Agile Business Analysis is the practice of business analysis applied with an Agile mindset:

• The analysis process is rich in communication, privileging face-to-face communication and video conferencing rather than documentation and e-mails
• It is highly iterative, design and analysis activities relying on each other
• It is incremental, where the work is achieved in small deliverable batches of functionalities
• It is oriented to the identification and understanding of the business goal, and this understanding is communicated to everyone involved in the project. The overall vision of the project is agreed by the stakeholders and the developers
• The created artifacts by the analysis process follows the "good enough" principle. They are not perfect, they are just enough to fulfill their purpose

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A typical practice of Business Analysis consists of creating a Logical Data Model. This model describes the data within a specific context, and is independent from the technology that is used to implement it.

It helps to understand the different business data elements and the required changes on those elements.

The Logical Data Model includes the following items:

• Entities
• Attributes
• Relationships between entities
• Business semantics for entities and attributes

When the Logical Data Model is mature enough, it can be used by technical team members in order to translate it to a Physical Data Model, which describes how the data will be implemented with a certain technology, for instance with a database system.

Want to know more about this ? There are plenty of in-depth articles on the web, online training and books available. If you start your career as a Business Analyst, especially in the domain of IT, like Functional Analysis, I warmly encourage you to learn about this matter.

Some tools

• Enterprise Architect, from Sparx Systems
• draw.io, from diagrams.net
• Lucidchart, from Lucid Software

AUTHOR
Gaëtan van den Hove
IT Consultant & Business Analyst
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This short video defines the role of a Functional Analyst.

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