eBay: Business analysis approach for enhancing system reliability
Introduction and Approach: eBay “The world’s Online Marketplace” is the largest and most popular marketplace on the internet allowing members to buy and sell almost anything. Buyers and sellers are brought together where sellers are permitted to list items for sale and buyers can browse through listed items and bid on items of interest.
A problem eBay encountered during their initial years was constant service interruptions, which in turn prevented consumers from interacting with their potential buyers/sellers or process their transactions. Since eBay built its business model as an online trading community on the internet using the World Wide Web, these interruptions cost eBay millions of dollars in revenues and threatened eBay’s reputation (Clark, 1999). To overcome these challenges, eBay developed a hot backup system which automatically limits the length of potential outages to less than an hour. This system reliability project included new hardware, additional engineering and more testing. eBay took the path of a plan-driven approach to improve their system reliability. Waterfall methodology was used for the execution of the project and followed a sequential approach. This document lists the elements of business analysis approach (BABOK Guide, Version 2.0, 2009).
Timing of Business Analysis Work: To accommodate the plan-driven approach for this project, all business analysis related tasks (enterprise analysis, requirements analysis, and solution assessment and validation activities) will occur sequentially over the course of the project. Project will produce all deliverables required according to eBay’s development methodology (EBDM).

Formality / Level of Details: Requirements will be gathered during formal requirements workshops. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), PM, BAs, Architects and stakeholders will be involved in requirement gathering process. Business Analyst will document all the requirements in detail in the Business Requirement Document and will further trace and map the requirements to the Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM). Business Analyst will use existing template from the eBay library to document BRDs and RTM. All documents will be routed for approval via eBay’s electronic document routing service (EDRS). Approvers/Reviewers of requirements document are listed in the Approach to sign-off section.
Requirements Prioritization: Requirements will be prioritized during requirements workshops based on business need. Priority of each requirement (Low, Medium, High) will be detailed in the RTM document.
Change Management: Any changes to the scope or priority of requirements will follow eBay’s change request process (CR) and should be agreed upon by stakeholders and IT teams. All change requests will be logged in the Change Request documents and will list the necessary details like requestor, owner, cost and impact of change. These change requests will go through prioritization and approval process before being added to the scope of the project.
Communication with Stakeholders:
Stakeholder Audience
Objective