What is a Business Analyst

Maybe you’re interested in becoming a Business Analyst and curious what the role entails or maybe you’ve recently landed your first BA job and are struggling to tell friends and family exactly what it is you do work a living or maybe you just want to see if you disagree with me. However you got here, I’m going to give you the quick inside scoop on what a Business Analyst actually is.

Requirements gatherer

As a Business Analyst your primary purpose at work is to gather requirements. What are requirements? Requirements are what we use to communicate what we need delivery teams to do. Delivery teams are often developers but could also be content producers or even a wider business delivery of a new support team.

On the surface this may sound really simple; and thinking it is simple is the reason a lot of businesses fail. Scratch the surface though and suddenly you start to see why the BA is so important.

Let’s say you have a customer who has asked for the ability to delete an entry in the product you sell them. A good BA will seek to understand beyond the simple customer request, it could actually turn out that the reason the customer wants to delete the entry is because they are regularly having incorrect entries created and what they actually need is input validation at the data entry stage. A poor implementation would have seen the customer eventually end up with an overly large data set (costing you the hosting company money) and the customer having users waste a lot of time (a poor experience which could end up losing the customer).

In another scenario you may once again have the customer asking for a delete button and this time they really do need it. A good BA has ensured the delete button is actually required but this time they checked around with their other customers and discovered that they don’t want their users to be able to delete entries, so one of the requirements will be that this is delete function can be turned on or off per customer. A poor implementation here would have delivered a function to the all customers with some actively not wanting to use it which will both annoy the customer and take time to correct (in turn disrupting the delivery roadmap and causing delays to future releases).

As you can see, what seems like something simple can have many deep ramifications if the requirements haven’t been properly gathered.

Facilitator

You will often hear a Business Analyst describe the role as a translator or the link between Business and Technology and this is true but it also only a part of the story.

A BA will often be the difference between a productive workshop and an unproductive one. This is due to the facilitation skills of the BA. Knowing how to cajole a lifeless group into a group that are producing good ideas (or whatever the purpose of your workshop is) is an essential skill to be a good BA.

Also a BA needs to be able to be clear in their communications. It is a regular occurrence that a BA needs to contact a Subject Matter Expert out of the blue and often without context to ask a question. Good communication skills will allow a BA to make the introduction, set the scene, ask the question in a way that gives the SME the ability to answer the question or supply relevant information as needed without having to spend hours of back and forth emails or setting up a potentially long meeting (and remember, as a BA you think bigger than just your product, the company you work for has a finite amount of money and unnecessary meetings are a huge waste of that money).

As mentioned, the Business Analyst is also the translator between Business and Technology. When you are asking a technology team to design and build a product, they can only do a good job if they have the relevant information to do so without being flooded with unnecessary information. Conversely, when there is a technical limitation, a BA needs to be able to convey what the limitation is to a potentially very non-technical person.

Note taker

I put this here to troll the experienced Business Analysts reading this but also as a warning to those starting out as a BA.

There are BAs out there who literally just go to meetings, take notes and regurgitate those notes into Features or User Stories. This is exactly what a bad BA does. As you’ll have noticed from the Requirements Gatherer section, taking surface level notes can lead to major issues. A good BA will ask many questions and seek clarifications. Often the person you are speaking to will only have a small part of the picture themselves or may not have a fully formed idea, and it is the BA who can help them shape that idea into something complete that can also work.

Summary

There is of course far more to what a Business Analyst is and does but we’ve covered the bare-bones. Essentially we know that a good BA is someone who gathers requirements and digs deeper than the surface level request. A BA is also a facilitator and the most successful BAs are fantastic communicators. Finally, we also have established what a bad BA is; a note taker!

Shameless plug time

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