Overseas, organisations such as the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA)are developing a BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) and plan to release a certification framework later this year (IRM Training is an Endorsed Education Provider to the IIBA). In the UK, the British Computer Society (www.bcs.org.uk) offers a Diploma in Business Analysis. Whilst the IIBA qualification plans to include work experience as part of the accreditation process, the BCS qualification is purely academic.
Here in Australia the Dept. of Education Science and Training (formerly ANTA) offers a number of IT qualifications through it’s latest training package ICA05. For business analysts the highest qualification is ICA50805, Diploma of Information Technology (Systems Analysis & Design). This is a purely academic qualification.
The Australian Business Analysis Association (www.abaa.org.au) has recently announced the "Qualified Business Analysis Practitioner" an accreditation which will be based on a mixture of resume, qualifications and work experience.
So what does all this mean to employers and to business analysts? At the end of the day, employers want a known level of skill and will base their assessment largely on track record and work experience. They will usually take experience over qualifications every time. For employers, business results come first.
Perhaps the real issue is lack of understanding of the analyst's role. In Australia a common view is that analysts gather requirements and document processes, the real heroes are project managers who deliver projects. This is in stark contrast to overseas – for example in the UK – where analysts are seen as the creative force. They are the people who can change the business, re-engineer processes and have a direct impact on increasing profits and reducing costs. This is where the creative "stuff" happens and project managers are the "doers", their job is to implement the plans of others. This is not to denigrate the key role that a project manager performs, merely to emphasise that project managers and business analysts use different skill sets.
Some of the job roles and responsibilities we’ve encountered over the last few years include:
Senior analyst, responsible for several business processes in their organisation
Consultant to business units, focusing on business process optimisation
BPR expert - looks for "breakthrough" opportunities in current business processes
Financial Analyst - development of or validation of business cases
Business systems design – sometimes crosses the boundary into systems analysis
Enterprise architect - looks for innovative uses of technology in the organisation
This is in addition to the more general duties of an experienced analyst such as team leadership, mentoring, staff management, partial or full project management (despite the comments above !), testing planner etc...
What about your organisation? What roles and opportunities do you see now and in the future ? Your input and comments will help us in planing future training needs and if there’s sufficient feedback we’ll include it in a future newsletter. Send feedback to editor@irm.com.au
The IIBA’s vision is "to be the leading world-wide professional association that develops and maintains standards for the practice of business analysis and for the certification of practitioners". Formed in March 2004, the
IIBA now has over 2,500 members worldwide. Whilst most of these are in North America and organised as city or regional chapters, the exciting news for Australia was the announcement of a local chapter in July 2006.
A key milestone for the IIBA has been the development of the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) which the IIBA has defined as:
The Business Analysis Body of Knowledge is the sum of knowledge within the profession of Business Analysis and reflects what is considered currently accepted practice. As with other professions, the body of knowledge is defined and enhanced by the business analysis professionals who apply it. The BOK describes Business Analysis areas of knowledge, their associated activities and tasks and the skills necessary to be effective in their execution.
The course must require at least two hours of student activity. (For online or CBT courses, the content must be equivalent to what would be covered in a lecture that is at least two hours in duration).
The contents of the course must be in substantial alignment with the IIBA BABOK.
The information included in the syllabus must address all the elements listed above and must be both complete and sufficiently detailed to allow a comprehensive evaluation.
For more information on RGS and BA, follow the links above or go to our home page.
The growth of the IIBA heralds an exciting new chapter for business analysis professionals - IRM is looking forward to working with them and supports any organisation (international or local) which can benefit business analysts.
The Class Diagram shows the relationship between classes and objects. The types of relationship encompass most of the core concepts within object-oriented techniques.
A Class is a collection of objects. Classes group together things that have similar properties, common behaviour, common relationships, and common semantics.
A class is shown as a box with three sections. The top one is for the class name. The middle one is for the data attributes it holds. The third shows the operations it can execute. There can be other layers for other purposes if the application requires it. These layers can be omitted where they are not required, such as a summary representation that does not require attributes and operations to be specified. The Name layer is the only one that is mandatory.
The attributes and objects group together properties, behaviour, relationships and semantics that are common to certain objects.
A Class groups convenient things which all work together. We can therefore use them as a basis for defining use cases, as if the class was a glossary of terms for the use case.