The key role and skills of a business analyst

A business analyst has become one of the significant positions in every organization. The business analyst plays an essential role in ensuring that the organization’s resources are well utilized. Every department might require one, and the HR manager makes recruitments. When hiring a business analyst for the IT department, he or she must portray specific skills. Every business requires a business analyst to analyze the market requirement and what should be done to meet the demand. This article will include the roles of a business analyst and the skills they must portray.

Roles of a business analyst

• Collecting, evaluating, analyzing business data, and making recommendations.
• Conducting market research and ensuring that every department is running smoothly.
• Identifying and communicating the changes required.
• Bridging the gap between the marketing goal and IT capabilities
• Taking part in employee training and communicating the possible solutions.

Skills of a business analyst

A business analyst must not only perform the above reasons but also portray some of the below skills.

Communication skills

A business analyst should have good communication skills and should be able to communicate if there any change to be undertaken. He or she also is supposed to solve the organization’s problems, and it can be done through open-ended questions. The business analyst needs to organize and attend meetings with stakeholders if need be.

Critical thinking

A business analyst must be a critical thinker, and the need to think about what should be done on specific issues lies on him. He or she needs to think about if resources should be allocated on a particular project and if the stakeholders need it.

Visual demonstration skills

 A business analyst must communicate to the stakeholders about the recommendations made from the data collected and analyzed. The visual demonstration skills include a flow diagram, road map, the business domain model, etc.

The analytics skills

As the name suggests, the business analysts should analyze the business process, conduct solution validations, and conduct SWOT analysis well.

Good relationship skills

A business analyst must be able to understand the owner’s need and communicate it to the employee. This requires him or her to have good relationship skills with the stakeholders and understand them.

How to assess the business analyst skills?

When hiring a business analyst conducting an interview won’t just be enough. However, there are specific tools that he or she needs to master they include; DOORS, MS Word, MS Visio, etc. if the business analyst is aware of these tools, three tests are conducted to test his or her skills include;

Knowledge test- this is conducted to check whether the candidate is aware of the business terminologies concerning the business models they use, etc.

English test – this will be needed to assess English proficiency of non-native speakers. You can use tools such as KillerCoder to evaluate a candidate’s reading accuracy and fluency in understanding a specific text and conveying that information.

Documentation test: Here, the analyst is assessed to check whether they have the technical skills to document review given a particular book.

Elicitation test- the candidate is tested whether he or she portrays some elicitation skills to handle the organization’s challenges.

In conclusion, a business analyst is an essential tool in any business. He or she performs the task that is directly concerned with the future success of the company.