Top 7 tips to become a professional business analyst pdf

Top 7 tips to become a
professional business analyst
Top 7 tips to become a pro business analyst
- created by businessAnalyst247

A business analyst is someone who analyzes an
organization or business domain (real or hypothetical)
and documents its business or processes or systems,
assessing the business model or its integration with
technology.
The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA)
describes the role as "a liaison among stakeholders in
order to understand the structure, policies, and
operations of an organization, and to recommend
solutions that enable the organization to achieve its
goals."
The role of a systems analyst can also be defined as a
bridge between the business problems and the
technology solutions. Here business problems can be
anything about business systems, for example the
model, process, or method. The technology solutions
can be the use of technology architecture, tools, or
software application. So System Analysts are required
to analyze, transform and ultimately resolve the
business problems with the help of technology.
Tip 1: Understanding of business analyst roles

Tip 2: Understanding ’s business
analyst job description

1.Define configuration specifications and business requirements
2.Perform Quality Assurance
3.Define reporting and alerting requirements
4.Own and develop relationship with partners, working with them
to optimize and enhance our integration
5.Help design, document and maintain system processes
6.Report on common sources of technical issues or questions and
make recommendations to product team
7.Communicate key insights and findings to product team
8.Constantly be on the lookout for ways to improve monitoring,
discover issues and deliver better value to the customer
Business analyst ‘s job description - Sample 1

1.The analyst works with the business to identify opportunities for
improvement in business operations and processes
2.The analyst is involved in the design or modification of business
systems or IT systems
3.The analyst interacts with the business stakeholders and subject
matter experts in order to understand their problems and needs
4.The analyst gathers, documents, and analyzes business needs and
requirements
5.The analyst solves business problems and, as needed, designs
technical solutions
6.The analyst documents the functional and, sometimes, technical
design of the system
7.The analyst interacts with system architects and developers to ensure
the system is properly implemented
8.The analyst may help test the system and create system
documentation and user manuals
Business analyst ‘s job description – Sample 2

Tip 3: Understanding ‘s business
analyst career path
David Foote, president of Foote Partners
LLC, an IT career research firm in New
Canaan, Connecticut, explains the
business analyst career path best. He
says, "There are career tracks that zigzag
back and forth between IT and business.
Someone might start as a business
analyst, then move into a project
management job, then an IT
management path, then go back to an
innovation path ... then to process
management, then move up a rung to
process leadership or process ownership,
and then go back over to management as
manager of an IT line of business.

Top business analyst ‘s online training
courses & materials
1. User Stories for Agile Scrum+Product Owner+Business Analysis
2. businessanalyst247.info/free-ebook-18-secrets-for-successful-business-
analyst
2. Business Analyst Fundamentals: Business Analysis
3. How to become world class Business Analyst - Cases in Excel
4. Business Analysis: Fundamentals of Use Case Modelling

Tip 4: Develop your ’s soft skills

As an effective communicator, you must
to able to facilitate work meetings, ask the
right questions, actively listen and take in
new information. The ability to
communicate proficiently in person, on
conference calls, in web meetings and
through email is essential. Business
analysts spend a significant time
interacting with clients, users,
management and developers. A project’s
success may revolve around your ability to
clearly communicate things like project
requirements, changes and testing results.
This course may help you: Advanced
communication skills for 21st Century
leaders
1. Communication Skills

While the ability to create workable solutions
to business problems is not unique to
business analysts, it is a necessary skill for
performing the job successfully. As with most
IT roles, the business analyst’s career may be
spent dealing with frequent and random
changes. When these professionals are
working to developing custom business
solutions, nothing is 100% predictable – so
finding ways to quickly resolve problems and
move toward a project’s successful
completion is important in the business
analyst’s role.
This course will help you more: Creative
Problem Solving Skills
2. Problem Solving Skills

First and foremost on the list of soft
skills is the ability to forge strong
relationships, often called stakeholder
relationships. A stakeholder is simply
anyone who has something to
contribute to your project and often
you’ll work with many stakeholders
from both the business and the
technical teams.
This skill involves building trust and
often means stepping into a leadership
role on a project team to bridge gaps.
Available course: Relationship
Coaching: A Guide To Fail-Proof
Relationships
3. Relationship-Building Skills

Another important business
analyst skill is the ability to make
decisions. As a consultant to
management and advisor to
developers, the business analyst is
called upon for sound judgment in
a wide variety of business matters,
any number of which could
determine the viability of the
business. Professionals who wish
to pursue a business analyst
career should be able to assess a
situation, receive input from
stakeholders, and select a course
of action.
4. Decision-Making Skills

Another skill a business analyst
should possess is the ability to
manage projects. Planning the
project scope, directing staff
members, handling change
requests, forecasting budgets and
keeping everyone on the project
within allotted time constraints
are just some of the management
skills a business analyst should
possess. Supervising projects of all
sizes, from inception to
implementation – and usually
concurrently – can take a high
degree of managerial skill.
5. Management Skills

