Business Analysis Life Cycle

This is a difficult one to define.   We all know the life cycle of software, be it a product or service or a feature.  The following is an attempt to provide the life cycle of business analysis at very high level.

Product marketing team comes up with a high level direction of different features that should be part of the product/service for a particular release or financial year based on the approval from the senior management.  

They provide the overview of the high level direction to all the stakeholders.  This will be primarily based on the following factors:

•       Market Research
•       Competitive Analysis
•       Product Direction
•       Sales strategy
•       Client feed back
•        Missing features in the product suite

Once marketing comes up with the features list, Analysis team analyzes these features and comes up with the requirements at high level to get it signed off from the product marketing.   This is the basis for analysis team to do research and provide with the best of the functionality for the product/service they are going to create. So, the scope of the features will be freezed based on the high level requirements.

Then analysis team details these requirements and periodically walks through all the stakeholders and gets it signed off from the Product Marketing team.  They also may get the product/service mock ups in order to make sure that they are understanding clearly what the Product Marketing is saying.  Once they come to an agreement, Analysis team works with the software development to build the product.  So, they will create requirement specification documents, process flow diagrams, mock up UI screens and other requirement documents as needed for the software development teams. They will be reviewed among all the stake holders (Senior Management, Software Architects, Software Development, User Interface and Software Testing) and get them reviewed periodically.

Analysis team takes the responsibility of creating the product as envisioned by the Product Marketing. So, they do the adhoc testing periodically and help the development/testing team with all the clarifications they needed. Analysis team has to have the understanding of the domain and product in order to give utmost clarity of the requirements to the software development/testing teams.  They have to innovate to come up with the best way of communicating the requirements to the teams to minimize the misunderstandings. 

For service organizations, the Client will give the requirements.  So, the Marketing/Product Management team will be the client's team primarily the same personnel. However, the business analysis team may not have direct access to team.