If you have people, products, or processes in your business, which virtually any business does, then the interaction between these entities can actually be analysed to determine if your business is functioning at its peak efficiency.
At Unisoft Systems, we have the skills to analyse and improve your business processes using industry standard methodologies like BPMN (business process modelling notation).
We have been analysing and improving business processes for our customers for the last 15 years, and are highly skilled in this area of IT.
We can produce business process flow diagrams, as well as data flow diagrams, and entity relationship diagrams which specifically determine how your business should work on a day to day basis, taking into account all the specific requirements that are unique to your way of doing business.
Our Business Analysts are highly skilled, and have experience in many industries;
Typically the business analyst will consult with the client to determine their exact needs, through JAD (Joint Application Design) sessions, enabling business processes to be discovered, defined, and documented.
The typical output from the Business Analysis sessions would be the following:
Business Requirements Specification
This document would initiate the project, and define what the required achievements would be as well as the way in which the project would be determined a success ‘The Quality Measures’. What is in scope and what is out of scope would be clearly reflected here. This is a non technical document, addressed to business owners and primary stakeholders.
Data Model
This is an ERD (Entity Relationship Model), which defines in exact detail all the database tables that the solution will require, and how they relate to one another. The data model is the blueprint for the database, and will be maintained in a product such as CA Erwin which is the global standard modelling tool for software. Maintaining your data model independently of your database, ensures loose coupling of the logical model from a physical environment and enables detailed documentation to be maintained, independent from the database. Our expertise and experience in designing robust and scalable data models, ensures that your solution is optimised from the outset, as we have encountered an enormous amount of different requirements over the years, and have therefore solved many data modeling challenges.
Functional Requirements Specification
This document is where the actual product (software system) requirements will be described in more detail, clearly defining the business processes involved as well as their interrelationships with each other business process. This will involve subject matter experts from the client explaining the business needs, and our Business Analyst converting those needs into a specification.
User Requirements Specification
This document will involve the users, or the stakeholders of the proposed software system, interacting with the business analysts to provide uses cases for each of the processes defined in the functional requirements specification. The output of this interaction will result in the interface requirements, application work flow, as well as the formulation of test cases.
Non Functional Requirements Specification
This document will cover the aspects of the software system that do not perform a specific function, but are very important, such as the security, scalability (how can the software be expanded and extended, without becoming redundant), quality and usability.
Implementation Requirements Specification
This document covers the transition from the current state, to the desired (or future) state, how, when and where will the software be implemented, what data will be imported, where will it come from, how will it be tested, how will we determine that the implementation is complete, and who will sign it off.
Reporting Requirements Specification
This document will produce a list of required reports, justification for each report, the rows and columns to be produced and from which parameters supplied.
Summary
Business Analysis is an important phase of software development. These documents will be the blueprint (like an architects house plans) for your business software requirements, and are independent of platform or vendor. This means that they are actually your intellectual property and will increase the value of your business by a far greater amount than the cost of our services.