PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PMI-PBA)®

This examination content outline defines a professional credential for practitioners who perform business analysis activities within projects and programs. It frames the credential around five interrelated domains—Needs Assessment, Planning, Analysis, Traceability and Monitoring, and Evaluation—each representing a core area of work and together covering the end-to-end lifecycle from problem identification through solution assessment. Candidates are expected to demonstrate competence in determining and articulating business problems or opportunities, gathering and valuing information from diverse sources, and contributing to the business case and goals so that solutions align with organizational objectives. Planning competencies center on establishing the practices that govern requirements work, including traceability strategy, requirements management planning, change and document control, and the definition of acceptance criteria and business metrics. Analysis emphasizes elicitation, decomposition, specification, prioritization, validation, and the creation of a requirements baseline; it also covers techniques for evaluating options and allocating requirements within constraints of scope, schedule, budget, and resources. Traceability and Monitoring focus on maintaining the lifecycle integrity of requirements through artifacts and tools, updating statuses, communicating issues and risks, and managing controlled changes to preserve alignment with the baseline. Evaluation addresses testing, gap analysis, stakeholder sign-off, and assessing how the delivered solution realizes the intended value proposition. The outline identifies a detailed set of analytic, elicitation, modeling, communication, and governance skills—such as dependency and impact analysis, requirements traceability, verification and validation methods, and decision-making techniques—that form the baseline knowledge for practice. The exam blueprint and role delineation study underpin the assessment’s validity: domain weightings and item counts were derived from broad practitioner input and psychometric validation to ensure reliability and representative coverage. Cross-cutting expectations include quality assurance of requirements artifacts, adherence to change control and governance processes, and clear documentation to support verification, validation, and stakeholder consensus. The test is delivered as a multiple-choice assessment mapped to these domains and designed to evaluate applied professional proficiency rather than introductory theory.