BABOK 3 - Techniques & Purposes

Used to define the requirements, outcomes, or conditions that must be met in order for a solution to be considered acceptable to key stakeholders. Measures used to assess a set of requirements in order to choose between multiple solutions.

Used to record, track, and prioritize remaining work items.

Used to manage performance in any business model, organizational structure, or business process.

Conducted to improve organizational operations, increase customer satisfaction, and increase value to stakeholders.

A way to foster creative thinking about a problem. Its aim is to produce numerous new ideas, and to derive from them themes for further analysis.

Provides a framework for scoping and planning by generating a shared understanding of outcomes, identifying alignment with strategy, and providing a scope and prioritization filter.

A justification for a course of action based on the benefits to be realized by using the proposed solution, as compared to the cost, effort, and other considerations to acquire and live with that solution.

Describes how an enterprise creates, delivers, and captures value for and from its customers.

Used to identify, express, validate, refine, and organize the rules that shape day-to-day business behaviour and guide operational business decision making.

Encourages participants in an elicitation activity to collaborate in building a joint understanding of a problem or a solution.

Used to organize the business vocabulary needed to consistently and thoroughly communicate the knowledge of a domain.

Used to standardize a definition of a data element and enable a common interpretation of data elements.

Show where data comes from, which activities process the data, and if the output results are stored or utilized by another activity or external entity.

Used to improve decision making by finding useful patterns and insights from data.

Describes the entities, classes or data objects relevant to a domain, the attributes that are used to describe them, and the relationships among them to provide a common set of semantics for analysis and implementation.

Formally assesses a problem and possible decisions in order to determine the value of alternate outcomes under conditions of uncertainty.

Shows how repeatable business decisions are made.

Used to elicit business analysis information, including contextual understanding and requirements, by examining available materials that describe either the business environment or existing organizational assets.

Used by business analysts and other stakeholders to forecast the cost and effort involved in pursuing a course of action.

Used to understand the financial aspects of an investment, a solution, or a solution approach.

A means to elicit ideas and opinions about a specific product, service, or opportunity in an interactive group environment. The participants, guided by a moderator, share their impressions, preferences, and needs.

Helps manage complexity and reduce uncertainty by breaking down processes, systems, functional areas, or deliverables into their simpler constituent parts and allowing each part to be analyzed independently.

Defines key terms relevant to a business domain.

Used to identify where, what, why, when, how, and for whom information is exchanged between solution components or across solution boundaries.

A systematic approach designed to elicit business analysis information from a person or group of people by talking to the interviewee(s), asking relevant questions, and documenting the responses. It can also be used for establishing relationships and building trust between business analysts and stakeholders in order to increase stakeholder involvement or build support for a proposed solution.

Used to capture and assign responsibility for issues and stakeholder concerns that pose an impact to the solution.

Used to compile and document successes, opportunities for improvement, failures, and recommendations for improving the performance of future projects or project phases.

Used to measure the performance of solutions, solution components, and other matters of interest to stakeholders.

Used to articulate and capture thoughts, ideas, and information.

Examines the requirements for a solution that define how well other requirements must perform. It specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system rather than specific behaviours of the system.

Used to elicit information by viewing and understanding activities and their context. It is used as a basis for identifying needs and opportunities, understanding a business process, setting performance standards, evaluating solution performance, or supporting training and development.

Used to describe the roles, responsibilities, and reporting structures that exist within an organization and to align those structures with the organization's goals.

Provides a framework for business analysts to facilitate stakeholder decisions and to understand the relative importance of business analysis information.

Assesses a process for its efficiency and effectiveness, as well as its ability to identify opportunities for change.

Used to show how work is carried out and is a foundation for process analysis.

Used to elicit and validate stakeholder needs through an iterative process that creates a model or design of requirements. It is also used to optimize user experience, to evaluate design options, and as a basis for development of the final business solution.

Used to evaluate the content of a work product.

Identifies areas of uncertainty that could negatively affect value, analyzes and evaluates those uncertainties, and develops and manages ways of dealing with the risks.

Used to ensure coverage of activities by denoting responsibility, to identify roles, to discover missing roles, and to communicate results of a planned change.

Used to identify and evaluate the underlying causes of a problem.

Define the nature of one or more limits or boundaries and place elements inside or outside those boundaries.

Used to model the logic of usage scenarios by showing the information passed between objects in the system through the execution of the scenario.

Assist the business analyst in analyzing stakeholders and their characteristics. This analysis is important in ensuring that the business analyst identifies all possible sources of requirements and that the stakeholder is fully understood so decisions made regarding stakeholder engagement, collaboration, and communication are the best choices for the stakeholder and for the success of the initiative.

Used to describe and analyze the different possible states of an entity within a system, how that entity changes from one state to another, and what can happen to the entity when it is in each state.

Used to elicit business analysis information — including information about customers, products, work practices, and attitudes — from agroup of people in a structured way and in a relatively short period of time.

A simple yet effective tool used to evaluate an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to both internal and external conditions.

Describes how a person or system interacts with the solution being modeled to achieve a goal.

A small, concise statement of functionality or quality needed to deliver value to a specific stakeholder.

Assesses the ability of a vendor to meet commitments regarding the delivery and the consistent provision of a product or service.

Bring stakeholders together in order to collaborate on achieving a predefined goal.