Business Analyst

Role purpose

Sit between the business and the build team. Take business requirements — often incomplete, verbal, or expressed as outcomes rather than needs — and convert them into functional specifications the business can sign off, and technical specifications engineers can implement without further interpretation.

The role owns the requirement from the moment it is raised until it is delivered, tested and accepted. Success is measured by how few clarification cycles the build team needs and how little rework surfaces in UAT.

Requirements

Key responsibilities

Requirements elicitation and analysis

• Run

workshops, interviews and process walkthroughs with business stakeholders, subject matter experts and operations teams.

• Challenge

stated requirements to establish the underlying business need, the decision being supported, and the value being sought.

• Identify

gaps, contradictions, duplication and unstated assumptions in the source requirements, and drive them to resolution rather than escalating them unresolved.

• Document

current-state ("as-is") processes and define target-state ("to-be") processes, including the operational and control changes required.

• Assess

regulatory, audit and data-protection implications of each requirement and flag where compliance input is needed.

Functional specification

• Author

functional specification documents that define system behaviour in business terms: process flows, use cases or user stories, business rules, decision tables, validation logic, calculation logic, roles and permissions, notifications, and reporting outputs.

• Define

exception paths, error handling and edge cases explicitly — not only the happy path.

• Write

clear, testable acceptance criteria for every requirement.

• Secure

formal business sign-off on the functional specification before build commences.

Technical specification

• Translate

the approved functional specification into a technical specification that engineering can build against, covering:

• System

and component architecture in scope, and the changes required to each.

• Data

model changes: entities, attributes, data types, cardinality, referential integrity, retention.

• Integration

and interface specifications: API contracts, request/response payloads, protocols, authentication, error and retry behaviour, throughput and volumetrics.

• Data

migration and transformation rules, including source-to-target field mappings and cleansing logic.

• Configuration

versus customisation decisions, with rationale.

• Non-functional

requirements: performance, availability, scalability, security, auditability, logging and monitoring.

• Work

with solution architects and developers to validate technical feasibility, sizing and effort, and to reconcile the specification with platform constraints.

• Document

assumptions, dependencies, constraints and out-of-scope items.

Delivery and quality support

• Maintain

a requirements traceability matrix linking business requirement → functional specification → technical specification → test case → delivered feature.

• Groom

and maintain the backlog; ensure work items entering a sprint meet the team's definition of ready.

• Support

developers through build, acting as the authority on intended behaviour.

• Author

or review test scenarios; support SIT and UAT, triage defects, and distinguish genuine defects from change requests.

• Contribute

to release notes, training material, user guides and operational handover documentation.

Change and stakeholder management

• Run

impact assessments on change requests: effort, risk, dependencies, cost and schedule implications.

• Manage

version control and change history across all specification artefacts.

• Keep

business and technical stakeholders aligned on scope, sequencing and trade-offs, and communicate decisions and their consequences clearly to both audiences.

Deliverables owned by this role

• Requirements

catalogue / business requirements analysis

• Functional

specification document (FSD)

• Technical

specification document (TSD)

• Process

models (BPMN or equivalent) — as-is and to-be

• Data

dictionary and source-to-target mappings

• Interface

/ integration specification

• User

stories with acceptance criteria

• Requirements

traceability matrix

• UAT

test scenarios and support for execution

• Impact

assessments for change requests