Who is a Business Analyst?
Business Analysts are the people who have a deep understanding of how the business works and with their unique skill-set comprising of both technological and business skills.
In any organization, they have access to data and after analyzing it, they can communicate within the different systems of an organization.
They act as connections between the technical and the managerial departments to deliver data-driven insights which aid in decision making for the executives and other stakeholders which are involved.
What is the work of a Business Analyst?
Business Analysts understand the requirements of a business, help in identifying suitable technologies, solutions and models which should be aligned with the client’s objectives. They are the leaders in teams which make sure that the needs of clients are met and the solution is rolled out after addressing all the expectations of the organization and their clients while keeping the business revenues in mind.
There are a few skills which are a must, for any person who is a BA or is an aspiring BA, these skills can be broadly classified into technical and soft skills.
Soft Skills:
Analytical Thinking: You should think in terms of solutions when presented with any problem, the first thing that should come to your mind after seeing a problem is analysing and approach towards the solution.
Communication: Communicating ideas and technical requirements of the organization neatly, so that agendas and reports are easily understandable.
Industry Know-how: As a BA, you should be familiar with the functioning of your industry in great detail because apart from your technical and soft skills, you need to have a grip on the industry for having a vision for growth and handling unprecedented situations.
People skills: Not just communication, but proper interpersonal skills of an individual play an important role. At times a BA would have to convince stakeholders about a certain choice, so along with the right data, having adequate consulting skills are also crucial.
Creativity: Contrary to the popular opinion, that a BA should be effective with data only, creative thinking is a crucial component in the skill-set of any analyst. This creative thinking gives an edge to analysts while thinking about data trends and helps in the creation of breakthrough ideas.
Patience: A lot of time of analysts is spent on structuring, understanding and combining the different results of any dataset to create a solution for a business. Data is not always available easily, and sometimes the research work is complicated.
Technical Skills:
Handling data and processing it for further analysis or reporting, a BA should be able to identify trends and share that new insight with other members of the team, for this a lot of technical tools are available as well as software packages, only a few popular ones are listed here,
SQL(Tool): This is your best friend if you have to do anything with databases. SQL is the most widely used tool to perform operations on data, and more importantly, this is very powerful for manual manipulations in the raw data.
Excel(Tool): The basics of analysis, can be learned by using this, it lays a solid foundation in understanding and performing data analysis. As an analyst, you have to be familiar with Excel, in most cases, excel can easily help in performing easy-to-moderate analysis, without the involvement of any complex programming.
Data Mining(Skill): An important part of the job of a BA is to reframe the data, extract it and, bring it into a better understandable format. Believe it or not, but a lot of time of business analysts is spent in this.
Data Visualization(Skill): Result and facts are cool, but when presented along with fantastic visuals they have a greater impact and often you can have a better idea about the data if you visualize it. You can use Tableau(Tool) for creating amazing visuals.
Keeping all of this in mind, let me also tell you what a normal workday would look like for a business analyst.
You enter your workplace, the client tells you about his requirements, then you evaluate and analyse the requirements presented by the clients, after this, you communicate these details with the respected departments to get them on board and helping them understand what needs to be done for the project. Since this is a growing field, many businesses use the help of their analysts for making significant changes in their operational strategies.
After reading this, I hope you have some clarity on what is the role of a business analyst and what is involved in a typical day of work for a business analyst.
