top 7 tips to become a professional business analyst pdf

Top 7 tips to become a professional business analyst

Top 7 tips to become a pro business analyst - created by businessAnalyst247

A business analyst is someone who analyzes an organization or business domain (real or hypothetical) and documents its business or processes or systems, assessing the business model or its integration with technology.

The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) describes the role as "a liaison among stakeholders in order to understand the structure, policies, and operations of an organization, and to recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals."

The role of a systems analyst can also be defined as a bridge between the business problems and the technology solutions. Here business problems can be anything about business systems, for example the model, process, or method. The technology solutions can be the use of technology architecture, tools, or software application. So System Analysts are required to analyze, transform and ultimately resolve the business problems with the help of technology.

Tip 1: Understanding of business analyst roles


Tip 2: Understanding ’s business analyst job description


1.Define configuration specifications and business requirements

2.Perform Quality Assurance

3.Define reporting and alerting requirements

4.Own and develop relationship with partners, working with them to optimize and enhance our integration

5.Help design, document and maintain system processes

6.Report on common sources of technical issues or questions and make recommendations to product team

7.Communicate key insights and findings to product team

8.Constantly be on the lookout for ways to improve monitoring, discover issues and deliver better value to the customer

Business analyst ‘s job description - Sample 1


1. The analyst works with the business to identify opportunities for improvement in business operations and processes

2. The analyst is involved in the design or modification of business systems or IT systems

3. The analyst interacts with the business stakeholders and subject matter experts in order to understand their problems and needs

4. The analyst gathers, documents, and analyzes business needs and requirements

5. The analyst solves business problems and, as needed, designs technical solutions

6. The analyst documents the functional and, sometimes, technical design of the system

7. The analyst interacts with system architects and developers to ensure the system is properly implemented

8. The analyst may help test the system and create system documentation and user manuals

Business analyst ‘s job description – Sample 2


Tip 3: Understanding ‘s business analyst career path

David Foote, president of Foote Partners LLC, an IT career research firm in New Canaan, Connecticut, explains the business analyst career path best. He says, "There are career tracks that zigzag back and forth between IT and business. Someone might start as a business analyst, then move into a project management job, then an IT management path, then go back to an innovation path ... then to process management, then move up a rung to process leadership or process ownership, and then go back over to management as manager of an IT line of business.


Top business analyst ‘s online training courses & materials


1. User Stories for Agile Scrum+Product Owner+Business Analysis 2. businessanalyst247.info/free-ebook-18-secrets-for-successful-business-

analyst 2. Business Analyst Fundamentals: Business Analysis

3. How to become world class Business Analyst - Cases in Excel 4. Business Analysis: Fundamentals of Use Case Modelling

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Tip 4: Develop your ’s soft skills


As an effective communicator, you must to able to facilitate work meetings, ask the right questions, actively listen and take in new information. The ability to communicate proficiently in person, on conference calls, in web meetings and through email is essential. Business analysts spend a significant time interacting with clients, users, management and developers. A project’s success may revolve around your ability to clearly communicate things like project requirements, changes and testing results.

This course may help you: Advanced communication skills for 21st Century leaders

1. Communication Skills


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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.

This course will help you more: Creative Problem Solving Skills

2. Problem Solving Skills


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First and foremost on the list of soft skills is the ability to forge strong relationships, often called stakeholder relationships. A stakeholder is simply anyone who has something to contribute to your project and often you’ll work with many stakeholders from both the business and the technical teams.

This skill involves building trust and often means stepping into a leadership role on a project team to bridge gaps.

Available course: Relationship Coaching: A Guide To Fail-Proof Relationships

3. Relationship-Building Skills


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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.

4. Decision-Making 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.

5. Management Skills


You'll need to prove that you're a team player but also have the ability to manage and delegate to others and take on responsibility. It's about building positive working relationships that help everyone to achieve goals and business objectives.

Available course: Team Building: New Strategies for Developing Effective Teams

6. Teamwork skills


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Tip 5: Develop your ’s technical 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.


To be able to properly interpret and translate a customer’s business needs into application and operational requirements, every analyst needs phenomenal analytical skills. A significant amount of your job will be analyzing data and documents, reviewing user input questionnaires and operational workflow to determine the right courses of action to take.

