What Does a Business Analyst Do

A business analyst (BA) plays a critical role in bridging the gap between IT and the business using data analytics to assess processes, determine requirements, and deliver data-driven recommendations and reports to executives and stakeholders.

What Does a Business Analyst Do?

1. Understanding the Business Needs: A business analyst begins by understanding the business needs of their client or organization. This involves identifying and analyzing business problems and the business context. BAs work closely with stakeholders to understand their goals and objectives and what they hope to achieve through the project or process being analyzed.
2. Eliciting Requirements: One of the core duties of a business analyst is to elicit, prioritize, and validate the requirements from stakeholders. This includes gathering both functional and non-functional requirements through interviews, workshops, documentation review, surveys, site visits, business process descriptions, use cases, scenarios, event lists, business analysis, competitive product analysis, task and workflow analysis, and/or viewpoints.
3. Analyzing Requirements: After gathering the requirements, a BA analyzes and refines them with the aim of determining how these requirements fit into the overall business processes. They perform gap analysis to highlight the differences between the current state and the future state desired by the stakeholders, detailing the steps required to achieve the latter.
4. Modeling Data and Processes: BAs use various tools and methods like data modeling and process modeling to illustrate business processes and the proposed changes. These models help stakeholders better understand the proposed improvements in a visual format and can include flowcharts, UML diagrams, or business process maps.
5. Facilitating Change: Implementing change can be challenging, and BAs play a key role in change management. This involves preparing the business for upcoming changes and assisting in the implementation. They act as a liaison between stakeholders and project teams to ensure that requirements are clearly understood and implemented as per the specifications.
6. Validating and Testing Solutions: Business analysts are involved in validating and testing the solutions to ensure that the requirements are met. This phase involves coordinating testing efforts, creating testing scripts, and performing usability testing to ensure that the system is functional and meets the business requirements.
7. Supporting and Training: Post-implementation, BAs may also provide support and create detailed documentation for the new systems and processes. They also play a significant role in training end-users, ensuring they understand how to use the new systems effectively.
8. Strategic Planning: In some cases, business analysts contribute to strategic planning, offering insights from data analytics to aid in decision-making and help the business develop a competitive edge.

Skills and Tools Required for a Business Analyst

• Analytical skills: Critical for analyzing data, understanding processes, and generating actionable insights.
• Communication skills: Essential for articulating the findings and bridging the communication between technical teams and non-technical stakeholders.
• Problem-solving skills: Necessary for identifying problems and figuring out efficient solutions.
• Technical skills: Proficiency in data analytics, modeling tools, and familiarity with SQL databases, programming, and business intelligence tools.
• Project management skills: Useful in overseeing projects from conception through implementation.

Conclusion

Business analysts are invaluable in today’s data-driven environment, helping organizations make data-informed decisions and streamline operations. They ensure that every facet of system and process improvements is aligned with strategic objectives, maximizing value and minimizing waste. As businesses continue to evolve in complexity and scope, the role of the business analyst will remain critical and in high demand.