Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring: Deciding How the Work Will Be Done
This knowledge area covers how the business analyst plans the analysis work itself: which lifecycle fits, who must be engaged, how decisions and changes are governed, how information is stored and reused, and how BA performance is measured. BABOK Guide v3 organises it into five tasks. Exam questions here ask you to match planning choices to context rather than recite a template.
The five tasks and their outputs
- Plan Business Analysis Approach - choose a predictive, adaptive, or hybrid lifecycle and set deliverables, timing, techniques, and how the approach will be adjusted. Output: business analysis approach.
- Plan Stakeholder Engagement - analyse who can affect or be affected by the change, their authority, influence, attitude, and communication needs. Output: stakeholder engagement approach.
- Plan Business Analysis Governance - define decision-making, change control, prioritisation, and approval authority. Output: governance approach.
- Plan Business Analysis Information Management - set level of abstraction, storage, access, reuse, retention, and traceability. Output: information management approach.
- Identify Business Analysis Performance Improvements - measure the BA work and find improvements. Output: business analysis performance assessment.
Worked example
A bank must document claims handling to a regulator with fixed dates and a prescribed template. The BA chooses a largely predictive approach for specification and approvals, plans one requirements workshop per department, establishes a change board chaired by the compliance lead, and stores requirements in a repository with clause-level traceability. When a department head asks for daily stand-ups, the BA keeps the fixed deliverable dates but runs a short daily clarification call. Real work is adjusted, not abandoned. The reasoning: regulator-driven constraints shape governance and information management, while collaboration can still flex.
Traps that cost marks
- Reading predictive as "no change control". Predictive fixes scope early, which makes disciplined change control more important, not less.
- Answering a stakeholder-engagement question with a communication plan. Engagement also covers analysis of influence, attitude, and collaboration needs.
- Choosing "solution performance measures" when the task is BA performance improvement - that task measures the analyst's own work.
- Assuming every stakeholder needs the same level of involvement and the same information format.