Available course: Analytics for All: Beginners to Experts

1. Analytical Skills


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While documentation or writing could be considered a subset of written communication, it’s really its own skill set for a BA. Here I include the ability to create clear and concise documentation (the latter becoming increasingly necessary in a lean or agile world). As a new business analyst, you may not have experience in a variety of business analyst specifications (that comes with time and a variety of project experiences) but it’s quite possible that your strong general documentation and writing skills will get you started.

And it will be easier to get into your first BA role if you can correlate your past experience in something very similar to a formal BA specification to the kinds of specifications required for any given position. And this is possible even if you’ve never worked in a formal environment.

2. Documentation and Specification Skills


Excel will be your daily bread, your dearest friend to learn how to present the problem in Excel an how to use it to solve them. Have a look at some nice examples of sucha analyses. More examples of intermediate and advanced analysis carried out in consulting you can find in my on-line course

Available course: Excel with The Ultimate Microsoft Excel Course

3. Excel skills


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Whether you are analyzing ways of improving production or efficiency of marketing activities you will have to do some sort of market, competition or consumer research. Therefore, be aware of the methods and resources available. Go through overview of market research methods to see how big is the arsenal. If this is not enough you can also take a short course on market research methods (with examples in excels)

4. Market research


A close sister to many analysis techniques is the ability to create visual models, such as work-flow diagrams or wireframe prototypes. For any given analyst role, there could be specific models you need to create. As a general skill set, it’s important to be able to capture information visually – whether in a formal model or a napkin drawing.

5. Visual Modeling


As a new business analyst, the ability to use basic office tools such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint should be sufficient to get you into the profession.

Other technical skills include the ability to use modeling tools, such as Visio or Enterprise Architect, requirements management tools, such as DOORS or Caliber, or project and defect management tools (there are really too many to list these days). It’s unlikely you’ll find these to be required skills for a large number of positions and they will be skills you learn on-the-job.

6. Business Analysis Tools


Tip 6: Understanding ‘s business analyst KPIs

Tks for KPIs ‘s source: - enfocussolutions.com - kpi123.com/free-ebook-2456-KPIs-examples


• Number of non-IT recommendations implemented – Often business analysts stay focused on just providing the IT solution and miss many low hanging fruit which are not IT related.

• Percentage of Business Objectives that were Achieved – SMART business objectives should be defined for every project. However, the real measure is how many of the business objectives were achieved.

• Scope Statement Quality Index – Carefully defining good solution scope statements is key to defining good requirements. Conduct an independent peer review of the scope statements and assess a numerical score using predefined critiera.

Solution Planning and Analysis KPIs


• Stakeholder satisfaction index – Project stakeholders should be interviewed to determine their satisfaction with the solution. This might be done with a series of questions such as:

– Were your needs addressed?

– How effective were communications with the solution team?

– Did you have transparency into the project?

– Was your investment of time worthwhile?

• Number of stakeholder comments received? – How many comments or concerns were received about the requirements?

• Stakeholder lifecycle participation – What % of the stakeholders participated in the following lifecycle events?

– Solution scope definition

– Requirements development

– Documenting business rules

– Defining key terms

– Design review

– Providing clarifications during build

– Participating in demonstration sessions

– Acceptance Testing

– Instructional design review

Stakeholder Engagement KPIs


• Number of stakeholder complaint (emails and letters) received – Sometimes stakeholders get frustrated and write emails or voice complaints. Many of these are because of poor communication problems.

• Number of key stakeholders that were either not identified or identified late in the project – How many stakeholders were missed during the stakeholder analysis activity?

• Number of participating stakeholders? – How many stakeholders were interviewed or participated in focus groups?

• Stakeholder Attendance % – The number of stakeholders that attended meetings versus the number of stakeholders that were invited

• Number of needs identified by stakeholders – Stakeholders provide needs that are translated into requirements. One of the best measures for stakeholder engagement is to see how many needs they provided.

Stakeholder Engagement KPIs


• Business Process Productivity Increase % – The actual increase in business productivity after the system has been implemented.

• Cycle Time Reduction % – The decrease in cycle time that occurred after the system was implemented expressed as a percentage.

• Unit Cost – The average unit cost decrease after the solution has been implemented and operational for 6 months.

