Core Skills
Communication Skills
- Must be good communicator.
- Facilitate working meetings, ask good questions, really listen to the answers, and absorb what is being said.
Problem-Solving Skills
- The entire project is a solution for a problem.
- Facilitate a shared understanding of the problem, the possible solutions, and determine the scope of the project.
Critical Thinking Skills
- Responsible for evaluating multiple options.
- While discovering the problem to be solved, must listen to stakeholder needs.
- Critically consider those needs and ask probing questions until the real need is understood.
Business Analysis Skills
Documentation and Specification Skills
- Ability to create clear and concise documentation.
- Creates requirements documents.
Analysis Skills
- Uses a variety of techniques to analyze the problem and the solution.
- E.g. Use cases, Business Process Models, Decision Models.
- Identifies the downstream impact of a change or new solution.
Visual Modeling
- Ability to create visual models, such as work-flow diagrams or wireframe prototypes.
- Important to be able to capture information visually – whether in a formal model or a napkin drawing.
Facilitation and Elicitation Skills
- Facilitates specific kinds of meetings.
- Most common kinds of elicitation sessions are interviews and observations.
- More advanced roles, the meetings are called “JAD sessions” or “requirements workshops.”
Business Analysis Tools
- Ability to use basic office tools such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
- Ability to use modeling tools, (e.g. Visio or Enterprise Architect), requirements management tools, (e.g. DOORS or Caliber) or project and defect management tools.
Soft Skills
Relationship-Building Skills
- Ability to build strong relationships, often called “stakeholder relationships”.
- This skill involves building trust.
Self-Managing
- The most successful BAs manage the business analysis effort.
- Manages themself to commitments and deadlines.
A Thick Skin
- Receives a barrage of feedback – on their documentation and proposed solutions.
- Able to separate feedback on his documents and ideas from feedback on his personally.
A Paradoxical Relationship with Ambiguity
- Ambiguities in requirements specifications lead to unexpected defects.
- Ambiguities in conversation lead to unnecessary conflict.
- At every stage of a project, can be found a BA clarifying and working out ambiguities.
- At the beginning of a project, before the problem is totally understood and the solution is decided upon, a BA must be able to embrace the ambiguity and work effectively through ambiguity.
Aloka Perera
alokabperera@gmail.com
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