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Business Analysis enables change in an organisation by identifying problems or opportunities - analysing them and suggesting solutions.
What is Business Analysis?
Business Analysis examines an organisation’s processes, systems, and strategies to understand its current state, define its needs, determine areas for improvement and recommend solutions that deliver value to the institution.
- What to expect from a BA
- Business Analysis at UCL
- Business Analysis lifecycle
- Business Analyst Capabilities
- Business Analyst role
- Notable projects within UCL we have supported
- Business Analysis Toolkit
- Business Analysis Team
What to expect from a BA
- Facilitation – help with facilitating discussions, bringing people together and fostering collaboration, capturing and clarifying requirements to ensure shared understanding, guiding stakeholders through decision making.
- Communication – ability to articulate ambiguous and complex problems and ideas, mapping them in ways that help visualisation and understanding of the overall context.
- Problem solving – apply structured problem solving techniques to identify root causes and propose effective solutions; challenging ways of working and existing approaches; asking insightful questions; elicitation and analysis of user needs to ensure the solution aligns with stakeholder expectations.
- Analytical thinking – analysing data / complex information, breaking it down into manageable components, helping draw logical conclusions to support decision making.
Business Analysis at UCL
The Business Analysis team are currently embedded within the ISD Change Portfolios and related Product Teams supporting UCL wide business areas.
The team is the Centre of Excellence for analysis approaches covering people, process and technology change. We ensure that the needs and interests of stakeholders of all levels are represented within change initiatives and take responsibility for assuring that all requests are appropriately assessed, and desired outcomes and value delivered to the customer are clear.
List of ISD Change Portfolios and their Lead Business Analyst ISD Change Portfolio Lead Business Analyst Education
Fraser Burgess
Student Experience
Jeremy Tree
Research and Innovation
Joshua Edwards
Digital Research (ARC)
Daniel Beilby
Campus Experience
Tanya Tomic
People, Money and Insight
Reece Greene
Data Insight
Huw Charles
Business Analysis lifecycle
We support all stages of the Business Analysis lifecycle
Business Analyst Capabilities
- Agile working Investigation and problem analysis;
- Feasibility assessment and business case development;
- Business process improvements;
- Requirements management;
- Solution design & delivery;
- Business acceptance testing;
- Business change deployment.
Business Analyst role
- Analyse and understand a business problem or opportunity;
- Undertake research and analysis to understand how a business or business area works, considering the people, organisation, processes, information, data and technology;
- Identify areas for improvement, explore feasible options, analyse the effects of change and define success measures;
- Identify user and business needs to enable effective design, development and testing of services and business change;
- Make decisions related to prioritisation and minimum viable product by using analysis led insights;
- Ensure new products and services meet business and user needs, and are aligned with organisational goals;
- Understand any business and policy constraints that need to be considered, and assess the implications collaborate with range users across ISD such as Delivery Managers; Product Owners; Change Managers; Architects; Service Owners;
- Build close relationships with our business stakeholders.
Notable projects within UCL we have supported
- TalentLink (recruitment)
- AssessmentUCL
- CRM
- SITS modernisation
- Application processing
- Student ATR
- MyCampus
- CRM
- Worktribe
- Research Ethics Service Transformation
Business Analysis Toolkit
Analysis Design and Delivery Idea on a page Use cases Options analysis Requirements document Roadmap design User stories Stakeholder map Acceptance criteria Workshop facilitation Backlog management Interviews Prioritisation Surveys JIRA Desktop research Wireframes; prototyping Lean Business Case KPIs Gap analysis Test plans Benefits realisation plan Test scenarios User journeys User guides Personas FAQs Context diagrams Support models Business process modelling (AS IS & TO BE) Business Analysis Team
The BA team promote and maintain the standards of business analysis practice, develop the tools and capabilities, and coach and mentor our team members.
The team have a wide range of backgrounds and expertise: education, research, government, charity, finance, media, insurance.
Most of our analysts are fully BCS qualified with BCS International Diploma in Business Analysis with additional capabilities in Change Management, Agile; Six Sigma; Business Architecture and Data analysis.