

Ask HN: What does a systems analyst do?  - systems_analyst

I've been invited to a "superday" hosted by one of the larger financial services firms. Initially I had applied for a PM role, but the recruiter thinks I'm a better fit for the business systems analyst position.<p>It's my understanding that the BSA is responsible for consulting with clients/internal departments to determine business needs, then draft software specs for engineers. Thereafter, the BSA sees the project through development, testing, implementation and finally review.<p>If this is an accurate job description, then it seems that the skills needed really do run the gamut. I'm just trying to get a sense of the questions I might be asked (accounting, technical, general) and whether I'll have to code during the super.<p>Thanks in advance, everyone. Also, if anyone here has any experience as a BSA or SA, I'd really appreciate hearing what a typical day/week/quarter is like.
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flint
The PM keeps lists of stuff, goes to meetings, and ask people when they'll be
done. A good PM is a combination of a guy that wears a bow tie and pocket
protector, and a mob enforcer - meticulous, but feared.

The BSA comes in after the senior management has decided what to do, tries to
figure out what they agreed on and writes it all down. Then he figures out
what actual work needs to be done by talking with the actual system users and
the IT staff and writes that all down. Finally, he works all that information
into some sort of document.

The best analyst I ever hired was an English major who could read anything and
summarize it concisely without actually knowing anything about the subject.
Some basic familiarity with subject area knowledge is useful but not really
required if you can read and think. In fact knowledge may be a hindrance if it
causes you to become invested in one solution over another. You are not the
business owner or the system designer - you are there to document the
requirements.

The resulting document is used as the basis of an agreement between the
business (who is paying for the work) and the IT department (who will be
responsible for getting the work done), and will be used later to assess
blame.

The BSA may or may not be involved with writing the technical spec with the IT
staff and developers. Developers are however, usually quite willing to off-
load this task to someone who can write in English.

As the IT staff deliver components the BSA may also be involved in writing the
acceptance tests and working with the QA team to run the tests and present
results.

You probably will not need to write any code but you will need to be a user of
everything. Every application on every system, every database and file system,
every messaging system, and every script on every network. You will also need
keep track of the business owners, actual system users, operations support
team and developers involved. It is very important that you know how to get
developer level access to all this and keep track of all the who/what/where
through all of the changes.

Note: If you are not given the authority to fire anyone you work with (and
even then); nothing anyone tells you is true unless you can verify it yourself
- so database, scripting and coding skills are very useful.

