Business Analysis is about turning information into meaningful insights and BAs can effectively extract the stories from data using wide range of hard-science skills.
Who are business analysts?
Business Analysts (BA) act as a liaison between various stakeholders and help guide businesses in improving their processes, products, and services. Every company has different issues like poor customer satisfaction that can be addressed more effectively by a BA. A BA’s life revolves around defining and prioritizing client’s requirements and getting feedback and approval on those requirements.
What does a Business Analyst Do ?
A clear-cut understanding of BA’s role entirely explains why BA’s will always be in demand. Some responsibilities of Ba’s can be process improvement, process design, strategic planning, or feasibility analysis. Corporate houses from Amazon to Boeing, as well as new Startups all rely on BA’s to help wring maximum profits and work towards a competitive future. Although a BA’s roles are not clear cut like that of HR or Finance Departments, most BA’s routinely perform the following tasks:
- Facilitate to design Solutions for existing or future problems of stakeholders
- Act as Information conduits : Translate business jargons into a language the clients can understand
- Define a business case, elicit information from stakeholders, model requirements, and validate Solutions, among others.
Although many have rightly stated that BAs are the liaison between the client and the technical development team, we have to wear multiple hats during the course of our work. For instance, we did a green field project for a company that wanted to launch a brand new B2B e-commerce platform in Nepal. My job as the BA here was to conduct Market research, Market sizing, draw out the industry best practices and translate it to fit for a localized context. Further, I had to study about which SaaS platforms could host their website feasibly that matched the conditions of the Nepalese market (e.g. Magento is not the best option for companies lacking capital to hire expert technical team). These are just few parts of the work I did as a BA to deliver the optimum level of work for the client.
A Business Analyst is a position that plays a critical role in deciphering the future for many businesses. However, to date this role has not been widely recognized by stakeholders as a profession in its own right –as other roles such as Project Managers and Finance Managers take the lead. Yet, the dramatic advancement in technology has had a dramatic impact on how organizations use their solutions to resolve various issues, challenges, and problems.
“A good Business Analyst’s skills as guardian of clarity, point of alignment, reasoning and value-focused thinking, as well as inter-disciplinary facilitator are so crucial to project success that every team that cannot cover that role will find themselves in trouble” – Marcel Britsch
The above quote perfectly explains why BAs are crucial members in the team for any organization. Further, employment of BAs is projected to grow 11% from 2019 to 2029 – much faster compared to the averages of other occupations. This demand is fueled by companies in variety of sectors, from consulting to HR. BAs will further be sought out by government agencies, IT firms, even health care employees! That is to say BAs are the future if a company wants to thrive in the long run.
