11/14/2016

What Business Analyst Skills are Important for a New BA?

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Filed Under: BA Roles and Responsibilities, Becoming a BA

Tagged With: Improve My BA Skills

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Are you exploring a business analyst role and wondering if you have the required

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business analysis skills and experience?

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Analyst

Its likely that you have many

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transferable skills. But just what skills

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are transferable to business analysis?

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And which ones are most important?

What follows is the list of the most
critical business analysis skills for new
business analysts to bring to the table
organized into the categories of core

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skills, business analysis skills, soft skills,

and skills that can be required for
specific types of BA jobs.
Before I forget, I want to be sure you know about my step-by-step BA career
planning course (its free) thats designed to help you, the mid-career professional,
kick-start your business analysis career.
Now, onto the skills.

Typically if business analysis is a good career choice, youll be able to tick off these
skills (or be extremely excited to go to work right away on improving these skills just
because they sound interesting).

Business analysts must be good communicators. This means they can facilitate
working meetings, ask good questions, listen to the answers (really listen), and
absorb whats being said. In todays world, communication does not always happen
face-to-face. The ability to be a strong communicator in a virtual setting (via
conference calls or web meetings) is equally important.

No project is without problems. In fact, the entire project is a solution to a problem.

At the highest level, BAs facilitate a shared understanding of the problem, the
possible solutions, and determine the scope of the project. Youll also find BAs in
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What Business Analyst Skills are Important for a New BA?

the midst of facilitating teams to solve technical challenges, especially when they
involve negotiation between multiple business or technical stakeholders.

Business analysts are responsible for evaluating multiple options before helping a
team settle on a solution. While discovering the problem to be solved, business
analysts must listen to stakeholder needs but also critically consider those needs
and ask probing questions until the real need is surfaced and understood. This is
what makes critical thinking and evaluation skills important for new business
analyst.
While communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills are core to being
a good BA, they are not all thats required. Lets look at the skills specific to the
business analysis profession next.

The following skills are specific to the business analyst role, but even as a new
business analyst or someone looking to enter the profession, youll see its possible
you have related transferable experience (and therefore skills) doing similar work
under a different title.
(By the way, this is something I can help you do a deep dive into. Click here to learn
more about the BA Essentials Master Class, a virtual, self-study course that walks
you through the 8-step business analysis process.)

While documentation or writing could be considered a subset of written

communication, its 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 its 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 youve
never worked in a formal environment.

Business analysts use a variety of techniques to analyze the problem and the
solution. As a new BA, you might find that you naturally see gaps that others gloss
over and identify the downstream impact of a change or new solution. As you
mature as a BA, youll use a variety of techniques to conduct analysis and
deconstruct the problem or solution. Examples include use cases, business
process models, and decision models.
In this skill area, we see many cases where professionals have related experience
in analyzing problems using different techniques. Your experience is transferable
and can be expanded by applying some of the BA techniques in your current work.

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What Business Analyst Skills are Important for a New BA?

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, its
important to be able to capture information visually whether in a formal model or a
napkin drawing.

BAs facilitate specific kinds of meetings. The most common kinds of elicitation
sessions a BA facilitates are interviews and observations. In some more advanced
roles, the meetings are called JAD sessions or requirements workshops.
Most new BAs have experience running very similar meetings or facilitating
discussions that can is transferable into elicitation experience.

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). Its unlikely youll find these to be required skills for a large number of
positions and they will be skills you learn on-the-job.
And as important as it is to have specific business analyst skills, no list of BA skills
would be complete without the soft skills required to be successful as a BA. Lets
discuss those next.

Like the core skills, you might find that you already have many of these skills in
your repertoire. However, these skills are listed separately because they may not
be intrinsic to the roles youve had in the past. You may need to actively seek out
improving in these areas as you move into your first business analyst role.

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 youll 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.

While BAs are not project managers, the most successful BAs manage the
business analysis effort. This means that the BA is proactive and dependencyaware. It also means they manage themselves to commitments and deadlines, a
skill set which can involve influence, delegation, and issue management.

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What Business Analyst Skills are Important for a New BA?

