The primary goal of a business analyst is guiding your company through processes, products, services, and, most importantly, software improvement. BA uses various data analysis techniques to find strengths and weaknesses in your company and improve the efficiency of all it’s critical aspects.
The primary responsibility of business analysts is bridging the gap between your IT and business data. This person assesses processes, outline requirements, and provide data-driven recommendations. BA reports to stakeholders and executives, and their help can be valuable for your business.
What does a business analyst do? The job description.
If you are wondering what BAs do, you should know more about the business analyst position. Usually, these guys are responsible for creating new models that are aimed to support business decisions. BA works closely with your financial and IT teams. They are establishing initiatives and strategies that should improve importing and help you to optimize costs.
So, what are the details you should include in the BA job description? Here are seven characteristics you should look for:
- A detailed business analysis creation, problems outline, identifying opportunities, and solutions
- Forecasting and budgeting
- Planning and results monitoring
- Changes analysis
- Reporting
- Pricing review
- Defining major business requirements and reporting them to executives and stakeholders.
Also, you should remember that business analysis is a changing area, and you cannot expect to find an expert in a particular subject if it is relatively new to the industry. Nevertheless, you can focus on your company’s business issues and search for the BA who qualified in the related fields.
Soft and hard skills of BA
A business analyst is not always a technical person. A skillful BA must know how to pull, analyze, and apply information to your business. This person should understand how your products, systems, and tools work.
IIBA outlines the most important skills of this person:
- Perfect oral and written communication skills
- Facilitation skills
- Interpersonal and consultative skills
- Analytical thinking
- Problem-solving
- Detail-oriented
- Able to deliver a high-level accuracy.
- Exceptional organizational skills.
- Deep business structure knowledge.
- Requirements engineering
- Costs analysis
- Benefits analysis
- Process modeling analysis
- Deep understanding of databases, networks, and another related tech.
As you see, a business analyst position requires a broad skillset, and it’s hard to find a well-trained and qualified person for your company. Nevertheless, this person, in most cases, is mandatory since it allows your business to adapt to changing situations and make sure you are on track.
What is the role of business analyst in software development?
Business analysis professionals can use real-time user data and various analytics programs to identify successful functions, user trends, and user adoption problems with the software. This data is valuable to any organization or a single software project.
Additionally, business analysts are a helping-hand for product owners. They can provide so-needed data for product changes and updates.
The primary goal of BA in software development projects is to choose the right path in both agile and waterfall type projects. This role is missed out by many companies, but it doesn’t belittle in software development work.
If you are planning the next ‘big thing,’ it’s worth having skillful business analysts in your team.