What are the basic requirements of a Business Analyst?

A Business Analyst is any person who perform business analysis tasks, no matter their job title or organizational role. Business Analysts enables change in an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to the stakeholders. Business analysis is performed on a variety of initiatives whether they are strategic tactical or operational to understand the current state of the organization, to define the future state and to determine the GAP between the current state and future state and the means required/steps required to meet the future state.

The most important Responsibilities of a BA are:

• Client Interaction
• Ownership of requirement
• Process Re-engineering

The basic skills required in a Business Analyst are:

A BA should be catalyst for change: Business Analyst must participate in change. The change is the key to success of any project, BA should welcome any change requests that he faces in his role in the organization.

Independent Assessor: The BA should be skillful enough to evaluate the outcomes of the project by performing feasibility study to determine whether the project is feasible or not. He should be skilled enough to evaluate the outcomes.

Overcome Internal Inertia against Change: To change inertia that’s linked to habits and routines, a company need to get its top management on board with the new way of thinking. BA should be resistant to any change in its direction.

Create Positive attitude of Collaboration: The communication between the team and its leader should be open and two-way around, a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities. A should create a positive atmosphere defining teamwork.

Self-confident engineer of change: A BA should be clear on his/her Goals and objectives that must be met, he/she should not let negative aspects demotivate the team. BA should be able to reform negative thoughts into positive thoughts.

Creative problem solver: BA should be able to analyze a problem and act on it cool headedly. BA must have the ability of mental process of searching.

Excellent communicator: This is the most important skill required. A BA must be excellent at communication skills. Which includes proper listening, well understanding and being able to grasp the nonverbal communication.

Other requirements of a Business Analyst are:

BA must have keen knowledge about the domain, which means he should know what his responsibilities roles area of expertise are. What are the documents that will be used in the project etc.

He/She should have a keen knowledge about the various Software development lifecycle methodologies that are used to carryout project. This will BA understanding the various stages of a project.

BA must have any calm and cool head to analyze the situation or problem within an organization and act rationally or in other words critical thinker.

BA must have a keen knowledge about UML and its tools. Since BA is a bridge between the technical team and client he must have understanding and knowledge about using the tools in unified modelling language.

BA must know the elicitation techniques to elicitate the requirements from the client.

The client is not trained to state his/her requirements, but BA should be skillful enough to gather such requirement by using the Elicitation techniques.