What is the Role of Business analyst in SharePoint?
Good day,
I think a BA has to do the following: The public face of SharePoint in the organisation. To demo and evangelise SharePoint to effect good user adoption. To provide specialized consulting services to business regarding best practices, design ideas and information architecture to Management.
A BA is actually a SP Evangelist.
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regards
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I don’t think a BA needs to have these things. Yours sound like things for a SharePoint architect rather. A BA in my opinion needs to select and tell the client which requirements defined that client needs to prioritize. If the client agrees and make a decision to go with priorities then BA needs to work with IMPLEMENTATION team to help them clearly understand through Business Case, Use Case, Flow Diagram, Constraint or something like that.
I don’t think BA needs to have good understanding of on-code and off-code solution as well. The SharePoint architect must understand that to design a whole architecture.
For example, a company needs their vendors to be able to access documents stored in SharePoint document library. What the BA would need to ask that company are:
- Does the company need to manage vendor’s accounts? If Yes then SP Architect would design FBA solution. If No and vendors have their own Active Directory and they need to use domain account so SP architect would go with federation solution using AD FS for example.
- Permission matrix-table (including details of granular permission requirement)
- Any requirement for iPad, iPhone accessibility?
- Are those venders require to be authenticated through a web-based security gate way? If Yes, then SP architect would plan for Forefront UAG.
- Is there any requirement for a dedicated permission management portal for vendors?
- …blah blah..
SharePoint architect needs to work with SP Admin to design an infrastructure that has the ability to meet that access requirement
Regards,
-T.s
Matthew is definitely correct, it definitely depends on your organisation. In my experience, some companies focus heavily on SharePoint’s collaboration tools, while others treat search as king, and others still are all about BI.
More to the point, the role of the SharePoint BA depends on the size of the SharePoint team and the breadth/depth of the SP environment. I can sympathize with Matthew on the all-rounder front, I have fallen into that role more often than not in my past 9 years with the product.
The BA must liaise between the business and IT. That entails different things at different companies.
One more item to add to the list:Â
The SharePoint BA must consult the business on what SharePoint cannot do (or rather, doesn’t do well or feasibly or without extensive customization etc.).
Great question and we currently have 552 listed SharePoint Business Analysts listed on here. Hopefully, one of those will chip in.Â
In my mind here are some of the roles  :
- Work with the business (Product Owner) to define what they need.
- Map those requirements onto the SharePoint feature set.
- Document requirements.
- Work with the technical team to convey what needs to be built and where SharePoint customisations is required.Â
- Demonstrate the progress back to the business.
There’s plenty more no doubt, but they are the ones I notice most.