• Increase in Revenue attributed to Solution – The actual increase of revenue that can be directly attributable to the solution.

• Decrease in Cost attributed to Solution – The actual decrease in cost that can be directly attributable to the solution.

Business Process Optimization KPIs


• Cost Variance – % of Actual Cost to Projected Cost identified in business case.

• Revenue Variance – % of Actual Revenue achieved versus revenue increase predicted in business case.

• User Satisfaction Index – Are the users satisfied with the delivered solution?

• Deviation of planned ROI – The deviation of the planned Return on Investment (ROI) is the difference between Return on Investment in the planned baseline and the actual Return on Investment. ROI is the return an investment will generate annually as a percentage of the total investment.

• Deviation of net present value (NPV) – The deviation of the planned net present value (NPV) is the difference in value between the planned baseline against the actual net present value. NPV is a method used in discounted cash flow analysis to find the sum of money representing the difference between the present value of all inflows and outflows of cash associated with the project by discounting each at a target yield.

• Deviation of planned break-even time – The deviation of the planned break-even time is the difference in time between the planned baseline against the actual break-even time. The break-even time is determined by the point where the business expenses equal the income (or cost reductions) generated, with neither profit nor loss.

Achieving Business Case Benefits


• Percentage of rework attributable to requirements – Rework is a serious problem on most projects, representing about 40% of total project cost. According to industry studies, about 70% of this rework is related to ambiguous, inaccurate, or missing requirements.

• Percentage of projects with prioritized requirements – Prioritizing requirements is critical to ensure that project teams first focus on items that deliver high value to the business.

• Percentage of requirements fully implemented – This is part of requirements traceability; requirements must be traced through design, test, and deployment.

• Percentage of approved requirements not implemented- A test of the likelihood of user satisfaction with the final result.

• Developer Requirements Satisfaction Index- Developers should be surveyed to determine their satisfactions with requirements. This actually should be presented as a series of requirements questions concerning quality such as

– Clear

– Accurate

– Complete

– Testable

– Feasible

– Testable

Requirements Quality KPIs


• Project Stakeholder Satisfaction Index – Project stakeholders should be interviewed to determine if they felt their needs were met and their overall satisfaction with the requirements. This might be done with a series of questions such as:

– Do the requirements address the business needs?

– Were the requirements gold plated by BAs or developers?

– Were stakeholders adequately involved in the requirements process?

• QA Requirements Satisfaction index – QA should be surveyed to ensure that the requirements were testable.

• Percentage of Requirements Tested – One good measure to determine if the requirements were testable and implemented is to determine what % of the requirements were actually tested.

• Number of missing requirements – Missing or incomplete requirements is always a major problem for projects. This KPI tracks the number of requirements that were added after the baseline was approved.

Requirements Quality KPIs


Tip 7: Understanding ‘s business analyst mistakes


1. Never assume any requirement: If you have any doubts on requirements, keep questions ready or write it as business analysis assumptions and highlight it in your document. Review it thoroughly with your stake holders as early as possible.

2.Jumping into ‘how to do’ instead of what they want. Never ever jump into functional requirements before you capture the business requirements. It is one big mistake which does not give you an option to be flexible later. Do it the agile way.


3. Get feedback. Get feedback about the requirements from your stakeholders. I always prefer keeping in loop my Product Managers (who have expertise in the product), the Testing team (so that they know the requirements are testable) and the Development team (so that you know the requirements are feasible). Always remember - incorrect requirements are worse than incomplete requirements.

4. Difficulty in dealing with some stakeholders. I used to do this mistake often - when I see a difficulty in dealing with a stake holder, I used to just ignore them; but now I know the best way to deal with them is to have a one-on-one meeting as soon as possible.


5. Ask more questions. A good trait of a smart BA - A smart BA doesn't look bad when he asks a dumb question. He makes that dumb question smart. Interviewing a stakeholder and getting enough data is a must for any BA role.

6. Requirements trace-ability- The ability to trace business requirements into test cases and to propagate these into functional requirements and development tasks is very important. Never miss that. A good process makes a smart BA. If there are any changes in the requirement, the BA can easily tell which test cases will be impacted based on his analysis. That makes everyone's life easy.
