What are the key skills for a business analyst?

Business analysis field is one of the fastest growing on a global scale. To be a good business analyst, one needs to have or develop in time a variety of qualities and skills. Needless to say, just like in every fast-growing field, a person has to be adaptable to the changing environment.

Of course, every business analyst brings their unique blend of skills and experience to the role, but there are few common skills for this profession. They can roughly be categorized into three categories: fundamental, technical and Business Analysis (BA) skills.

Fundamental skills

• Communication skills

Regardless of the means or the method of communication, you need to be able to express yourself properly. It is essential to find and ask the right questions and to make your point clearly. For example, if the person (the stakeholder) you are talking to, is not a technical specialist, you will need to modify the way you are asking questions and explaining things.

• Problem solving skills

Of course, this is not a skill, required only in the BA field. A business analyst, just like most IT roles, may have to deal with frequent and random changes. When you work on developing custom business solutions, nothing is 100% predictable. So, finding a way or ways to resolve the problems is essential to moving forward in the process and completing it successfully.

• Decision making skills

professionals who want to pursue a career in the BA field, should be able to correctly and thoroughly assess, receive input from stakeholders and select and effective course of action. Having a sound judgement in business matters is a must because any of them can determine the viability of the business.

• Managerial skills

As business analysts juggle carious activities throughout the day, they should be able to manage responsibilities and balance the various sides of the project. Directing staff members, documenting requirements, handling changes, forecasting budgets, attending meetings are an important part of managing the project as a whole. If the business analyst is unable to play the balancing role in management, he will eventually get caught in the cycle if deadlines and incomplete tasks.

• Negotiation skills

A business analyst is a key figure, the liaison between clients and companies, developers and users, management and IT. Maintaining all these relationships requires strong negotiation and persuasion skills. And a good basis for developing the latter is being a good listener, with the ability to absorb information, and to “digest” it. Then the business analyst should be able to express it unambiguously, so that the other side gets persuaded. Therefore, the result is a profitable outcome for the company and a working solution for the client.

Technical skills

The basic technical skills which a business analyst should possess, are IT skills. Of course, it is not in the field of a business analyst to code the software of a project, but basic understanding of the various information technology aspects is a must. These include: MS Office Suite; basic knowledge of the operating systems (Windows, iOS); knowledge of different types of databases, their application and programs; acquaintance with testing methods and at least one (not mandatory though) programming language.

In the information technology space, the solution development for a project is carried out by means of a specific development methodology. Being acquainted with the different methodologies will help a business analyst figure out what will happen and when will it happen in the development cycle. Among the most common methodologies are: “Waterfall model”, “Rapid Application development”, “Agile Software Development”.

Last but not least, domain knowledge is an essential part of the business analyst’s inventory. One should have knowledge of the domain they are working in. This gives a clear picture of the business case of the project and its background. And also, it helps in solving the domain-specific problems.

BA skills

The basic skills, which come into this category, are closely related to the fundamental skills, described in the beginning. But we shall add few more.

In the first place, here comes elicitation. It means to ‘draw out’. Or in other words, a business analyst should be able to extract, collect, distill, sort out information and requirements from the stakeholders. These requirements are the very basis of a project.

After this, but not less important, comes documentation. A business analyst documents the requirements by creating use cases, user stories, class and sequence diagrams, etc. All the documents have to be complete, unambiguous and up-to-date, which is the main responsibility of a business analyst.

And what is an analyst without analytical skills, you may say. These include: investigative approach, logical thinking, interpretation and problem handling. The good news is that analytical skills can be acquired quickly by using a specific approach. There are some very useful models, types of diagrams and analytical techniques that have proved themselves as working and can be applied to different fields and processes.

So, these were most of the skills, closely related to a business analyst’s profession. Of course, we can also add few common ones, such as: flexibility, presentation, team work. Undoubtedly, every business analyst has something to add or share in this respect. Feel free to share your own tip or experience in the comments below.

And, in case you aspire for a career in this field, do not hesitate to contact us. We would be happy to have you in our team.