The Role of a Business Analyst

The term

This may involve the development of new systems, improving processes, strategy planning or potentially organisational change.

Business Analyst Tools

Nowadays there are several different

Roles and Responsibilities of a Business Analyst

The key responsibilities of a Business Analyst are to locate any business issues or inefficiencies and provide recommendations (principally through implementing IT and technological solutions). Although the role of a Business Analyst will vary dramatically from industry to industry and from company to company, there are four key elements that Business Analysts are responsible for:

• Elicitation – Uncover the underlying business issues that need to be addressed and discover any information related to the project.
• Analyse Requirements – Organizing, specifying and modelling the requirements to ensure they are complete and unambiguous.
• Specifying Requirements – Ensuring that the documentation of the requirements is in a layout and format that can be easily shared with and understood by stakeholders.
• Validating and Verifying Requirements – Making sure that the requirements map to the business need being addressed, they are approved by all the appropriate stakeholders and that they meet with relevant quality standards.

Business Analyst Key Skills

A good Business Analyst must have a combination of both soft skills and practical skills. Often working between the IT department and a particular business area it is essential that a BA has good negotiating skills, is a great listener and is skilled at dealing with conflict.

Other key soft skills include:

• Problem solving
• Strategic thinking
• Technical writing
• Client services techniques
• Public speaking/Presenting
• Team building

Due to the technical nature of a Business Analyst role you will also be expected to have good knowledge or experience of the following technical areas.