SGS: Business Analyst

Responsibilities

• This person details the specification of the system's functionality by analyzing and describing the Requirements.
• This person works on requirements gathering and analysis to modeling the system's functionality and delimiting the system.
  

Skills

• You should be a good facilitator and has above-average communication skills. Knowledge of the business and technology domains is essential to have amongst those acting in this role.
• You should be fluent in the English (Required), French (Desired) and Spanish (Desired) languages (Spoken and written).
• You should have Higher education in Information Technology or science, such as a University degree and relevant business experience.
• You should have the Knowledge of Object Oriented Business Analysis Techniques, Unified Modeling Language (UML), use cases and experience in using modeling tools (Rational Rose is a plus).

The knowledge of Six Sigma™ for the proven problem-solving technique of Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (DMAIC) is a plus.

Information system analysis is a systematic approach to gathering, documenting, organizing and analyzing the new or changing requirements of a system. It is also to establishing and maintaining agreement between stakeholders and developers on the changing requirements.

We define a requirement as: A condition or capability to which the system must conform.

Collecting requirements may sound like a rather straightforward task. In real projects, however, you will run into difficulties because:

• Requirements are not always obvious, and can come from many sources.
• Requirements are not always easy to express clearly in words.
• There are many different types of requirements at different levels of detail.
• The number of requirements can become unmanageable if not controlled.
• Requirements are related to one another.
• Requirements are neither equally important nor equally easy to meet.
• Requirements need to be managed by cross-functional groups of people.
• Requirements change.

Analysis Tasks

Analysis
Information system analysis is done to understand problems, initial stakeholder needs, and design technical solutions. It is an act of reasoning and analysis to find "the problem behind the problem."

Understanding Stakeholder Needs
Requirements come from many sources. You need to know how to best determine what the sources should be, get access to those sources, and also how to best elicit information from them. You may have end user experience and business domain expertise. Very often you will start the discussions at a business model level rather than a system level. Elicitation activities will occur using techniques such as interviews, brainstorming, conceptual prototyping, questionnaires, and competitive analysis. The result of the elicitation would be a list of requests or needs that are described textually and graphically, and that have been given priority relative one another.

Defining a System
To define the system means to translate and organize the understanding of stakeholder needs into a meaningful description of the system to be built. The outcome of system definition is a description of the system that is both natural language and graphical.

The detailed definition of the system needs to be presented in such a way that both stakeholders and developers can understand, and agree on them. You should put lots effort in understanding the audience for the documents you are producing to describe the system. You may often see a need to produce different kinds of description for different audiences: stakeholders and developers.

Another component of the detailed definition of the system is to state how the system should be tested. Test plans and definitions of what tests to perform tell us what system capabilities will be verified.

Managing Changing Requirements
You need to make sure that you give your requirements a structure that is resilient to changes, and that you use traceability links to represent dependencies between requirements.

email: irene.corpuz[at]sgs.com