Who is a Business Analyst?

Business analyst (BA) — an intermediary between client and development team. He identifies, analyzes and approves requirements for changes in business processes, corporate policies and information systems. The role of business analytics is not provided for all projects, but the popularity of the profession is growing. Not all companies appreciate it, and not every client understands why they include another specialist in the development team. This specialist clarifies, categorizes and validates business requirements, and also communicates with customers and end users. BA’s list of responsibilities depends on the particular project. Among the skills of a professional business analyst are:

High communication skills.

The business analyst is responsible for arranging meetings with clients. He must be able to ask the right questions and actively listen to the answers, be able to display in dialogue all the important and useful information. As other high-level specialists he should be able to adapt to the peculiarities of communication in a company, especially within a distributed team.

The ability to inspire the client.

The business analyst should understand the client’s wishes. This role is aimed at solving client’s business problems and often acts as translators of customer requirements into technical terms and categories that are understandable to specialists working on the project.

Problems solving skills.

Every such specialist must be able to solve problems, because there is no project free from it. BA should understand all problems and determine the amount of work to cope with it.

Critical thinking.

Business analysts are paid to think. This is an extremely important quality BA should have. He evaluates information collected from all sides and takes into account requirements of all stakeholders.

To learn and work in a limited time environment.

The analyst will have not only to carefully study all available documentation, but also to find who it is possible and necessary to ask questions to. And if the BA joined the project later, which is very often the case, he must think and learn very quickly.

It is believed that technical education is a prerequisite for success for BA. Although technology knowledge, of course, helps to better understand the basic principles of information systems. Business analysis training programs focus primarily on modeling and data collection, business process visualization, and collection of functional and non-functional requirements. The business analyst seeks to answer the following questions: What should the system do? How should the specific functionality of the system work? How should the system be built? With the last question BA addresses system analysts or architects.

The business analyst is immersed in a variety of business systems, looking at the requirements from different points of view, adapting them to the appropriate users group.