Requirement gathering is extremely vital for any development activity. Usually, clients share business processes, but the other surrounding aspects are identified by business analyst, who later transform the requirements into a detailed project scope.
Business analysis for any industry involves understanding the complete business processes. However for a finance inclined solution, it is critical to capture the understanding of the numerical derivations, as it involves a huge set of numerical data to be processed and managed. Here, business analyst plays a significant role in communicating the right steps to achieve those numbers as output, beyond the business process which are essential for any other kind of project.
Here are some helpful tips to ensure the requirements for a finance project are gathered in a complete sense:
Capturing all the input rules: Many finance applications struggle with garbage inputs which actually ruins the entire processes resulting into garbage output. Therefore, business analyst must ensure capturing all possible errors that knowingly or unknowingly can be punched into the system. For example, in applications where only integer input is acceptable for correct calculation, if such application system accepts a decimal value then one might see 100.25 men standing in the queue.
Follow the steps exactly: In finance, to achieve correct/expected output, it is important to follow the exact steps in the fashion which is done manually. Any shortcut or variance in the steps might lead to void BODMAS (as an example) and hence, will result in incorrect output.
Implementing even the tiniest requirement: Numbers can drastically impact the application implementation process with even tiniest variance, and especially in enterprise applications for BFSI sector where the core business lies in money. This can turn out to be the scariest dream for any finance manager. For example, mutual funds NAVs are calculated with four decimal places, i.e. 100.1234. If the system rounds off the figure after 2 or 3 decimal places, the entire calculation would be flawed and would cause blunder in millions.
The above points might seem insignificant, but if missed during the requirement gathering process can impact the entire project. Enterprise applications with core finance business must be catered with domain experts in IT to ensure such mistakes are avoided.