You'll need to prove that you're a
team player but also have the
ability to manage and delegate to
others and take on responsibility.
It's about building positive
working relationships that help
everyone to achieve goals and
business objectives.
Available course: Team Building:
New Strategies for Developing
Effective Teams
6. Teamwork skills

Tip 5: Develop your ’s technical skills
Another important business analyst skill is the ability to make
decisions. As a consultant to management and advisor to
developers, the business analyst is called upon for sound
judgment in a wide variety of business matters, any number of
which could determine the viability of the business.
Professionals who wish to pursue a business analyst career
should be able to assess a situation, receive input from
stakeholders, and select a course of action.

To be able to properly interpret and
translate a customer’s business
needs into application and
operational requirements, every
analyst needs phenomenal analytical
skills. A significant amount of your
job will be analyzing data and
documents, reviewing user input
questionnaires and operational
workflow to determine the right
courses of action to take.
Available course: Analytics for All:
Beginners to Experts
1. Analytical Skills

While documentation or writing could be considered
a subset of written communication, it’s really its own
skill set for a BA. Here I include the ability to create
clear and concise documentation (the latter
becoming increasingly necessary in a lean or agile
world). As a new business analyst, you may not have
experience in a variety of business analyst
specifications (that comes with time and a variety of
project experiences) but it’s quite possible that your
strong general documentation and writing skills will
get you started.
And it will be easier to get into your first BA role if
you can correlate your past experience in something
very similar to a formal BA specification to the kinds
of specifications required for any given position. And
this is possible even if you’ve never worked in a
formal environment.
2. Documentation and Specification Skills

Excel will be your daily bread,
your dearest friend to learn how
to present the problem in Excel an
how to use it to solve them. Have
a look at some nice examples of
sucha analyses. More examples of
intermediate and advanced
analysis carried out in consulting
you can find in my on-line course
Available course: Excel with The
Ultimate Microsoft Excel Course
3. Excel skills

Whether you are analyzing ways
of improving production or
efficiency of marketing activities
you will have to do some sort of
market, competition or consumer
research. Therefore, be aware of
the methods and resources
available. Go through overview of
market research methods to see
how big is the arsenal. If this is
not enough you can also take a
short course on market research
methods (with examples in excels)
4. Market research

A close sister to many analysis
techniques is the ability to create
visual models, such as work-flow
diagrams or wireframe
prototypes. For any given analyst
role, there could be specific
models you need to create. As a
general skill set, it’s important to
be able to capture information
visually – whether in a formal
model or a napkin drawing.
5. Visual Modeling

As a new business analyst, the ability
to use basic office tools such as Word,
Excel, and PowerPoint should be
sufficient to get you into the
profession.
Other technical skills include the ability
to use modeling tools, such as Visio or
Enterprise Architect, requirements
management tools, such as DOORS or
Caliber, or project and defect
management tools (there are really too
many to list these days). It’s unlikely
you’ll find these to be required skills
for a large number of positions and
they will be skills you learn on-the-job.
6. Business Analysis Tools

analyst KPIs
Tks for KPIs ‘s source:
- enfocussolutions.com
- kpi123.com/free-ebook-2456-KPIs-examples

• Number of non-IT recommendations implemented – Often business
analysts stay focused on just providing the IT solution and miss many
low hanging fruit which are not IT related.
• Percentage of Business Objectives that were Achieved – SMART
business objectives should be defined for every project. However, the
real measure is how many of the business objectives were achieved.
• Scope Statement Quality Index – Carefully defining good solution
scope statements is key to defining good requirements. Conduct an
independent peer review of the scope statements and assess a
numerical score using predefined critiera.
Solution Planning and Analysis KPIs

• Stakeholder satisfaction index – Project stakeholders should be interviewed to determine their
satisfaction with the solution. This might be done with a series of questions such as:
– Were your needs addressed?
– How effective were communications with the solution team?
– Did you have transparency into the project?
– Was your investment of time worthwhile?
• Number of stakeholder comments received? – How many comments or concerns were received about
the requirements?
• Stakeholder lifecycle participation – What % of the stakeholders participated in the following lifecycle
events?
– Solution scope definition
– Requirements development
– Documenting business rules
– Defining key terms
– Design review
– Providing clarifications during build
– Participating in demonstration sessions
– Acceptance Testing
– Instructional design review
Stakeholder Engagement KPIs

• Number of stakeholder complaint (emails and letters) received –
Sometimes stakeholders get frustrated and write emails or voice
complaints. Many of these are because of poor communication problems.
• Number of key stakeholders that were either not identified or identified
late in the project – How many stakeholders were missed during the
stakeholder analysis activity?
• Number of participating stakeholders? – How many stakeholders were
interviewed or participated in focus groups?
• Stakeholder Attendance % – The number of stakeholders that attended
meetings versus the number of stakeholders that were invited
• Number of needs identified by stakeholders – Stakeholders provide needs
that are translated into requirements. One of the best measures for
stakeholder engagement is to see how many needs they provided.
Stakeholder Engagement KPIs

