BABOK® v3 Guide
The six BABOK knowledge areas
Each knowledge area groups related tasks a business analyst performs. Together they describe the full practice of business analysis as recognized by IIBA.
Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring
Organizes and coordinates the efforts of business analysts and stakeholders. Defines how BA work will be performed, governed, and improved across the initiative — including the approach, stakeholder engagement, governance, information management, and performance measurement.
Elicitation and Collaboration
Describes the tasks BAs perform to obtain information from stakeholders, confirm the results, and communicate BA information so that everyone shares an accurate, up-to-date understanding.
Requirements Life Cycle Management
Describes how to manage and maintain requirements and design information from inception through retirement — ensuring traceability, reuse, prioritization, change control, and approval.
Strategy Analysis
Focuses on identifying the business need, gaps in current capabilities, the desired future state, the risks involved, and the change strategy needed to move from current to future state.
Requirements Analysis and Design Definition
Structures and organizes elicited requirements, specifies and models them, validates and verifies their quality, defines requirements architecture, identifies design options, and recommends the option that delivers the greatest value.
Solution Evaluation
Describes the tasks BAs perform to assess the performance and value delivered by a solution in use, identify limitations preventing it from realizing its full value, and recommend actions to increase value.
Also on the exam (~15% Key Concepts)
Requirements classification
Higher-level statements of goals, objectives, or needs of the enterprise.
Describe why the change is being undertaken. Owned by the sponsor and senior leadership; expressed as outcomes, not features.
e.g. 'Reduce customer onboarding time from 14 days to 3 days by Q4.'
Needs of specific stakeholders or stakeholder groups.
Describe what particular stakeholders need from the solution to achieve a business requirement. Owned by the affected stakeholder group.
e.g. 'A relationship manager needs to view a single timeline of all customer interactions across channels.'
Capabilities and qualities of a solution. Split into functional and non-functional.
Functional = what the solution does (behavior, information). Non-functional = quality attributes (performance, security, usability, reliability, maintainability, compliance).
e.g. Functional: 'The system must accept document uploads up to 25 MB.' Non-functional: 'Pages must render within 2 seconds at the 95th percentile.'
Capabilities the solution must have to transition from current to future state.
Temporary by nature — they apply only during the transition. Cover data migration, parallel running, training, cutover support, and decommissioning.
e.g. 'Migrate 18 months of historical claim records into the new system within 24 hours of cutover, with a reconciliation report.'
Underlying competencies
The six competency areas
BABOK v3 names these as the personal capabilities that support every BA task — assessed indirectly across the exam.
- Analytical Thinking and Problem Solving
Creative thinking, decision making, learning, problem solving, systems thinking, conceptual thinking, visual thinking.
- Behavioral Characteristics
Ethics, personal accountability, trustworthiness, organization and time management, adaptability.
- Business Knowledge
Business acumen, industry knowledge, organization knowledge, solution knowledge, methodology knowledge.
- Communication Skills
Verbal communication, non-verbal communication, written communication, listening — adapted to audience and purpose.
- Interaction Skills
Facilitation, leadership and influencing, teamwork, negotiation and conflict resolution, teaching.
- Tools and Technology
Office productivity tools, BA tools, communication tools, modeling tools, and a working understanding of the technologies the solution relies on.
BABOK® v3 · Part 11
The five perspectives
Agile, Business Intelligence, IT, Business Architecture, and BPM — the lenses through which BABOK tasks are applied. Now on their own page.
Key Concept · Often tested
Requirements vs Designs
BABOK v3 deliberately distinguishes Requirements from Designs. The same statement can be either, depending on what decision it is supporting and at what point in the life cycle. The split matters because requirements describe a need, while designs describe a chosen response to that need.
If the ECBA stem asks whether something is a requirement or a design, ask: does it describe a need (requirement) or a chosen response to that need (design)? The same sentence can flip categories as analysis matures.
BA Planning · Approach selection
Predictive vs Adaptive approaches
BABOK v3 frames BA approaches on a spectrum from predictive (plan-driven) to adaptive (change-driven). The choice shapes how requirements are elicited, documented, prioritised, and approved — and is decided in 'Plan Business Analysis Approach' (KA 1).
- Real initiatives almost always blend both — e.g. predictive at programme level, adaptive at team level.
- The chosen point on the spectrum drives the BA approach, stakeholder engagement, governance, and information management plans.
- Mismatching the approach to the context (e.g. heavyweight specs on an exploratory product) is one of the most common BA failure modes.