The Most Important Business Analyst Duties

So where do business analysts concentrate most of their efforts and what are the most important tasks that apply to all business analysts? According to research from Requirements Solutions Group (RSG), a consultancy that helps train business analysts, the business analyst has a wide range of responsibilities. (RSG's research is based on data from 1,700 IT professionals who consider themselves IT business/system analysts that was gathered by RSG and from other sources.)

At the top of their responsibilities are: identify and model process requirements (80 percent of respondents said this was part of their job); identify and model data requirements (75 percent); identify business rules requirements (75 percent); and test requirements (75 percent), which includes many levels of testing.

Next in the ranking of responsibilities are: manage requirements (70 percent); facilitate requirements sessions, or what's also called joint application development (65 percent); help scope the project (60 percent); write use cases (55 percent); improve business processes (50 percent); design screens (or prototypes) (40 percent); and write system (or technical) specifications (40 percent).

Last in the RSG data are these two responsibilities: determine benefit/cost (30 percent) and lead or manage projects (25 percent).

In light of just how much pressure and responsibility fall to today's business analysts, Forrester's Schwaber notes how underappreciated they are, especially as much of the kudos for software project success (when it does happen) goes to either self-congratulatory executive sponsorship or the Herculean efforts of the developers.

"[Business analysts] don't get the glamour, and they don't get the glory," Schwaber says. "For some reason, we always think that should go just to the people who write the code, even though they wouldn't know what code to write in the first place if it weren't for the business analysts."