the stakeholders and carry out the tricky decision making for the welfare of the organization and its stakeholders. In such a case along with decision making and foresight, two vital characteristics required for the business analyst to have are leadership and team building skills (Kandogane et al. 2014). The job responsibilities of a business analyst are much like a nagging counsellor, influencing others to perform tasks that they do not want to perform otherwise. The job responsibility of the business analysts often includes damage control, resolve any conflict, professional or internal and allow the business top run smoothly (Northouse 2012). In this situation the business analysts have to work with in house employees, external suppliers and consumers. Dealing with so many professional sectors requires the business analysts to be the leader without title. The business analysts need to resolve internal conflict in the employees, negotiate with the suppliers and resolve the service user demands (Vera-Baquero, Colomo-Palacios and Molloy 2013). The interesting fact is that all the different domains that a business analyst has to work with, views the business analysis personnel like a member of their team. In order to retain harmony in the business operation the business analyst has to keep peace with all of them. In order to do so the business analyst has to have team management skills like attentive listening capabilities, influential attitude, motivation and persuasion skills, assertiveness and supportive approach (Northouse 2012). Criticising the concept, I can comment that the business analysts need to employ much more effort than what their job responsibilities mandate them to do. Their job profile in=s to overlook the business operations and making decisions that are crucial for the growth and sustenance of the business. However, in order to perform the responsibilities the analysts need to step into the shoes of an able team leader without the title that they very much deserve. Hence it can be concluded that without proper leadership and team management skills the business analysts will never be able to push other professionals to do more than what they are willing to do for the benefit of the organization (Vera-Baquero, Colomo-Palacios and Molloy 2013). 2.Key processes of business understanding: Another important sector in business management knowledge is clear understanding of the key business processes that occur in the organization in a daily manner. A business process can be defined as the carefully organized steps of tasks or activities that lead to the production of a service product for a consumer base that will profit the organization. Naturally, there are a number of critical and interdependent steps associated with the entire process, and each step has a profound importance in the generation of the desired outcome. Hence, business management knowledge is incomplete without an individual divulging in understanding the key business processes (Sonteya and Seymour 2012). The first step to business process carried out by a business analyst is the orientation process, where the business analyst will get acquainted with the new business project. In this step the business analyst is supposed to attain a clear idea of the desired outcome of the business project and determine the involvement of the primary stakeholders, and carefully plan the changes required to proceed with the project (Abramowicz et al. 2012). The next process is discovering the primary objective of the project by evaluating the expectations of the stakeholders followed by the step of the scope of the business project so that the stakeholders get a clear idea of they are to gain from the project. The next step is to design the business analysis plan categorizing perfect methods and technologies to be used in the project and aligning them to the context of the business project. The next step is to outline the project requirements, be it material or technical implementation in accordance t o the business project plan and the recommendation from the quality assurance team (Sonteya and Seymour 2012). The last two processes include implementation of the planned solution to achieve the desired outcome set for the project and assessment of the quality produced. The steps categorized above are elemental for successful completion of the project and are critically interconnected with each other. Moreover, all these steps depend on the competent and efficient performance of not only the business analyst but all the employees associated with the business project. Therefore the business analyst has to depend on all these factors for successful completion of the project, hence the business analyst must keep a vigilant eye on not just assessing the quality and value of the end product but should also assess the successful completion of each step so that there are no risks to the progress of the project (Jeston and Nelis 2014). 