IIBA BABOK v3 Glossary Flashcards
Criteria associated with requirements, products, or the delivery cycle that must be met in order to achieve stakeholder acceptance.
Acceptance Criteria
A human, device, or system that plays some specified role in interacting with a solution.
Actor (Business Analysis)
An approach where the solution evolves based on a cycle of learning and discovery, with feedback loops which encourage making decisions as late as possible.
Adaptive Approach
A standard on the practice of business analysis in an agile context. The Agile Extension to the BABOK® Guide version 1 was published in 2013 by IIBA®, in partnership with the Agile Alliance.
Agile Extension To The Babok® Guide
See requirements allocation.
Allocation
The design, structure, and behaviour of the current and future states of a structure in terms of its components, and the interaction between those components. See also business architecture, enterprise architecture, and requirements architecture.
Architecture
Any solution-relevant object that is created as part of business analysis efforts.
Artifact (Business Analysis)
An influencing factor that is believed to be true but has not been confirmed to be accurate, or that could be true now but may not be in the future.
Assumption
A business rule that places an obligation (or prohibition) on conduct, action, practice, or procedure; a business rule whose purpose is to shape (govern) day-to-day business activity. Also known as operative rule.
Behavioural Business Rule
A comparison of a decision, process, service, or system’s cost, time, quality, or other metrics to those of leading peers to identify opportunities for improvement.
Benchmarking
The aggregated knowledge and generally accepted practices on a topic.
Body Of Knowledge
See business process management.
Bpm
A team activity that seeks to produce a broad or diverse set of options through the rapid and uncritical generation of ideas.
Brainstorming
See enterprise.
Business (Business Analysis)
An economic system where any commercial, industrial, or professional activity is performed for profit.
Business (Business World)
The practice of enabling change in the context of an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.
Business Analysis
Any kind of information at any level of detail that is used as an input to business analysis work, or as an output of business analysis work.
Business Analysis Information
A document, presentation, or other collection of text, matrices, diagrams and models, representing business analysis information.
Business Analysis Package
Any person who performs business analysis, no matter their job title or organizational role. For more information, see Who is a Business Analyst? (p. 2).
Business Analyst
The set of processes, rules, guidelines, heuristics, and activities that are used to perform business analysis in a specific context.
Business Analysis Approach
A description of the types of communication the business analyst will perform during business analysis, the recipients of those communications, and the form and frequency of those communications.
Business Analysis Communication Plan
The scope of activities a business analyst is engaged in during the life cycle of an initiative.
Business Analysis Effort
A description of the planned activities the business analyst will execute in order to perform the business analysis work involved in a specific initiative. See also requirements management plan.
Business Analysis Plan
The design, structure, and behaviour of the current and future states of an enterprise to provide a common understanding of the organization. It is used to align the enterprise’s strategic objectives and tactical demands.
Business Architecture
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.
Business Case
A decision that can be made based on strategy, executive judgment, consensus, and business rules, and that is generally made in response to events or at defined points in a business process.
Business Decision
See domain.
Business Domain
A state or condition that an organization is seeking to establish and maintain, usually expressed qualitatively rather than quantitatively.
Business Goal
A problem or opportunity of strategic or tactical importance to be addressed.
Business Need
An objective, measurable result to indicate that a business goal has been achieved.
Business Objective
A non-practicable directive that controls and influences the actions of an enterprise.
Business Policy
An issue of strategic or tactical importance preventing an enterprise or organization from achieving its goals.
Business Problem
An end-to-end set of activities which collectively responds to an event, and transforms information, materials, and other resources into outputs that deliver value directly to the customers of the process. It may be internal to an organization, or it may span several organizations.
Business Process
A management discipline that determines how manual and automated processes are created, modified, cancelled, and governed.
Business Process Management (Bpm)
Rethinking and redesigning business processes to generate improvements in performance measures.
Business Process Re-engineering
A representation of goals, objectives and outcomes that describe why a change has been initiated and how success will be assessed.
Business Requirement
A specific, practicable, testable directive that is under the control of the business and that serves as a criterion for guiding behaviour, shaping judgments, or making decisions.
Business Rule
The set of activities the enterprise performs, the knowledge it has, the products and services it provides, the functions it supports, and the methods it uses to make decisions.
Capability
See fishbone diagram.
Cause-and-effect Diagram
The act of transformation in response to a need.
Change
One who is a catalyst for change.
Change Agent
Controlling changes to requirements and designs so that the impact of requested changes is understood and agreed-to before the changes are made.
Change Control
Planned activities, tools, and techniques to address the human side of change during a change initiative, primarily addressing the needs of the people who will be most affected by the change.
Change Management
A plan to move from the current state to the future state to achieve the desired business objectives.
Change Strategy
A cross-functional group of individuals who are mandated to implement a change. This group may be comprised of product owners, business analysts, developers, project managers, implementation subject matter experts (SMEs), or any other individual with the relevant set of skills and competencies required to implement the change.
Change Team
A standard set of quality elements that reviewers use for requirements verification.
Checklist (Business Analysis)
The act of two or more people working together towards a common goal.
Collaboration
A prepackaged solution available in the marketplace which address all or most of the common needs of a large group of buyers of those solutions. A commercial off-the-shelf solution may require some configuration to meet the specific needs of the enterprise.
Commercial Off-the-shelf (Cots)
A structured assessment which captures the key characteristics of an industry to predict the long-term profitability prospects and to determine the practices of the most significant competitors.
Competitive Analysis
A uniquely identifiable element of a larger whole that fulfills a clear function.
Component
An analysis model that develops the meaning of core concepts for a problem domain, defines their collective structure, and specifies the appropriate vocabulary needed to communicate about it consistently.
Concept Model
An influencing factor that cannot be changed, and that places a limit or restriction on a possible solution or solution option.
