A quick check on Wikipedia shows this high-level definition for a business analyst…



“A Business Analyst (BA) analyzes the organization and design of businesses, government departments, and non-profit organizations; they also assess business models and their integration with technology.”



In my years as a project manager – and there have been quite a few – my experience with the business analyst has always been this… they are basically your very technical bridge to the development team.  They capture the business requirements and work with the development team or technical lead to translate the business needs of the customer into technical requirements that the developers can build the solution from.



Obviously, if this is not done well, you’ll have the same age old problem.  Your development staff on the project will be building a solution that doesn’t match up well with the actual needs and requests of the customer.  The customer end user will be unhappy, customer satisfaction will be low, your job will be in jeopardy, and so forth.  You get the picture … and it’s not pretty.



The business analyst – in my view and in my experience – is the glue that ties the non-technical and the technical together.  As a former techie and an IT project manager, I can fill both roles if necessary on a smaller project and have on several occasions.  But I’ve seen none technical project managers without any technical training try to do that and fail miserably.  On my larger IT projects, I don’t know what I would have done without a very experienced business analyst who understood the business needs and was able to translate those needs well into meaningful requirements for the developers.  It would have been a disaster.