Describe the analysis your business needs
Identify the business area, systems and stakeholders involved. Explain whether the work concerns discovering needs, improving processes, supporting delivery or analysing operational information. Clarify the expected outputs and who uses them to make decisions.
Separate business analysis from product ownership, project management and data analysis where responsibilities overlap. A broad role can be workable, but candidates should understand which function takes priority. State how much subject knowledge is essential and how much access they will have to people who understand the business.
Assess how the candidate clarifies ambiguity
Present a short, fictional request with missing information. Ask what the candidate would clarify, whom they would involve and how they would distinguish the underlying need from the proposed solution. Look for structured questions and an awareness of different stakeholder perspectives.
Discuss a past situation where stakeholders disagreed. How did the candidate record assumptions, evaluate options and confirm a shared understanding? A useful analyst should make uncertainty visible. Producing a large document without resolving the important question is not necessarily evidence of effective analysis.
Connect requirements to acceptance and change
Ask how the candidate checks that a requirement is understandable and testable. Explore how they handle changes, dependencies and decisions made after initial agreement. Their examples should show how analysis remains useful during delivery, not only at the beginning.
Use a proportionate work sample such as a process sketch or a short set of clarification questions. Assess the reasoning and communication rather than a particular diagram style unless that notation is genuinely required. Have the relevant business and delivery stakeholders contribute to the assessment.
PUT IT INTO PRACTICE
A useful analysis prompt
“The sales team says it needs a new dashboard because follow-ups are being missed.” Ask the candidate to explore the problem before designing the dashboard. They might investigate ownership, current workflow, data quality and how a follow-up is recorded. The exercise tests whether they examine the need instead of accepting the first suggested solution.
Your practical checklist
- Name the business decisions the analysis supports.
- Clarify boundaries with adjacent roles.
- Assess questions, assumptions and stakeholder handling.
- Look for a connection between requirements and acceptance.
Take it forward
Hire a business analyst for the quality of understanding they create. Documents are useful when they help people agree, decide and deliver the right work.