3.Investigation techniques of requirement elicitation: As discussed above, outlining the project requirements is one of the key business processes, without which a project can not attempt to start. However, projects requirements are not very easily available for the business analyst to string together. The requirements in most cases are in the thoughts and mental plans of the stakeholders and the business analyst has to elicit the requirements in order to initiate the project. Studies suggest that the majority of the project failures and abandonments lead back to a faulty requirement elicitation process. Therefore the business analyst must employ advanced investigative techniques to elicit the requirements (Mulla and Girase 2012). The investigative elicitation techniques can be of two major types, qualitative, to identify the broadest possibility range of facts and figures, and quantitative to provide more in depth knowledge about the requirements. The most popular qualitative techniques include brainstorming and focus group sessions (Mulla and Girase 2012). The brainstorming approach helps to generate new ideas, the responsibility of the analyst is to extract the perspective from all of the stakeholders and string them together according to the need of the project. The next approach is the focus group technique, formulating a team of qualified stakeholders collaborating to contribute to investigate business need; an approach generally opted when all the stakeholders are not very forthcoming and imaginative with ideas and concepts. Among the quantitative techniques the most popular techniques are questionnaires and document analysis (Sharma and Pandey 2013). Document analysis is concerned with reviewing and an alysing all the existing documentation available that align with the objectives of the business project, and it can give a very practical and analytical idea to the business analyst about the needs of the project and how that can be attained. Questionnaires are designed to incorporate the views of a huge base of participants and generate real world and realistic opinion about the mass (Sharma and Pandey 2013). Overall, both quantitative and qualitative techniques are of huge benefit to the requirement elicitation process, where one approach gives professional facts and figures other generates a real world scenario of the needs and expectations of any business project. Hence the business analyst cannot ignore any of the approaches as that can lead to faulty requirement elicitation harming the project outcome exponentially (Sharma and Pandey 2014). Therefore, it is imperative that the analysts take heed of both kinds of investigative techniques so that the project can be based on the foundation of genuine and accurate requirements. Conclusion: On a concluding note it can be said that the responsibilities of a business analysts are more than what it is generally expected to be. The business analysts not only has to overlook and design all the business operations, they need to assess the quality of the business operation and they need to step into the shoes of a team leader to ensure that the business processes run smoothly. Therefore the business analysts need to have a clear understanding of business process management and their job roles so that they can seamlessly perform the myriad of responsibilities they are entrusted with. References: Abramowicz, W., Filipowska, A., Kaczmarek, M. and Kaczmarek, T., 2012. Semantically enhanced business process modeling notation. InSemantic Technologies for Business and Information Systems Engineering: Concepts and Applications(pp. 259-275). IGI Global. Eberius, J., Thiele, M., Braunschweig, K. and Lehner, W., 2012. DrillBeyond: enabling business analysts to explore the web of open data.Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment,5(12), pp.1978-1981. Jeston, J. and Nelis, J., 2014.Business process management. Routledge. Kandogan, E., Balakrishnan, A., Haber, E.M. and Pierce, J.S., 2014. From data to insight: work practices of analysts in the enterprise.IEEE computer graphics and applications,34(5), pp.42-50. Mulla, N. and Girase, S., 2012. A new approach to requirement elicitation based on stakeholder recommendation and collaborative filtering.International Journal of Software Engineering Applications,3(3), p.51. Northouse, P.G., 2012.Leadership: Theory and practice. Sage. Ottensooser, A., Fekete, A., Reijers, H.A., Mendling, J. and Menictas, C., 2012. Making sense of business process descriptions: An experimental comparison of graphical and textual notations.Journal of Systems and Software,85(3), pp.596-606. Sharma, S. and Pandey, S.K., 2013. Revisiting requirements elicitation techniques.International Journal of Computer Applications,75(12). Sharma, S. and Pandey, S.K., 2014, March. Requirements elicitation: Issues and challenges. InComputing for Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom), 2014 International Conference on(pp. 151-155). IEEE. Sonteya, T. and Seymour, L., 2012. Towards an understanding of the business process analyst: an analysis of competencies.Journal of Information Technology Education: Research,11(1), pp.43-63. Sonteya, T. and Seymour, L., 2012. Towards an understanding of the business process analyst: an analysis of competencies.Journal of Information Technology Education: Research,11(1), pp.43-63. Vera-Baquero, A., Colomo-Palacios, R. and Molloy, O., 2013. Business process analytics using a big data approach.IT Professional,15(6), pp.29-35.