Professional Business Analysts

About Professional Business Analysts

The central problem of the discipline is that requirements do not exist before somebody goes looking for them. They are constructed, and the construction is the job.

There is a persistent misunderstanding about what a business analyst does, and it is held as firmly inside the profession as outside it. The misunderstanding is that somewhere in the organisation there exists a set of requirements, held in the heads of the people who do the work, and the analyst's task is to extract them accurately and write them down. Under that model, a good analyst is a good stenographer with better questions, and failure means somebody was not listened to carefully enough.

This is not how it works. Ask a competent person to describe what they need from a new system and you will get a mixture of things: their current workaround described as a requirement, a feature they saw somewhere else, a complaint about the present arrangement, a constraint they believe is fixed but is not, and a genuine need buried among them and expressed obliquely. None of that is because they are unclear thinkers. It is because the question asks them to specify a thing that does not exist yet, in terms of a solution space they have not seen, while abstracting from a job they perform by habit rather than by rule.

Professional Business Analysts is written for people doing analysis work under any of its current titles: eliciting what is needed, making it specific, and getting decisions made by people who own them. The assumed reader has responsibility without much formal authority, which is the ordinary condition of the role.

The editorial position is that requirements are constructed rather than discovered, that being concrete and wrong early beats being comprehensive and untested, and that a large share of what appears to be analytical disagreement is organisational disagreement in disguise.

This publication is independent. It is not affiliated with any professional body, certification scheme, methodology or tool vendor, and it does not accept payment for coverage. Where a framework is discussed, it is discussed on its merits for a particular situation.

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