A day as a Business Process Analyst

The increase in the adoption of business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) has created a high demand for qualified professionals with a plethora of skills. The Business Process Analyst (BPA) role is quite interesting to many people and is definitely an excellent career to get into.

A Business Process Analyst’s role involves “thinking processes”. BPA design inferences from process details and link these inferences to the big picture by considering business objectives in identifying process improvements. A Business Process Analyst has the ability to structure a large amount of information within a process framework.

BPA works with business teams and the IT Department to find the best way to design new processes and solve process-related problems.

The different departments of a company often speak different languages, so one of the tasks of the Business Process Analyst is to interpret business requirements for IT staff. BPA often find yourself holding meetings, researching processes, collecting data, analyzing information and performing related tasks. It is an office-based job, though it may involve a reasonable amount of travel to meet with end users and key stakeholders.

Business Process Analysts have understanding and expertise of process mapping and business process re-engineering. They analyse business processes and workflows with the objective of finding out how they can be improved or automated. BPAs organize workshops, after which they document any information elicited using process maps and business requirements documents. They also involve in documenting procedures and presenting new process designs to stakeholders for discussion.

So, what BPA do on a typical day?

• Interview participants in processes to understand exactly how their processes work. Sometimes it is possible to get different descriptions of the same process. The BPA job is to clear the confusion by extracting information on how the processes actually work before documenting their definition and attributes.

• Document and modeling process information using visual diagrams in the form of business process models (using the Business Process Management Notation or the Flowchart Notation).

• Analyse process models as they are As-Is, compare them to the future To-be and determine the necessary changes for improvement.

• Recognize, document and analyse business rules that govern the implementation of business processes.

• Write Business Process Management System (BPMS) specifications to be used by the developers for process automation.

• Test and execute processes to ensure that the right results are achieved.

• Examine processes to understand the impact of changing them on people, strategy, existing software applications, and general business operations.

• Collate feedback on process performance. This data forms the basis for future process improvement projects.

• Monitor and measure the effectiveness of processes to ensure value delivery.

According to Michael Hammer – American engineer, former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known as one of the founders of the management theory of Business process re-engineering,

If it doesn’t make 3 people angry, it’s not a process

Organizations and companies are very often faced with processes that are inefficient, unnecessarily convoluted,slow. The job of a Business Process Analyst is to identify these troublesome processes, optimize and possibly automate them, to make life easier for clients and customers.

If you want to develop yourself in this area, have the desire to learn and want to challenge yourself, you can become part of our team.