*(retired) Business Analytics | Program Guide: Role & Skills

Seven Necessary Business Analyst Skills

• Communication Skills
  By nature of the job, business analysts spend a great deal of time interacting with users, clients, management and developers. A project’s success may depend upon the business analyst clearly communicating details like project requirements, requested changes and testing results. Fluent language skills and written communication abilities are necessary to thrive in a business analyst career.

• Technical Skills
  In order to identify business solutions, a business analyst should know what information technology applications are being utilized, what new possible outcomes can be achieved through current platforms and what the latest technology offers. Testing software and designing business systems are also important technical business analyst skills. Gaining respect and creating a sense of confidence among IT and business end-users requires a business analyst to speak with confidence about business and technology, and to demonstrate a strong technical aptitude.

• Analytical Skills
  A business analyst’s skill set should include outstanding analytical skills so that a customer’s business needs are properly interpreted and translated into application and operational requirements. One aspect of the job is analyzing data, documents, user input surveys and workflow to determine which course of action will correct the business problem. Strong analytical skills are beneficial in performing the business analyst’s job successfully.

• Problem Solving Skills
  While the ability to create workable solutions to business problems is not unique to business analysts, it is a necessary skill for performing the job successfully. As with most IT roles, the business analyst’s career may be spent dealing with frequent and random changes. When these professionals are working to developing custom business solutions, nothing is 100% predictable – so finding ways to quickly resolve problems and move toward a project’s successful completion is important in the business analyst’s role.

• Decision-Making Skills
  Another important business analyst skill is the ability to make decisions. As a consultant to management and advisor to developers, the business analyst is called upon for sound judgment in a wide variety of business matters, any number of which could determine the viability of the business. Professionals who wish to pursue a business analyst career should be able to assess a situation, receive input from stakeholders, and select a course of action.

• Managerial Skills
  Another skill a business analyst should possess is the ability to manage projects. Planning the project scope, directing staff members, handling change requests, forecasting budgets and keeping everyone on the project within allotted time constraints are just some of the management skills a business analyst should possess. Supervising projects of all sizes, from inception to implementation – and usually concurrently – can take a high degree of managerial skill.

• Negotiation and Persuasion Skills
  A business analyst serves as a liaison between developers and users, clients and companies, and management and IT. Finding the balance between individual wants and business needs, and then interacting with a variety of personality types toward a solution that works for the business, takes professional persuasion skills. When competing for client projects, a business analyst’s negotiation skills come into frequent use, with the goal of achieving a profitable outcome for the company and a working solution for the client. Maintaining relationships within an organization and with external partners is an important function of a business analyst that require strong negotiation and persuasion skills.

From:  https://www.villanovau.com/resources/business-analysis/business-analyst-skills/#.WBzjUEfUjcs

What Are the Key Roles of a Business Analyst?

1. Extract requirements - Requirements play a key part in engineering IT systems. Incomplete or improper requirements usually lead to project failure. A business analyst determines a project’s requirements by extracting them from business or government policies, as well as from current and future users, through interaction and research.
2. Anticipate requirements - Skilled business analysts know how quickly things change in the dynamic world of IT. Baseline plans are subject to modification, and anticipating requirements that will be needed in the future or that have not yet been considered is essential to successful outcomes.
3. Constrain requirements - While complete requirements are essential to project success, the focus must remain on core business needs, and not users’ personal preferences, functions related to trends or outdated processes, or other non-essential modifications.
4. Organize requirements - Requirements often originate from disparate, sometimes opposing sources. The business analyst must organize requirements into related categories to effectively manage and communicate them. Requirements are sorted into types according to their source and applicability. Proper organization prevents project requirements from becoming overlooked, and leads to optimum use of time and budgets.
5. Translate requirements - The business analyst must be adept at translating business requirements to technical requirements. This includes using powerful analysis and modeling tools to match strategic business objectives with practical technical solutions.
6. Safeguard requirements - At regular intervals in the project life cycle, the business analyst safeguards or protects the business and user’s needs by verifying functionality, accuracy and completeness of the requirements against the original initiating documents. Safeguarding minimizes risk by ensuring requirements are being met before investing further in system development.
7. Simplify requirements - The business analyst emphasizes simplicity and ease of use at all times, but especially in implementation. Meeting business objectives is the goal of every IT project; business analysts identify and avoid extraneous activities that do not solve the problem or help reach the objective.
8. Verify requirements - The business analyst is most knowledgeable about use cases; therefore they continually verify the requirements and reject implementations that do not advance business objectives. Verifying requirements is accomplished through analysis, test, demonstration and inspection.
9. Managing requirements - Typically, a formal requirements presentation, review and approval session occurs, where project schedules, costs and duration estimates are updated and the business objectives are revisited. Upon approval, the business analyst transitions into requirements management activities for the rest of the IT solution life cycle.
10. System and operations maintenance - Once all requirements have been met and the IT solution delivered, the business analyst’s role shifts to maintenance, or preventing and correcting defects; enhancements, or making changes to increase the value provided by the system; and operations and maintenance, or providing system validation procedures, maintenance reports, deactivation plans, and other documents, plans and reports. The business analyst will also play a major role in analyzing the system to determine when deactivation or replacement is required.

From: https://www.villanovau.com/resources/business-analysis/business-analyst-role/#.WBpEm0fUjcs

Understanding Key Business Analysis Tools

The tools available for business analysts typically fall into five categories:

Strategy analysis – external business environment

• PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technical, Legal and Environmental) Analysis - This analysis can be helpful when gauging the broader business environment and the opportunities and threats within it, making it easier to manage the market risks and their impact on an organization’s growth strategy. Often used as part of a SWOT analysis (see below), it can be used to explore a strategy, a marketing initiative or a business idea while evaluating the direction a business is taking.

• Porter’s Five Forces Model - This model gauges a business’ position relative to five distinct forces characterizing the industry’s competition. The strength of the competition influences the extent of a company’s potential profitability. The forces include the intensity of rivalry, how much of a threat is posed by new market entrants, the amount of bargaining power held by suppliers as well as customers, and the level of threat posed by substitute products

Strategy analysis – internal capability

• MOST Analysis - By understanding and refining their Mission, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics, businesses can adjust their direction to improve their industry position and performance. This analysis helps identify business distractions and how their removal can drive advances in the market and with customers and suppliers. Ultimately, it can lead to a stronger link between the business and the mission statement.

• Resource Audit - For businesses to effectively respond to internal and external circumstances, proper resources and proficiencies should be in place and ready to implement. These are identified through a resource audit that focuses on items that are owned or can be obtained. They are usually grouped in the following categories: financial (cash, loans, ability to raise new funds, etc.), human resources (the skills base of the business), physical resources (from production facilities to IT systems) and those that are intangible (goodwill, reputation, brands and intellectual property).

• Portfolio Analysis (Boston Box) - Portfolio proliferation is a growing business problem which typically wastes marketing resources, destroys economy of scale and creates marketplace confusion. The Boston Box for portfolio rationalization analyzes products according to their market share and growth in four categories: stars, or high growth/high investment products, cash cows, or low growth/low investment products, question marks, those with low share in high growth markets that may have potential, and dogs, sold or closed.

Strategy definition

• SWOT analysis - This exercise maps an organization’s strengths and weaknesses (or internal environment) against the opportunities and threats posed externally, and typically is conducted for a business unit or idea versus a market, per the PESTLE analysis. Typically undertaken as part of a workshop or brainstorming effort, SWOT analysis looks at factors in the present, such as products, pricing, profitability and performance, and weighs them against factors that could have impact in the future, such as culture, technology, audience and market shifts.

• Ansoff’s Matrix - This tool for business analysis helps an organization understand market or business development opportunities by looking at four options for strategy development. Market penetration is an option in situations where growing market share is possible or when the market can accommodate the kind of growth the business seeks. Another focuses on new products developed internally, via acquisitions or through joint ventures, as a route to increased share. A third is market development, looking at entirely new markets or new sub-sets to existing ones as a strategy for growth. The fourth is diversification, or a strategy where new products are taken to new markets, which is likely to require new distribution channels.

Strategy implementation

• The McKinsey 7-S model - With the opinion that all parts work in harmany at successful companies, this model helps businesses understand how well they are aligned by exploring seven interdependent factors. These include more easily defined and influenced hard elements of strategy, structure and systems, such as strategy statements, organization charts and IT systems. They also explore four soft elements that are less tangible, but are equally important as the hard ones in driving success. These elements include shared values, skills, style and staff.

Performance measurement

• The Balanced Business Scorecard - The idea behind the scorecard is to ensure the alignment of a business’ performance, vision and objectives. This means that not only is its financial performance evaluated, but so are customer concerns, business processes and learning tools and mechanisms. Those perspectives are weighed against four factors in assessing an organization’s performance: Objectives, measures, targets and initiatives. Among other benefits, the balanced scorecard helps sharpen a business’ focus on business strategy, while effectively aligning employees around the strategy. It also helps leaders better target actions that impact future performance.

From:  https://www.villanovau.com/resources/business-analysis/business-analysis-tools/#.WBzhXkfUjcs

Best Practices for Business Analysis Strategies

Five steps of conducting a business requirement analysis:

• Step 1 - Identify Key Stakeholders: Who has the biggest stake in the project, and who is the sponsor? The first step is to identify the stakeholders who have influence over the project’s scope. From there, end-users should be identified, as their insights are critical if the project is to meet their needs.

• Step 2 - Capture Stakeholder Requirements: Each group of stakeholders should provide input on their expectations and requirements of the project. These can be solicited through individual interviews or group workshops. It can also be valuable to develop 'use cases' that help take the user through the system or process to add a better understanding of functionality. Building prototypes of the system or product can also be helpful.

• Step 3 - Categorize Requirements: The analysis process can be made easier by grouping the stakeholder requirements in four categories: functional, operational, technical and transitional.

• Step 4 - Interpret and Record Requirements: This aspect has several facets: The first is to precisely define requirements in clear detail, while noting the requirements’ relationship to business needs. Then, they should be prioritized to help organized the process. Interpretation also includes an analysis of the impact of change on processes, products and people. It’s also important to work with stakeholders in resolving conflicts with the requirements, and then to undertake a feasibility analysis to identify major issues.

• Step 5 - Sign Off: This stage represents a formal commitment by stakeholders to requirements that reflect their needs. Sign off is critical to preventing scope creep.

From:  https://www.villanovau.com/resources/business-analysis/best-practices/#.WBzglkfUjcs