What the guide contains
The BABOK, A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge, is the reference body of knowledge for business analysis, published by the IIBA, the International Institute of Business Analysis. Version 3 appeared in 2015 and supersedes version 2. The guide sets out to define the profession and to assemble the practices the profession accepts, so that an employer knows what to expect from a skilled practitioner. It records observed practice and asks that it be tailored to the conditions of each situation.
Business analysis is defined there as the practice that enables change in an organisation by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders. The definition holds at every level: a strategic initiative, a transformation programme, the redesign of a front-desk process.
The business analyst is defined by the tasks they perform. Product manager, requirements engineer, systems analyst, business architect: the guide addresses a role.
A shared vocabulary: the BACCM
Ahead of the tasks, the guide sets out a conceptual model, the Business Analysis Core Concept Model (BACCM). Six terms define one another there, with no hierarchy between them: Change, the act of transformation in response to a need; Need, a problem or an opportunity to be addressed; Solution, a way of satisfying one or more needs in a context; Stakeholder, the group or individual in a relationship with the change, the need or the solution; Value, the importance or usefulness of something to a stakeholder in a context; Context, the circumstances that influence the change, are influenced by it and provide an understanding of it.
The model is independent of method, industry and organisational level. It is a checkpoint for an analysis that has gone off course: going back over the six terms brings out both the solution under debate whose underlying need nobody has named and the value being measured without a stated stakeholder.
Six knowledge areas
The guide organises thirty tasks into six knowledge areas. Each area groups the tasks that answer the same question, and several are active at the same time on a single initiative.
- Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring: organising and coordinating the work of analysts and stakeholders, producing the outputs that other tasks in the guide take as inputs.
- Elicitation and Collaboration: preparing and conducting elicitation, confirming its results, then communicating them and sustaining collaboration.
- Requirements Life Cycle Management: maintaining, tracing and prioritising requirements and designs, from their creation to their retirement.
- Strategy Analysis: identifying a strategic or tactical need and aligning the change strategy on it.
- Requirements Analysis and Design Definition: structuring and modelling requirements and designs, verifying them, validating them, then assessing the solution options.
- Solution Evaluation: measuring the performance and the value of a solution in use and recommending the removal of what limits it.
The Techniques Toolbox is browsed by knowledge area when the question is what to use at this stage.
Where a technique's authority sits
Chapter 10 of the guide is an inventory of fifty techniques. The guide itself states that this list is not exhaustive and invites analysts to adapt existing techniques or engineer new ones.
The sections bear that out: the one on the Balanced Scorecard describes its four dimensions, its purpose and its elements without naming an author; the technique comes from Robert Kaplan and David Norton, from a 1992 article in the Harvard Business Review and then a 1996 book. The Business Model Canvas follows the same pattern: the body of the section cites no one, while the guide's copyright page acknowledges that the canvas belongs to BusinessModelGeneration.com and is released under a Creative Commons licence. Its authors are Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, in Business Model Generation (2010).
What the guide brings to a technique is of another order: the place it occupies in business analysis practice, the task it serves, its elements, its usage considerations and the limitations the guide recognises in it. On these points the guide is the source to cite. The distinction decides which one you open: the guide to situate a technique and know when to call on it, the original source to know what it is and how to run it.
The IIBA certifications
The guide is the reference the exams for the IIBA's three generalist certifications are based on: ECBA on entry to the profession, CCBA at mid-career, CBAP for the experienced practitioner. What a candidate takes away beyond the title is a vocabulary shared with the people around them, whether they work in the IT department of a cantonal administration or in project management at an insurer.
For the book itself, its edition and its detailed contents: BABOK v3 - A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge - IIBA.