Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Business Analyst

🎯 Role Definition

The IT Business Analyst acts as the bridge between business stakeholders and IT delivery teams, eliciting requirements, translating business needs into functional specifications, and ensuring successful delivery of software, integrations, and process improvements. This role requires strong analytical skills, stakeholder management, and hands-on experience with Agile methodologies, system integration, and data analysis.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior Business Analyst focused on application support and requirements documentation
Systems Analyst or Functional Analyst supporting ERP/CRM modules
Data Analyst or QA Analyst transitioning into requirements and stakeholder-facing work

Advancement To:

Senior IT Business Analyst / Lead Business Analyst
Product Owner / Product Manager for enterprise applications
IT Project Manager / Program Manager
Business Architect or Solution Architect

Lateral Moves:

Data Analyst / BI Analyst (focus on analytics & reporting)
Process Improvement Specialist / Lean Six Sigma Analyst
Scrum Master or Agile Coach

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead end-to-end requirements elicitation for IT initiatives by conducting stakeholder interviews, cross-functional workshops, and discovery sessions to capture business objectives, constraints, success criteria and acceptance criteria in clear, actionable formats.
Translate business needs into comprehensive functional specifications, user stories, use cases and acceptance tests, ensuring traceability from business goals to technical deliverables.
Develop AS-IS and TO-BE process maps using BPMN or equivalent notations, identify process inefficiencies, and define measurable process improvement recommendations to reduce cycle time and cost.
Collaborate with product owners, architects and developers to design system solutions and integrations, ensuring designs align with enterprise architecture, security, and data governance standards.
Maintain and prioritize the product backlog in collaboration with stakeholders and delivery teams, facilitating grooming sessions and ensuring user stories are INVEST-compliant and ready for development.
Facilitate cross-functional workshops and sprint ceremonies (planning, refinement, demo, retrospective) to align expectations, unblock delivery impediments and drive consensus across business and technical teams.
Define and document non-functional requirements including performance, scalability, security, compliance, and accessibility to guide technical design and QA testing.
Create detailed data requirements, mapping, and data dictionaries; write SQL queries and collaborate with data engineers to validate data integrity for reporting, migration, and ETL activities.
Design, coordinate and execute user acceptance testing (UAT) plans and test cases, manage defect triage with development teams and validate fixes against acceptance criteria before production release.
Conduct impact analysis for change requests, enhancements and integrations, assessing technical, operational and business implications and updating requirements and test plans accordingly.
Produce functional prototypes, wireframes or low-fidelity mockups (in collaboration with UX) to accelerate stakeholder validation and reduce rework during development.
Prepare and present executive-level status reports, requirements summaries, roadmap artifacts and release readiness documents to senior stakeholders and steering committees.
Drive vendor and third-party integration efforts by defining API requirements, data contracts, security expectations and coordinating integration testing with external partners.
Create and maintain requirements traceability matrices (RTM), ensuring every requirement is mapped to design artifacts, test cases and delivered functionality for auditability.
Support data migration and cutover planning including validation scripts, reconciliation processes and post-migration verification to ensure no loss of critical business data during deployments.
Identify, measure and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) and service-level agreements (SLAs) for implemented solutions; recommend continuous improvement actions based on metrics and stakeholder feedback.
Manage release scope and change control processes, facilitating go/no-go decisions, coordinating rollback plans and ensuring stakeholders are prepared for deployment impacts.
Ensure solutions comply with regulatory and internal control requirements (e.g., GDPR, SOX, PCI) by documenting compliance requirements and working with legal, compliance and security teams.
Develop training materials, runbooks and end-user documentation; coordinate and deliver knowledge transfer and training sessions for operations and business users pre- and post-launch.
Provide post-deployment support and hypercare, monitoring system behavior, tracking remediation actions and capturing lessons learned for future releases.
Mentor and coach junior business analysts, sharing best practices for requirements elicitation, documentation standards and stakeholder engagement.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Maintain project artifacts in JIRA and Confluence, ensuring accessibility and version control for audit and onboarding purposes.
Assist in vendor evaluation activities by drafting RFP requirements and scoring vendor responses against business and technical criteria.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Requirements Elicitation & Documentation — advanced experience creating BRDs, FRDs, user stories, use cases, acceptance criteria and traceability matrices.
Business Process Modeling (BPMN) — design AS-IS/TO-BE flows and identify optimization opportunities.
SQL & Data Analysis — ability to write queries, validate datasets, and interpret results to support reporting and data migrations.
Agile & Scrum Frameworks — hands-on experience working within Agile teams, maintaining backlogs, and facilitating ceremonies.
User Acceptance Testing (UAT) & Test Case Development — design, coordinate and validate UAT, regression and integration testing.
System Integration & API Specifications — define integration requirements, data contracts and participate in end-to-end integration testing.
Requirements Management Tools — proficiency with JIRA, Confluence, Azure DevOps, or similar tools for tracking requirements and issues.
Reporting & BI Tools — familiarity with Power BI, Tableau, or similar for KPI tracking and dashboarding.
ERP/CRM Functional Knowledge — exposure to ERP systems (e.g., SAP, Oracle, Dynamics) or SaaS platforms and common configuration patterns.
Data Migration & ETL Concepts — planning migration strategies, validation approaches and reconciliation procedures.
Documentation & Authoring — strong ability to produce clear, structured documentation that supports delivery and compliance needs.
Security & Compliance Awareness — understanding of data privacy, regulatory constraints and how they impact requirements and design.

Soft Skills

Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills with the ability to manage competing priorities and achieve consensus.
Clear, concise written and verbal communication tailored to technical and non-technical audiences.
Strong analytical and problem-solving mindset; able to decompose complex problems into actionable requirements.
Facilitation and workshop leadership to drive discovery, alignment and decision-making.
Prioritization and time management; experience balancing short-term deliverables with roadmap objectives.
Critical thinking and attention to detail when reviewing requirements, test results and technical designs.
Adaptability and resilience working in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and shifting priorities.
Collaboration and team orientation with a bias for action and continuous improvement.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, Management Information Systems, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s degree plus professional certification (CBAP, PMI-PBA, IIBA certifications, Scrum Master, ITIL) or a Master’s degree in a relevant discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Software Engineering
Management Information Systems (MIS)
Business Administration / Finance
Data Analytics / Statistics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3 to 7 years of progressive experience in business analysis, systems analysis, or related IT roles supporting enterprise applications and software delivery.

Preferred:

5+ years as an IT Business Analyst or BA on multi-disciplinary Agile teams with experience across full SDLC, system integrations, ERP/CRM projects, cloud migrations and UAT coordination.
Demonstrated experience working with cross-functional stakeholders, delivering business value through process redesign, automation, and data-driven insights.
Proven track record of producing high-quality documentation and managing end-to-end delivery for technical and business stakeholders.