What is Business Analysis?
Business analysis is the discipline of identifying business needs and defining solutions that deliver value — eliciting requirements from stakeholders, analyzing and prioritizing them, and validating that what gets built solves the actual problem. CAPM's 2024+ exam gives it a full domain (27%).
The craft's center is the gap between what people ask for and what they need — closing it is what separates requirement-writing from order-taking.
Worked example
A department requests "a faster report server." The analyst asks what the reports are for — and discovers three teams re-key the same numbers into spreadsheets every Monday. The need isn't server speed; it's a shared dashboard that kills the re-keying. The solution costs a quarter of the server upgrade and saves ten hours a week: business analysis earning its keep.