Know Your Knowledge Areas?

The BABOK® Guide is based upon a set of knowledge areas guiding you when you perform business analysis activities at any point in your project or product life cycle. Knowledge areas define what you need to understand and the tasks you should perform. Knowledge areas do not represent project phases and their activities are not intended to be performed in a linear fashion. Tasks from one or more knowledge areas may be performed in any order (such as in succession, simultaneously or iteratively) provided that the necessary inputs to each task are available.

Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring is the knowledge area where you plan how to approach your business analysis effort. The business analysis approach is a set of processes, templates, and activities used to perform business analysis in a specific context. The results of this knowledge area govern the tasks found in the remaining five knowledge areas and set the performance metrics to be used to evaluate all business analysis work on your project.

Enterprise Analysis focuses on how you identify the business needs driving your proposed project by performing problem definition and analysis. In addition to defining and refining these business drivers for a project, you are responsible for defining a feasible solution scope that can be implemented by the business. This work may also include developing a business case or feasibility study for a proposed project. Typically, the tasks in this knowledge area occur prior to or early in the project life cycle.

Requirements Analysis describes how you progressively elaborate and prioritize stakeholder and solution requirements. In essence, you are taking the elicited information and making sense of it to derive the real requirements for your project. This knowledge area also focuses on graphically modeling the requirements as well as documenting them. When performing these tasks, you should ensure the feasibility of the requirements while defining, describing, and refining the characteristics of an acceptable solution.

Elicitation is where you work with stakeholders to identify and gather requirements and understand their needs and concerns. The elicitation techniques found in this knowledge area are selected and used to elicit requirements at many levels of detail, including your project’s business, stakeholder, solution, and transition requirements.

Requirements Management and Communication defines how you approach communicating requirements to stakeholders. Tasks and techniques for managing changes, conflicts and issues related to requirements are also described. You are expected to perform requirements communication activities as part of your requirements development work.

Solution Assessment and Validation focuses on assessing and validating proposed, in progress, and implemented solutions before, during, and after the project life cycle. While many tasks in this knowledge area take place later in the project life cycle, some solution-focused activities may occur quite early on in your project.

You will need to know these definitions for your certification exam, as well as more details about each task found within the knowledge area and all of the techniques and deliverables that are involved with getting your job done and done well. You can read more about all of the exam topics in our new certification prep book, CBAP/CCBA Certified Business Analysis Study Guide.

Happy studies!
Susan