Constraint (Business Analysis)
The circumstances that influence, are influenced by, and provide understanding of the change.
Context
One of six ideas that are fundamental to the practice of business analysis: Change, Need, Solution, Context, Stakeholder, and Value.
Core Concept (Business Analysis)
An analysis which compares and quantifies the financial and non-financial costs of making a change or implementing a solution compared to the benefits gained.
Cost-benefit Analysis
See commercial off-the-shelf.
Cots
A two-dimensional matrix showing which user roles have permission to access specific information entities, and to create new records in those entities, view the data in existing records, update or modify the data in existing records, or delete existing records. The same type of matrix can be used to show which processes, instead of users, have the create, read, update and delete rights.
Create, Read, Update, And Delete Matrix (Crud Matrix)
See create, read, update, and delete matrix.
Crud Matrix
A stakeholder who uses or may use products or services produced by the enterprise and may have contractual or moral rights that the enterpriseis obliged to meet.
Customer
An approach to decision making that examines and models the possible consequences of different decisions, and assists in making an optimal decision under conditions of uncertainty.
Decision Analysis
A technique that subdivides a problem into its component parts in order to facilitate analysis and understanding of those components.
Decomposition
A deficiency in a product or service that reduces its quality or varies from a desired attribute, state, or functionality.
Defect
A rule that indicates something is necessarily true (or untrue); a rule that is intended as a definitional criterion for concepts, knowledge, or information. Also known as a structural rule.
Definitional Business Rule
Any unique and verifiable work product or service that a party has agreed to deliver.
Deliverable
A usable representation of a solution. For more information see Key Terms (p. 14) and Requirements and Designs (p. 19).
Design
An examination of the documentation of an existing system in order to elicit requirements.
Document Analysis (Business Analysis)
The sphere of knowledge that defines a set of common requirements, terminology, and functionality for any program or initiative solving a problem.
Domain
A stakeholder with in-depth knowledge of a topic relevant to the business need or solution scope.
Domain Subject Matter Expert
See dynamic systems development method.
Dsdm
A project delivery framework which focuses on fixing cost, quality, and time at the beginning while contingency is managed by varying the features to be delivered.
Dynamic Systems Development Method (Dsdm)
Iterative derivation and extraction of information from stakeholders or other sources.
Elicitation
A stakeholder who directly interacts with the solution.
End User
A system of one or more organizations and the solutions they use to pursue a shared set of common goals.
Enterprise
A description of the business processes, information technology, people, operations, information, and projects of an enterprise and the relationships between them.
Enterprise Architecture
An assessment that describes the enterprise is prepared to accept the change associated with a solution and is able to use it effectively.
Enterprise Readiness Assessment
A graphical representation of the entities relevant to a chosen problem domain and the relationships between them.
Entity-relationship Diagram
A quantitative assessment of a planned outcome, resource requirements, and schedule where uncertainties and unknowns are systematically factored into the assessment.
Estimate
The systematic and objective assessment of a solution to determine its status and efficacy in meeting objectives over time, and to identify ways to improve the solution to better meet objectives. See also indicator; metric, monitoring.
Evaluation
An occurrence or incident to which an organizational unit, system, or process must respond.
Event (Business Analysis)
A prototype that is continuously modified and updated in response to feedback from stakeholders.
Evolutionary Prototype
Elicitation performed in a controlled manner to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact.
Experiment
An interaction that is outside the proposed solution. It can be another hardware system, software system, or a human interaction with which the proposed solution will interact.
External Interface
The art of leading and encouraging people through systematic efforts toward agreed-upon objectives in a manner that enhances involvement, collaboration, productivity, and synergy.
Facilitation
An evaluation of proposed alternatives to determine if they are technically, organizationally, and economically possible within the constraints of the enterprise, and whether they will deliver the desired benefits to the enterprise.
Feasibility Study
A distinguishing characteristic of a solution that implements a cohesive set of requirements and which delivers value for a set of stakeholders.
Feature
A diagramming technique used in root cause analysis to identify underlying causes of an observed problem, and the relationships that exist between those causes. Also known as an Ishikawa or cause-andeffect diagram.
Fishbone Diagram
A group formed to to elicit ideas and attitudes about a specific product, service, or opportunity in an interactive group environment. The participants share their impressions, preferences, and needs, guided by a moderator.
Focus Group
A graphical method for depicting the forces that support and oppose a change. Involves identifying the forces, depicting them on opposite sides of a line (supporting and opposing forces) and then estimating the strength of each set of forces.
Force Field Analysis
A capability that a solution must have in terms of the behaviour and information the solution will manage.
Functional Requirement
A comparison of the current state and desired future state of an enterprise in order to identify differences that need to be addressed.
Gap Analysis
See business goal.
Goal
A process by which appropriate decision makers use relevant information to make decisions regarding a change or solution, including the means for obtaining approvals and priorities.
Governance Process (Change)
An instruction or description on why or how to undertake a task.
Guideline (Business Analysis)
A prototype that is used to explore requirements and designs at one level of a proposed solution, such as the customer-facing view or the interface to another organization.
Horizontal Prototype
An assessment of the effects a proposed change will have on a stakeholder or stakeholder group, project, or system.
Impact Analysis
A stakeholder who has specialized knowledge regarding the implementation of one or more solution components.
Implementation Subject Matter Expert
A specific numerical measurement that indicates progress toward achieving an impact, output, activity, or input. See also metric.
Indicator
A specific project, program, or action taken to solve some business problem(s) or achieve some specific change objective(s).
Initiative
Information consumed or transformed to produce an output. An input is the information necessary for a task to begin.
Input (Business Analysis)
A formal review of a work product by qualified individuals that follows a predefined process, and uses predefined criteria, for defect identification and removal.
Inspection
