COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
A business analyst is like a face of an IT solution provider organization to client. He/She acts a liaison between the project development team and client organization
Business analyst is a highly skilled job profile, one must have following skills
- Communication Skills
A business analyst needs to interact with stakeholders from various teams in his organization and client organization. So interacting with stakeholders with clarity, setting clear and right agenda for meetings, seeking their business requirements, understanding their pain points is of utmost importance
- Time Management Skills
Stakeholders from various teams have a busy work schedule for carrying out their job responsibilities, so to utilize their time for business analytics functions such as requirements gathering, requirement analysis is of utmost concern. So BA should be able to align various teams/stakeholders on one path and should be able to utilize their availability to fullest.
- People Management Skills
A BA has to be professional in handling his/her relations with project team, stakeholders within the organization, and stakeholders in client organization, No criticism, No personal comments, Positive and right attitude for all interactions are must have competencies to be a good people manager.
- Conflict Management
There will be numerous instances where a BA has to handle conflicting requirements from client organization, conflicting KRAs within own organization, so to handle these BA can learn Thomas-Kilmann Technique, improve negotiation skills.
- Risk Management Skills
Every project comes with certain risks associated with it. Risk management is one of the most important if not most important skills a BA should possess. Risk identification, acceptance, aversion, mitigation, plans for continuing project activities in case of difficult situations are necessary competencies one must possess to be a BA
- Documents and Report Writing Skills
A BA is in charge of drafting documents for project kick off, project progress reviews and project closure. So, to make those documents one must have a clear understanding of importance of those documents, good written communication skills, liability on the project teams about the project in development.
- Technical Skills
A BA should be able to draw such as Use Case Diagrams using different tools eg. MS Visio, he must have knowledge and skills to make wireframes of project in development by making sample screens. Wireframes, UCDs can help him get requirements from client easily and also can help BA to refine the requirements. Though BA is not expected to code the software requirements or but he must have some of the skills that are mentioned below
SQL- Basic queries
Power BI, Tableau
MS-Excel
- Other Skills
Understanding the clients Business Model, Goals and Visions of the business, Enterprise analysis, Understanding impacts of external and internal factors on the progress of project, Understanding of financial factors, Root Cause Analysis, SWOT analysis of the process or product to be developed, understanding the Gaps between AS-IS of the process and TO-BE when the requirements will be coded and deployed as an IT application are necessary skills to have as a BA.
