The Basics Of Business Analysis

Business Analysis is the task of understanding business change needs, assessing the business impact of those changes, capturing, analyzing and documenting requirement and supporting the communications and delivery of requirement with relevant stakeholders.

-BA Training Solutions. 

Business Analysts are said to be the link of communication between the IT and business stakeholders of a company. These professionals have a similar job to the architect, who has been given the responsibility of building a house on a newly purchased land. In this case, the architect will start from the basics, will go analyze the strengths and weakness of that land, approach professionals to provide help throughout the process and finally, construct the house. This is a similar way a Business Analyst works, but here the difference is that they work for building a company with the help of a computer system.

The job title, ‘Business Analyst’ is more of an umbrella term to all those job profiles, which result in improving the various aspects of implementing improvements, for the furthering of a business firm. The field of business analysis, is basically where any business is analyzed through its various processes, improvements within are identified and changes are implemented so as to ensure growth and development of the firm. The various titles that a business analyst can have are namely, data analyst, solutions provider, requirements manager, product owner, product manager, specifications writer and so on.

According to the International Institute of Business Analysis, the basic job description within this field is that, A BA works as a liaison among stakeholders to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business process and information systems. Thus the various functions of these professionals include, using technology to solve problems and improve outcomes, enhancing the quality of sales, customer servicing, account management, client relationship and the likes. Thus basically, an aspirant looking for a job as a Business Analyst needs to possess great listening skills, be adept in multitasking, have exemplary people’s skills, great negotiation skills, attention to detail and the knowledge to prioritize correctly.

The jobs in this field aren’t restricted to any particular industry, but most of the jobs are available in the  information technology or the management consulting firms. Other fields suitable for a business analyst may include accounting, finance, investment banking, market research and others. While there are some BA roles, that also require a professional to have some level of data analytics skills and have the knowledge, as to how to convert logic and numbers into value based decisions for the company.

Education requirements for this field are a background in either finance, technology, management or accounting. While there are a lot of business analysts who do not belong to the technical background, but still are able to function in their roles. Having a certain amount of experience becomes a per-requisite to get into esteemed companies as an entry level BA. This is the reason why a lot of people opt for specialization courses after their graduation. As the world has gone online, there are various institutes like Imarticus Learning, which offer industry endorsed courses in the field of business analysis, which are both in classroom and online formats. These online business analysis courses can be taken at the pace of the candidate and are based thoroughly on experiential training.