System Requirements Analysis Step By Step: What does a System Requirements Analyst Do?

The BABOK® Guide identifies a Business Analyst (BA) as “a practitioner of business analysis” or “any person who performs business analysis activities”. There are probably as many variations of BA job descriptions as there are analysis-related job postings on the Internet. There are multiple job titles and organizational roles for BA practitioners, including “business analyst,” “requirements analyst,” “systems analyst,” “requirements engineer,” “process analyst,” “product manager,” “product owner,” “enterprise analyst,” “business architect,” and “management consultant.” It’s easy to see how the abundance of varying job titles and job descriptions can lead to confusion about the real-world job activities and responsibilities of business analysts. This book will introduce readers to the professional responsibilities of a “system requirements analyst” (also referred to as a System Analyst in this text), a type of business analyst that coordinates the requirements of a client with the technical capacities available to the project.

What does a System Requirements Analyst do?

People seek an answer to this question for different reasons, depending on their current professional situation. This book therefore attempts to achieve three main goals:

1. To help people who are contemplating switching to a career as a System Analyst, as well as those currently seeking a junior-level analyst position.

This book will help newcomers to the field understand the specific job responsibilities of a System Analyst. At meetings of a local IIBA chapter, you can often meet people who are attending these events because they want to become business analysts. The main question they have is: “What do you really do as a BA?” The same question is asked during job interviews and at networking events. This book describes a System Analyst’s tasks step-by-step, summarizes expected deliverables, and explains methods of execution for these tasks. If you find that you love the idea of working in this manner, this book can help you with job interviews and with starting your new career smoothly. If you find that you dislike the process, it will surely help you avoid wasting your time in a career that may be a poor fit. To help make the described concepts concrete, this book provides a specific example of a project and describes the necessary tasks a System Analyst may perform.

2. To help experienced System Analysts prepare for the CCBA/CBAP certification test.

In order to cover all possible varieties of BA job descriptions and duties, the authors of the BABOK® Guide took the most logical–and perhaps the only possible–approach. They organized the material according to Knowledge Areas (KAs) and stated from the beginning that KAs “are not intended to represent phases in a project”. While this approach is perfect for the purposes of the BABOK® Guide, each practitioner still needs to distill subsets of the material specific to his or her specific job description.

This book attempts to do just that–distill the tasks and techniques specific to the job description of a “System Analyst” or “Requirements Analyst” in the IT industry. The material will attempt to faithfully match project phases, Knowledge Areas, and corresponding tasks and techniques required during the development of a new system, covering everything from the initial stages of a project to the deployment and maintenance stages. This book will help you understand BABOK® Guide material better during test preparation and connect it to your work experience.

3. To help experienced System Analysts identify best practices for each phase of a project.

Each organization has its own methods of bringing in an analyst, its own sets of tasks, and its own expected deliverables. Even within one company, some projects will call for a standard execution of BA tasks while others can have a unique set of needs. This book will help you and your organization with job performance optimization.