Business Analyst

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What is a business analyst?​

A business analyst is a key player in facilitating successful business change initiatives.

Business analysts (also known as a BA) help to define business problems via in-depth investigation and gathering of technical and non-technical information. Once the issue is clearly understood, they outline detailed requirements for a solution and ensure the delivered solution meets those business requirements.​ They are most often engaged to work on IT and business transformation projects, but can also be deployed onto projects in other departments too.

BAs are usually engaged from the outset of a project and play an advisory role to senior managers and exec teams. They help to bridge the gap between IT and the wider business and many business analysts work as contractors engaged on specific projects.​

Depending on the scope of the business analyst roles, they can also be known as technical business analysts, business systems analyst or process business analysts.

Business analysts responsibilities

Duties of a business analyst may vary depending on the type of organisation or industry they are working in, however there will be some commonalities across roles:​

• Gathering, validating and documenting business requirements​.
• Analysing commercial data such as budgets, sales results and forecasts
• Modelling business processes and identifying opportunities for process improvements​.
• Identifying issues, risks and benefits of existing and proposed solutions and outlining business impacts.
• Creating functional specifications for solutions​.
• Estimating costs and identifying business savings​.
• Simplifying information and deciphering technical jargon so it is easily understood by the whole team​.
• Implementing and testing of solutions​.
• Supporting business transition and helping to establish change.

7 essential skills of a business analyst​

The following are some of the specific skills a business analyst needs in order to be successful:

1. Effective stakeholder engagement

• Business analysts are likely to deal with stakeholders at all levels of an organisation right up to the CEO

1. Critical thinking

• The ability to understand and analyze problems and find solutions

1. Problem solving

• The ability to think creatively and work collaboratively with teams to solve business challenges

1. Decision making

• The ability to make decisions around things such as requirement prioritisation, scope, assessing viability of solutions etc

1. Good listener & communicator

• Requirement gathering is a key part of the role so the ability to ask the right questions and correctly understand the information received is essential

1. Documentation and writing skills

• Business analysts will find themselves creating documents such as use cases and business requirement documents

1. Confident presenter

• The ability to present findings and recommendations to senior leaders and to manage stakeholder meetings