Business Documentation - Part I

What is Business Analyst ?

An internal consultancy role that has responsibility for investigating business systems, identifying options for improving business systems and bridging the needs of the business with the use of IT

Business requirements (project initiation document):

What the needed achievements will be, and the quality measures. They are usually expressed in terms of broad outcomes the business requires, rather than specific functions the system may perform. Specific design elements are usually outside the scope of this document, although design standards may be referenced.

Functional Requirements:

Describe what the system, process, or product/service must do in order to fulfill the business requirements. Note that the business requirements often can be broken up into sub-business requirements and many functional requirements. These are often referred to as System Requirements although some functionality could be manual and not system based, e.g., create notes or work instructions.

User (stake holder) Requirements:

are a very important part of the deliverables, the needs of the stakeholders must be correctly interpreted. This deliverable can also reflect how the product will be designed and developed, and define how test cases must be formulated. However, stakeholders may not always be users of a system.

Quality of Service (non-functional) Requirements:

are requirements that do not perform a specific function for the business requirement but are needed to support the functionality. For example: performance, scalability, quality of service (QoS), security and usability. These are often included within the System Requirements, where applicable.