• Business Process Productivity Increase % – The actual increase in
business productivity after the system has been implemented.
• Cycle Time Reduction % – The decrease in cycle time that occurred
after the system was implemented expressed as a percentage.
• Unit Cost – The average unit cost decrease after the solution has
been implemented and operational for 6 months.
• Increase in Revenue attributed to Solution – The actual increase of
revenue that can be directly attributable to the solution.
• Decrease in Cost attributed to Solution – The actual decrease in cost
that can be directly attributable to the solution.
Business Process Optimization KPIs

• Cost Variance – % of Actual Cost to Projected Cost identified in business case.
• Revenue Variance – % of Actual Revenue achieved versus revenue increase predicted in
business case.
• User Satisfaction Index – Are the users satisfied with the delivered solution?
• Deviation of planned ROI – The deviation of the planned Return on Investment (ROI) is the
difference between Return on Investment in the planned baseline and the actual Return on
Investment. ROI is the return an investment will generate annually as a percentage of the
total investment.
• Deviation of net present value (NPV) – The deviation of the planned net present value
(NPV) is the difference in value between the planned baseline against the actual net present
value. NPV is a method used in discounted cash flow analysis to find the sum of money
representing the difference between the present value of all inflows and outflows of cash
associated with the project by discounting each at a target yield.
• Deviation of planned break-even time – The deviation of the planned break-even time is
the difference in time between the planned baseline against the actual break-even time. The
break-even time is determined by the point where the business expenses equal the income
(or cost reductions) generated, with neither profit nor loss.
Achieving Business Case Benefits

• Percentage of rework attributable to requirements – Rework is a serious problem on most
projects, representing about 40% of total project cost. According to industry studies, about
70% of this rework is related to ambiguous, inaccurate, or missing requirements.
• Percentage of projects with prioritized requirements – Prioritizing requirements is critical to
ensure that project teams first focus on items that deliver high value to the business.
• Percentage of requirements fully implemented – This is part of requirements traceability;
requirements must be traced through design, test, and deployment.
• Percentage of approved requirements not implemented- A test of the likelihood of user
satisfaction with the final result.
• Developer Requirements Satisfaction Index- Developers should be surveyed to determine
their satisfactions with requirements. This actually should be presented as a series of
requirements questions concerning quality such as
– Clear
– Accurate
– Complete
– Testable
– Feasible
– Testable
Requirements Quality KPIs

• Project Stakeholder Satisfaction Index – Project stakeholders should be
interviewed to determine if they felt their needs were met and their overall
satisfaction with the requirements. This might be done with a series of questions
such as:
– Do the requirements address the business needs?
– Were the requirements gold plated by BAs or developers?
– Were stakeholders adequately involved in the requirements process?
• QA Requirements Satisfaction index – QA should be surveyed to ensure that the
requirements were testable.
• Percentage of Requirements Tested – One good measure to determine if the
requirements were testable and implemented is to determine what % of the
requirements were actually tested.
• Number of missing requirements – Missing or incomplete requirements is always a
major problem for projects. This KPI tracks the number of requirements that were
added after the baseline was approved.
Requirements Quality KPIs

analyst mistakes

1. Never assume any requirement: If you have any doubts on requirements,
keep questions ready or write it as business analysis assumptions and
highlight it in your document. Review it thoroughly with your stake holders
as early as possible.
2.Jumping into ‘how to do’ instead of what they want. Never ever jump
into functional requirements before you capture the business
requirements. It is one big mistake which does not give you an option to be
flexible later. Do it the agile way.

3. Get feedback. Get feedback about the requirements from your
stakeholders. I always prefer keeping in loop my Product Managers (who
have expertise in the product), the Testing team (so that they know the
requirements are testable) and the Development team (so that you
know the requirements are feasible). Always remember - incorrect
requirements are worse than incomplete requirements.
4. Difficulty in dealing with some stakeholders. I used to do this mistake
often - when I see a difficulty in dealing with a stake holder, I used to
just ignore them; but now I know the best way to deal with them is to
have a one-on-one meeting as soon as possible.

5. Ask more questions. A good trait of a smart BA - A smart BA doesn't
look bad when he asks a dumb question. He makes that dumb question
smart. Interviewing a stakeholder and getting enough data is a must for
any BA role.
6. Requirements trace-ability- The ability to trace business requirements
into test cases and to propagate these into functional requirements and
development tasks is very important. Never miss that. A good process
makes a smart BA. If there are any changes in the requirement, the BA
can easily tell which test cases will be impacted based on his analysis.
That makes everyone's life easy.

Top 7 tips to become a professional business analyst pdf

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