A career as a business analyst, or BA, can be rewarding – it can involve some technical areas that information technology professionals are known for, and can involve communicating and working with other people outside the information technology industry which can be great as well. Read more about how to become a BA in this article. There Isn’t Really A Set Business Analyst Career Path I feel I should highlight this straight away. There isn’t actually a set path to becoming a business analyst. There aren’t any (that I know of) degrees in becoming a business analyst. Sure, there may be introductory business analyst roles out there, but you still require some knowledge and probably some experience to be able to be a successful business analyst. If you speak to business analysts you know through work or other places, you might find that they started in one of two methods: - Commenced in a technical role (e.g. development) and transitioned into business analysis - Started in a business role (e.g. a business user or manager) and moved into business analysis When I began as a BA, I was originally a software developer that moved into a more analysis role. This doesn’t always need to be the case – you can work in support or testing and make a similar move. I would think that most of my readers, who are information technology professionals, would make the transition from technical to BA, rather than from business user to BA. How To Move From Development Into Business Analyst Ok, so assuming you’re in a software development position (or a similar IT role, such as testing, networking, support, etc), and you're interested to move into business analysis. What do you need to know? What are your biggest problems and what should you start with? Well, the role of a business analyst, as mentioned in a recent article, is to determine business requirements to solve a business need, and translate them into technical details that the information technology teams can work with. You may have been involved in this before, from the IT side, or you might not have. No problem if you haven’t. You should look to improve the skills you need for a business analysis role, such as: - Communication skills (speaking with people, asking questions, phone calls) - Establishing requirements based on talks with users - Developing documents that can be understood by business users - Industry knowledge Communication Skills for a Business Analyst A important part of a business analyst’s role is communication. They would spend a large amount of time speaking with users, team members, project managers, team leaders and other stakeholders for a project. Communication skills improve with time, but it’s a good idea to practice yours, work on them, determine what your weaknesses are and improve on those as well. Areas such as listening, asking the right questions, talking to people on the phone, group discussions and negotiation all contribute to the communication skills that you’ll need. Requirements Gathering Is An Important Skill Discovering how to gather requirements is something you’ll need to learn if you want to become a business analyst. Being able to talk to users, determine what their concerns are with current processes, and document them in a method they can be matched to a requirement of a system is something that takes practice and experience. Basically, a requirement, or business requirement, is something that a software or system needs to be able to do to achieve what it is being built for. For example, I’m writing this post in Microsoft Word – one of the requirements for creating that program is that it needs to save files in a certain format. If it couldn’t save files, it wouldn’t be a successful application. Determining priority of requirements is needed as well – this would be retrieved from the users that you talk to. To use the Microsoft Word example again, the Spell check feature is a requirement, but possibly not a high priority one – the program will still operate without it. Industry Knowledge Is Great For Business Analysis Knowledge of the industry that you work in is a good way to help your business analysis career. Sure, building an IT system may just involve getting requirements and making something from those requirements, but to get those requirements it helps to know about the field that the business is in. If the company is in the finance industry, and if you have knowledge of bank transactions and loan processes, it could be useful for determining requirements. Users have this knowledge, where IT people don’t usually know a lot about the industries if they’re beginning as a business analyst. It will help you get better, more accurate requirements and improve the overall quality of the product. In summary, if you’re in an IT role and searching for how to become a business analyst, I think that working on the skills that business analysts need, (such as communication, requirements gathering and industry knowledge) will be a fantastic way to step into a career as a business analyst.
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