Business Analysis: For Whom & How?

A gentle guide to Business/Data Analysis.

6 min readMay 27, 2021

*Image by* *Werner Du plessis* *from* *Unsplash*

Even a good project can fail without a good Business Analyst on the board. Why it is so critical to involve a good specialist to analyze project requirements, or to be one? Everything is clear. Even if there is a great idea for the product and dev team to realize it, we still don’t know what we will get in the end.

Just doing dry technical tasks is too risky. But doing all the work with the notion it is exactly what user and customer need makes a lot of sense. Business Analyst is like a bridge between developers and customers that makes both sides satisfied. That’s why a specialist who can do good business analysis for a project is an absolute catch for any business owner.

Who is a Business Analyst, and how to become one? Here is the most essential advice.

Who is a Business Analyst?

In a nutshell, Business Analysts gather all requirements and decide how to do things better. They analyze existing data and decide how to avoid unnecessary steps that will not bring any value to the business. To do so, BA dives into business logic, specific domain of a product, its architecture and more. Dev or QA, in turn, is just making a technical task that was described, for instance, in Jira.

Who can be a Business Analyst?

First off, critical thinkers and problem-solvers. Secondly, this job can suit both technical and nontechnical people. You don’t have to learn programming or get a bachelor degree in computer science. You don’t have to waste a few years on studying, and can start your first project really fast. The only conditions are having:

General understanding of business analysis, its tools, approaches;
The ability to dive quickly into a project, learn its architecture, major goal etc.

For this, reason, business analysis requires less time to learn than machine learning, data science, or any programming language. You don’t have to study linear algebra, neural networks. Everything is simpler. Instead, you have to learn to think in a larger level, so you need to know how to analyze things.

Typical day of Business Analyst. Tasks to do.

*Image by* *Moritz Kindler* *from* *Unsplash*

The typical working day of BA may be filled with two things:

1) Gather requirements. You need to gather requirements regarding the product/ discussing the development — meeting with customers or other team members (sometimes these meeting even take the whole day);

2) Analyze requirements. Then it is important to analyze requirements and create tasks for the team. It is very important to describe technical tasks in the right way, know some details of the technical stack, and weigh all the possibilities of a team. This part may include workflow charts and diagrams; studying system capabilities; writing specifications, etc.

Key things BA works with:

Requirements are essentially the most important artifact for any project.
Functional requirements. The product capabilities, or things the product must do for its users.
Non-functional requirements. The quality attributes, design and implementation constraints, and external interfaces that the product must-have.
Notations. It is a conditional set of rules for expressing certain business logic or a graphical description of something. Notations are used when modeling business processes, internal processes, or when developing prototypes. For example, it is when a button looks like a button and not as a picture. That is, it is an internal agreement that the user will use just such a button, and not any other.
Specifications. Apart from this, all types of BA are responsible for making specifications. For instance, if one person leaves a project, there is a high risk to lose all the knowledge gained by him. In that way BA works on making a specification which is a document with necessary links and explanations to help newcomers get into the project more quickly and reuse valuable insights. In some way, it is like technical writing.

Of course, everything depends on the company, its internal processes, the type of project, and so on. That is, all this is changing quite dynamically. Do not forget that BA is a somewhat generalized name for a profession. These people take part in various activities.

Different types of Business Analysts

One way or another, all types of BA have one thing in common — all of them investigate the work with a specific scope of data and suggest some recommendations. But just like with any other role, there are two gradations of BA:

Horizontal gradation — career growth like Junior BA, Middle, Senior, or Team Lead of BAs, etc.
Vertical gradation — Business Analyst are classified into various categories like — Business Analyst, Business Process Analyst, IT Business Analyst, Business System Analyst, System Analyst, Data Analyst, Functional Architect, Usability or UX Analyst, and even more.

For instance, UX Analyst is responsible for increasing the effectiveness of visual objects (increasing conversions). System analyst works with a slightly different type of tasks like working mainly with requirements.

Data Analyst: What’s important to know

Once again, BA works with functional and non-functional requirements. Data analysts, on the other hand, work with data. Their main goal is to clean row data and extract valuable insights from them. That’s why Data analysts are very close to Data scientists.

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As a rule, they should know Python or R to create models to work with data. DA shares the same goal with BA — to find insights and make the right decisions. But if to go deeper, DA is the more narrow implementation of this goal since it requires specific knowledge.

How to become a Business/Data Analyst?

If you are an analytical thinker, have a knack for puzzle solving, are skilled at matching business problems to possible solutions, you can easily become BA. To do so, here are a couple of my tips:

Ask questions. The most essential part of being a successful BA is to ask questions. Most importantly, to ask the right ones and know whom to ask. It is much more effective than spent hours absorbing unnecessary stuff. Just find the right people and know what to ask them — is a key to good analysis.
Know how to ask questions. Yes, not everyone has time to explain everything about the project. That’s why the next thing you need to have is simple empathy. Understand people, and how to keep an effective dialogue with them.
Allow mistakes and trust yourself. Being BA may be stressful because you’re always under pressure of making the right decisions, and what if you make a mistake? But when you think about the possibility of making mistakes, you can’t think rationally anymore. That’s the point.

My top of Instruments for Business Analysis:

Google Apps Script. This tool makes it easy to create and publish add-ons for Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms. Most importantly, it allows adding different settings on top of other docs or tables (even send some data to API from tables). All of your work can be published in Google, so you don’t have to use additional hosting services. Besides, you can use other projects published there.
Excel — work with data elements, analyze them, and more.
Jira — track tasks, backlog, etc.
Confluence — environment for gathering all the information. Much more effective than Google Docs, or something else, because you can view various versions of the document, who and when changed it. Also, you can integrate links from Jira, paste snippets of code, or other links from Confluence. So, in that sense, it is really comfortable for work.
Draw.io — this is open-source software for drawing diagrams. The reason why I like this tool is that you can easily integrate all diagrams in Confluence and edit everything right there any time. Very convenient to visualize some tasks.

Books: