Who is a Business Analyst?

A Business Analyst is a person who analyzes and documents the business to bring it up to a high position. They use the attributes of market environment, process or system business.

Market environment refers to the factors and forces to build and maintain customer relationships. The business process is the collection of structured activity by the user. It produces the service or product to the specific customer or customers. Business processes transpire in all organizations and may or may not be visible to the customer.

The business analyst's responsibility is to fill the gap between IT and the business by using the data analytical process. They always engage with the business experts and the users about the data-driven chances to process, product, service, and hardware or software to improve efficiency and value. In addition, the business analyst should be aware of the exact ideas, technologies, and functionalities that are being used.

Business Analysts are the representatives of change professionals to research their business or organization by reporting the system process and business to assist within the model, identifying liabilities, and originating solutions. A business analyst enquires to know about business needs and a functional analyst translates and segregates requirements into system functions/solutions. These requirements work as a manual process without involving the system or any paper-based file etc.

The business analyst focuses on the implementation of a system instead of the business needs. In addition, a functional analyst is also called a System Analyst or Solution Designer 

A business analyst's technical skill is to focus to deliver the functionality of the business requirements. Hence, a Business Analyst focuses on the solution/system of the business.

Business analysts proceed with many other job titles, such as:

☀ Business Architect

☀ Business Intelligence Analyst

☀ Business System Analyst

☀ Data Scientist

☀ Management Consultant

☀ Process Analyst

☀ Product Manager

☀ Requirements Engineer

☀ System Analyst

Compared to a business analyst, the IT business analyst works more with software methodologies. Innovation changes, the way of businesses works and it’s adapting the changes. A business analyst is a perfect professional for any organization and that can change the business environment. Once the negative thoughts inherit the business, it impacts the emerge a more robust, more competitive, and digital-based business.

Roles and Responsibilities of a Business Analyst:

✔ Should have better knowledge of the business process, requirements, design, and implementing solutions.

✔ Keep up the latest technologies to automate the process to improve efficiency.

✔ Skills needed for business analysts to figure smart to research the business process, reply to the feedback, and manage the team members. Ability to handle budgeting and forecasting.

✔ Important to check the regular requirement of planning and monitoring the projects.

✔ A business analyst takes complete responsibility in pricing.

✔ Better to conduct detailed market research and competitive analysis.

✔ Responsible for regular reporting and analysis.

✔ Managing all the competing resources and priorities with regular checks on deliverables.

✔ Need to handle the project management till the end.     

Top 10 Business Analyst Skills 

A business analyst should be able to perform multiple duties. It would lead them to have a strong skill set that works for technical skills and non-technical skills. The business analyst skills set are;

✔ Understanding the Business Objective

✔ Analytical and Critical Thinking

✔ Communication and Interpersonal Skill

✔ Negotiation and Cost-Benefit Analysis

✔ Decision-Making Skill

✔ Programming Languages

✔ Creation of Reports and Dashboards

✔ Database and SQL

✔ Microsoft Excel

✔ Documentation and Presentations

Here we discuss the business analyst skills list:

Understanding the Business Objective:

A business should be able to reach the organization’s goal by solving the problem as much as possible. It helps them to recognize the problems and come up with a better solution.

It is always good for the business analyst to have the domain knowledge to work with the organization. It would help them to bring up the invention in the business.

Always the business analyst work should enable a change with the motive of increasing sales, scale-up production, improving revenue streams, etc.

It is better to understand the business motive initially in a business analyst’s journey.

Analytical and Critical Thinking:

As the famous quote by Daniel Levitin goes - “Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in.”

This quote clearly shows that it is an underrated ability. Critical thinking and analysis are fundamental business analyst skills required.

The client’s requirements of analyzing and translating requirements are done by the business analyst. Critical thinking helps the business analyst to work with multiple options to receive a better solution.

Business analysts basically focus on understanding and gathering the client’s requirements. Hence critical thinking helps to show the prior to the business needs. A good analytical mind would help the business analyst to reach the goal even if there is a limitation in the resources and the conditions.

Communication and Interpersonal Skills:

Communication and interpersonal skills are common in business analysts. Communication is the basic ability to communicate concisely with the clients and stakeholders about their requirements.

Communication and interpersonal skills are used in different phases by the business analyst. For example: If a project is launched, the stages of collecting requirements might help to collaborate with clients to validate the final solution.

They basically use verbal written communication to convey information such as ideas, facts, and opinions to clients. To get confidence in facilitating meetings, the business analyst should have good communication and interpersonal skills.

Negotiation and Cost-Benefit Analysis

It is necessary to highlight here that a business analyst should have negotiation skills. In every project phase, the business analysts might negotiate. It works in the initial stage of the project for the analyst to decide and negotiate to include the project visions.

Business analysts use their negotiation skills to the priority levels and requirements based on the requests. Negotiation skills play a significant role in the project's progress to deciding a function and fulfilling the requirements. Technical decisions are also used for negotiation skills.

It is important to make a cost-benefit analysis to assess the cost and benefits expected in the project by the business analyst.

It also provides benefits for the business analyst to use the cost-benefit in a particular project if the organizations undertake new projects.

Decision-Making Skill

Another important and basic skill is the Decision making skill which is a non-technical skill. A business analyst makes the final decisions in the business; however, it impacts the company’s business directly or indirectly. They should decide the requirements before presenting their decision.

In addition, a business analyst interprets the problem and finds a solution for the business approach before making the decision.

Hence they test the other alternative approaches to make decisions based on the thoughts and requests. They implement the solution to test finally.

The business analyst also considers a particular design is discussed in the business or not.

Programming Languages:

Not all business analysts are familiar with programming languages. However, it is important to have programming language knowledge in order to perform faster and better in data analysis.

The beneficial program language for the business analyst is R and Python. It can solve complex problems by writing efficient codes.

Hence R and Python contain the libraries and packages for data wrangling, data manipulation, data visualization, and analytics. For a sound understanding of statistical software like SAS and SPSS is suggested strongly.

The massive data are often analyzed visualized finely with the assistance of programming languages. R and Python programs work for business analyst qualities to figure better.

Creation of Reports and Dashboards:

The creation of reports and dashboards is an essential skill for business analysts. Business analysts should be aware of using business intelligence tools for creating reports and dashboards.

General reports and dashboard reports are done by the business analyst by solving decision-making problems. It is necessary to make different reports based on the business request.

Requirements the sound knowledge of Tableau, QlikView, and Power BI is used.

Database and SQL:

The next skill is Database and SQL.  They are very easy programming languages. The business analyst should have is these programming languages to perform even better.

The business analyst usually works with structured data to store and process the heavy data. The Database and SQL programming languages contain relational databases such as Microsoft, SQL Server, MySQL database, Oracle DB, and NoSQL databases.

It is basic for every business analyst to have good experience with SQL. This can help them access, retrieve, manipulate, and analyze data.

The basic procedure for database and SQL is to write data definition and data manipulation commands such as create, delete, select, update, insert, etc.

Microsoft Excel:

Microsoft Excel is one of the fundamental skills that every business analyst should have. 

Excel is one of the most powerful and elderly analytics in reporting tools; basically, the business analyst uses several calculations of knowledge, and budget analysis to perform on unraveling business patterns.

Creating different charts by using excel to get dynamic reports relates to helps the business problem. Hence it summarizes data by creating pivot tables on the charts.

Microsoft Excel is employed to make an idea and editorial calendar, product list expenses, and revenue growth models for each new product supported by recent customer forecast; all of their help to make charts of the products is to budget across each category.

Excel calculates the customer discount based on monthly purchase volume by-products to the business analyst. They even help to find areas of a product for customer revenue to build strong customer relationships.

Documentations and Presentations:

A business analyst should have clear knowledge about their project documents to teach well and get the results concisely. They should be able to present their projects confidently in front of the stakeholders and clients. It is easier for business analysts when they have organized documentation to communicate technical concepts easily to non-technical employees.

Setting down the project lesson is essential and this would help to make a better decision in the upcoming presentations.

If the business analyst finds a problem in the presentation they can use the previous solutions to save time and prevent unwanted issues.

Conclusion:

All the above-listed business analyst skills are very important.  They are a combination of hard skills and soft skills. All these skills would help the business analyst to be a successful business analyst expert technically. Every organization demands business analysts to lead them in the correct direction. The business analyst should adopt all of these skills to become an excellent socializer and communicator in the business analyst project field.

To become a Business analyst expert enroll with Sprintzeal to get training and certification.

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