BAs receive a barrage of feedback on their documentation and proposed

solutions. To succeed as a business analyst you need to be able to separate
feedback on your documents and ideas from feedback on you personally.

Deep down, business analysts despise ambiguity. Ambiguities in requirements

specifications lead to unexpected defects. Ambiguities in conversation leads to
unnecessary conflict. At every stage of a project, youll find a BA clarifying and
working out ambiguities.
Yet, at the beginning of a project, before the problem is fully understood and the
solution is decided upon, a BA must be able to embrace the ambiguity and work
effectively through ambiguity. Managing ambiguity means we embrace new
information and learning as it surfaces, even if it surfaces later than wed like.
And so weve reached the end of the important skills for a new business analyst.
But no discussion of this topic would be complete without dealing with the 800pound gorillas in the profession.
On we go.

So, there are not one, or two, but THREE 800pound gorillas in the profession? Yes there are,
and they are technical skills, methodology skills,
and business/industry domain expertise
respectively.
So lets look at these separate skill sets now.

First on the list is technical skills. What about SQL, .NET, Perl, and VBScript (just to
name 4 of the potentially dozens of relevant IT skills in the job marketplace today)?
While its important that a business analyst have a conceptual technical
understanding as it helps you analyze the problem to be solved and communicate
with technical stakeholders, you dont need to be able write code or run database
queries.
Unless you want to. If you want to there are plenty of hiring managers who will
gladly take you on as a BA and a software developer.
We see technical skills in business analyst jobs for a variety of reasons, but most
often its because the organization is looking for one person to fill two roles.
There goes the first 800-pound gorilla.
Onto the second.

Another way the business analyst job role can be specialized is around a specific
methodology. Common examples include:
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What Business Analyst Skills are Important for a New BA?

Agile Business Analysis

Six Sigma
Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)
Rational Unified Process
Etc.
Pick just about any specific way that an organization could choose to approach
change or software development, and you can find business analyst job profiles
requesting BAs with this specialized skill set.
Having one or more of these skill sets in your back pocket can be an added
advantage when it comes to searching for a job, and quickly getting up to speed on
any specialized methodologies in place in your organization is critical for a new
business analyst.

Now for the third, because what about business and industry domain expertise? Do
I need to learn about the financial domain? Or insurance? Or the ins and outs of
running an HR department?
How can I ever become a BA if I must learn this all first?
You dont need to be an expert in every domain or industry.
In fact, that would be impossible.
Yes, a lot of BA jobs require special areas of expertise. If you have areas of
expertise in specific domains, you can leverage your expertise in your BA career.
But if you dont have a specific expertise to leverage, youll just need to focus on
opportunities that will value your other business analysis skills.
And with that discussion, weve effectively dealt with 3 800-pound gorillas. Not bad
for a days work! But theres one more thing Id like you to keep in mind.

There is a big difference between business analysis and business analyst roles.
This means that as a business analyst we might specialize in any number of skills.
It also means that even if were experts in business analysis, we may not qualify for
all business analyst jobs.
Even the most senior business analyst, the kind who would qualify for the CBAP
based on their years of experience across multiple knowledge areas, would
probably qualify for less than the 50% of the business analyst job roles
available today.
They simply dont have the required skills.
If you are making a career transition, the stakes are even higher. Dont expect to
qualify for more than 20% of business analyst job roles.
At first this might sound bleak. But let it sink in.
Doesnt that take the pressure off just a little?
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What Business Analyst Skills are Important for a New BA?

Instead of chasing around dozens of skills you arent even certain youd enjoy
using, you have permission to focus on the relevant BA skills you already have.
Whew.
We cover how this kind of focus can impact your job search in our business analyst
job search process.

An essential element of succeeding in a business analyst

job role is understanding the business analysis process. We
walk you through an 8-step business analysis process in the
4-week self-study session of the BA Essentials Master
Class. Youll learn a step-by-step process that you can
customize to meet your organization and project situations,
how to create a timeline for a new business analyst
assignment, and be prepared to handle the more common issues BAs face on new
projects.
Click here to learn more about the BA Essentials Master Class

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