Working with a Business Analyst (BA) can have long-lasting benefits for your business, bringing a range of knowledge and skills, as well as a fresh perspective and consistency of voice.
Below, we break down the core skills that make BAs an incredible asset, and five pivotal improvements they can make to the future of your business.
A Business Analyst is an individual who collaborates with a business to help them define and realise goals. This is achieved by analysing needs, breaking them down into actionable insights, and working with development teams to ensure requirements become tangible outputs.
The title may vary depending on the company or specific area of focus – Business Systems Analyst, Digital Business Analyst, Technical Business Analyst – but expected skills tend to include the following:
1. Scope Guardianship = Efficiency, Accuracy Whether your goal is maximising customer engagement, creating internal process efficiency, improving data quality, or upgrading a Content Management System, the BA will be the unwavering guardian of these requirements. Shielding from scope creep allows teams to remain focused on the project goal, helping to ensure efficient delivery within budget, timelines, and agreed scope.
2. Subject Matter Expertise = Business Continuity, Change Adoption
The BA role requires gleaning detailed info from all corners of the stakeholder map. This coupled with end-to-end involvement throughout the project life cycle affords them a unique position by which they become a subject matter expert. The BA will become a trusted central source of information and insight, resolving questions, enabling consistency, and providing knowledge transfer to ensure business continuity and empower clients.
3.Voice of Customer, Voice of Client, Voice of Development = Consistency
Through frequent contact and deep involvement with different teams during a project, the BA can pivot to represent those not ‘in the room’ during sessions. This could be underlining your client’s strategy on an internal call, challenging a development team to consider the Voice of Customer in decision making, or breaking down an issue that the developers are wrestling with to a project sponsor.
4.Consultancy = Logic
A frequently overlooked quality that a BA brings to the party is consultancy. Working with multiple internal and external stakeholders across a range of industries and domains – as many BAs have done – brings experience on a given business challenge or decision point. Projects with tight deadlines require swift resolution to these. Whether it’s a low impact on-the-spot call, an opportunity to explore, or deep-dive analysis, the BA will have the tools and techniques to consult with the business to work through to resolution.
5.Testing = Quality
A key element of any project requiring development is the test phase, and an effective test phase starts with the Business Analysis team. Through rigorous standards of requirements engineering, and using methods such as Business Driven Design, the BA will provide reliable foundations by which the test team are able to create robust and accurate test scenarios and automations, ultimately leading to a finished product of the highest quality.
Here at Sagittarius, we have a fantastic Business Analysis team who have 15+ years of experience working with a huge variety of clients across a broad spectrum of industries, including financial services, hospitality, travel, entertainment, media, construction, automotive, and insurance.
From Discovery through to project close and beyond, our BAs maintain excellent relationships with stakeholders and provide the essential services required to drive successful business outcomes, through high-quality deliverables.
