A Competent Business Analyst

A Business Analyst is an important role in any project. They are the main reason to understand and fulfil the client requirements. A Business Analyst works closely with clients, internal and external stakeholders, where they mainly build a rapport with them to feel settled, so that the clients and stakeholders will be able to express freely and explain about their requirements, as per their needs. A Business Analyst plays a crucial role where other team members involved in the project depend on them for clarity on what exactly they need to develop on a project so that they meet the client needs and improve client satisfaction. A Business Analyst mainly gather requirements using several techniques, analyze them using various methods, break these requirements into simpler versions that help the designers and architects to the design the layouts and also developers who will understand the requirements clearly due to the simpler versions shared by the BAs, and testers who can easily validate the developed features against the easily understandable requirements shared by the BAs. In order to be successful in their role, Business Analysts need to be very active and they need to have a lot of competencies required as part of their role. These competencies include Analytical thinking where the BAs would try to understand the situations and problems and try to break the complex versions to smaller versions so that they can work on these problems individually. BAs should also have problem solving ability where they can solve these problems with appropriate solutions. BAs should have the capacity to analyse requirements and needs shared by the clients and other stakeholders. This involves various steps right from gathering or collecting with the help of various elicitation techniques, analysing and prioritizing these requirements based on various techniques including MosCoW and MVP techniques, breaking these requirements into functional, non-functional and finally sharing these requirements with the project team. BAs should have an excellent communication skill, where they should be able to convey their message in a clear and professional way without being ambiguous or rude. BAs should have have good email communication skills as they are dealing with clients most of the time and sharing the proof in the form of mail communications with the clients. They should be able to explain and share the details clearly in emails. BAs should be able to manage Stakeholders and clients, no matter how difficult they are to work with. This is the most important skill as the stakeholders and clients change for each project and they differ in the way of handling things. BAs should display a lot of Patience which is another main skill required as part of dealing with stakeholders and clients. BAs should have great listening skills and try to give a lot of space to the clients to share their needs before providing any judgements or comments. BAs should have a great documentation skills as the project team members refer to these documents as the source of truth for their design, development and testing. BAs should have high critical thinking and Quality Analysis mindset so that they can help the testers to create test scenarios and also help them with validating Business rules. Apart from these competencies, it is always helpful for the BAs if they have the knowledge of the domain they are working in and also it will be great if they are technically aware. Overall, BAs play a major role in a project and they will be able to contribute better of they have the mentioned competencies.