What is Business Analysis

Business Analysis in simple terms means analyzing the business needs of your client / customer and identifying the solutions or ways through which you (your company) could help the client overcome his business challenges or meet his business needs.

Example :

Suppose Mr. Tata has an automobile showroom and he sells very premium cars to his clientele .

He is facing a challenge in his current business model.

“The challenge is that his customers have to wait for a longer period at his showroom before getting the delivery of their car.”

Although Mr. Tata has a really big showroom and every facility to accommodate his customers , he truly values others’ time like anything and don’t want to make them wait for long.

Now, to get this problem resolved Mr. Tata approaches an IT company that has recently opened up its office in the same area.

The company aligns Mr. Tata’s meeting with one of their own Business Analysts named Mr. Premji so that Mr. Premji could understand the challenges being faced by Mr. Tata.

Mr. Premji on meeting with Mr. Tata understands his business problems and identifies all the pain areas of the process, currently being followed in delivering the car to the client.

Mr. Premji also interacts with the people who are currently involved in the process of delivering cars at the TATA showroom and discusses various aspects of the delivery process with the people so as to get the complete understanding of the business.

In short, Mr. Premji performs a complete business analysis and finds out that there is not just one thing that needs to be resolved but also a couple of other things that are making this whole process unproductive and inefficient.

What after understanding the Business Problem ?

Now, to overcome all these challenges Mr. Premji suggests Mr. Tata to automate this whole process of delivering cars and eliminate the manual intervention that occurs at various stages of the process.

Mr. Premji further tells him that he has previously resolved the same issues at one other automobile showroom with his company’s leading software (product) named SWIFTY.

He tells Mr. Tata that SWIFTY has been developed keeping all these things in mind and will resolve each of your challenges completely.

Let’s stop here for now.

We will continue with our story further but before that let me tell you that the whole set of activities performed by Mr. Premji just now comes under the umbrella of Business Analysis.

Right from the first meet with Mr. Tata to interacting with this executives at showroom, understanding the process and its complexities, identifying the pain points and figuring out the ways to solve them, all these are the activities performed by Mr. Premji as a part of business analysis.

So we can again say that Business Analysis is the set of tasks, knowledge, and techniques required to identify business needs and determine solutions to business problems. 

Solutions often include a systems development component, but may also consist of process improvement or organizational change.