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Day in Life of Business Analyst -
IT Services Firm
UT Career Desk, [
Thursday, Apr 17, 2008 ]
It’s all about requirements.
If I could sum up in one word the world of a business analyst, requirements
would be it.
Yes, the requirements and
the needs of all our customers. How many of us understand the essence of these?
How many of us make an effort to dig deeper and understand the driving force
behind the customers requirements?
And even if we do, how many
of us really comprehend or understand the larger picture in the light of which
the customer requirements are to be decoded, deciphered and finally serviced. It
is this ability of mine with which I approach a typical day in a life as a
senior business analyst of a top Indian IT services firm.
Starting out within the
technical field after my engineering graduation and having spent a couple of
years in delivery function of the organization, I married my ability to
comprehend technology with the subtleties involved in making a business sense of
the technical initiatives through a management course from one of the IIM’s.
My day begins at 9-00 AM
with checking up on my mails over the previous day. It had been a long day
yesterday what with the submission of a response to a customer’s proposal (RfP)
that I had been helping out in. Having a good understanding of the domain and a
couple of certifications, from NSE and SII, me and another business analyst from
my team were called upon by the bid response team to help them with the
functional understanding of the requirements within the RfP.
We typically get involved in
3-4 such proposals every month. Translating the customer’s business landscape to
a simpler form which everybody can understand is the foremost priority within
such proposals. Sometimes we multitask between multiple proposals
simultaneously.
We play this role multiple
times in different ways. So whenever there is a new project that is going to
start, I get called upon to interact closely with customers teams at onsite. I
am required to get acquainted with the way business functions, the way different
entities interact within the customers business and help the technical teams
understand the business flow.
Over the past couple of
years, I can boast of being at multiple investment banks around the world,
analyzing and bridging the gap between technology and business. Strange, that
even I missed impending Subprime crisis.
Some of the assignments have
been those of acquiring knowledge transition and others such as requirements
gathering, implementations. We’ve been at customer locations, getting trained on
the applications or the business functions that we would eventually serve out of
our delivery locations.
By now, its 11-00 AM and
grabbing a quick cup of coffee, I head to a review meeting with the new project
team that I assisted last month. I am involved in preparation of the test cases
or test scenarios as you would have it, for one the IT applications that we are
developing.
Even though, I don’t always
relish playing this function within my job description, I have to contend myself
with the fact that this forms one of the most crucial elements of my role.
Missing any scenario, which results in the application downtime may cause
irreversible losses to the bank and hence the need for even greater care. We
review the various test plans prepared over the past couple of weeks.
So if it’s trade being
captured, verified, analyzed, confirmed, settled or netted even, I as a subject
matter expert (SME) have to ensure that all the functionalities are covered
within the scope the application’s testing. It always fall upon a few business
analysts like us to translate the business functionalities to more simpler,
easily understandable form for the developers and testers to carry on with their
jobs.
Done with the review by noon
and after finishing the lunch, I spend the greater part of my afternoon in
completing a whitepaper that had been pending for a long time with me. This one
would be put up at the corporate website and forms part of a larger
organizational strategy of improving the brand recall and increasing the service
offerings.
Titled “Integrated Services
Proposition within Changing Business Landscape”, the paper has involved
humongous research from my part. I am also to present this concept in an
upcoming due diligence meet we have planned for a bank based out of Mauritius.
This is one aspect that I love the most of my job - the travel associated with
it and the fact that I get to meet variety of people faced with similar issues.
By 5-00 PM, I head out again
for a dry run of a client visit where, I am being portrayed as an SME from a
domain perspective within the team that would be deployed for the I-bank.
Post the dry run, that takes
about an hour, I closet myself with my team of other business analysts to take
stock of the various propositions that we’ve been trying to develop over the
past few months.
This exercise which involves
keeping track of the way the investment banking industry is shaping up, what are
the trends that seem to emanate from various markets of US, Europe and Asia Pac,
what are the challenges being faced by various players and how these could be
serviced by an organization such as ours either through existing services or new
service lines, is continuous feature.
Going through various
resources such as Gartner/Forester reports, information available in the public
domain and communicating with various industry bodies helps us gain insights of
the industry.
By now its almost 7-00 PM
and close to calling it a day. Clearing a few mails and after a quick chat with
my manager I head back home after another fruitful day fulfilling the
requirements of not only external but internal customers.
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