A business analyst dives into the economy, finances, organizational processes of the company, helps to solve strategic problems and takes the business to a new level.
As you can see, three arbitrary links to authoritative resources (from Google’s point of view) – and three different points of view at once. Moreover, only Wikipedia is trying to give some definition, neutral and at the same time informative.
On the RBC website, the question of who a business analyst is is practically not considered. The main emphasis is on certification and related documents. Although, in fact, this is far from being the main thing in the business analyst profession, more on that later.
On the course website, a business analyst is generally called a completely incomprehensible person who “plunges” somewhere. And there are no specifics.
At the same time, all three publications speak about this and the same profession, and at the same time they are different.
Job Requirements and Training: The Real Situation
If you try to study the programs of training courses and publications of teachers, it turns out that course developers basically write that there should be skills in system analysis, systems thinking, facilitation.
Someone even divides the profession into two – a business analyst and a system analyst. Someone refers to BABOK. Some even write that only those who work exactly according to BABOK can be called a business analyst.
It turns out that there is no business analytics without BABOK?
I read BABOK. And I can say that this is just reading for the sake of reading. It’s just another “rattle” of consultants. If you are interested, I will somehow explain in more detail what it is and why it was invented. But this is not the topic of this article.
What actually happens? The requirements are the most vague. And, as I said above, if the requirements are vague or incomprehensible, and people are taught incomprehensible things, there will be no benefit.
Imagine that in one business analysis course they teach one thing, in another they teach completely different things. The specialist studied in the first year, the leader studied or got acquainted with publications on the basis of another, or in general he was advised to hire such a specialist. The result is out of sync, an unhealthy situation. I have seen this very often. Therefore, all these business analysts fly between organizations. They go to one, then to another, then to a third. Why is that? Because a person, as I said, it is not clear what he is doing.
How do you know what a business analyst is?
I suggest starting to deal with this issue through the name.
A business analyst is a person who does business analysis:
Business is understandable, it is a commercial organization and activity. In my past publications, I have written more than once what business is. In this case, it is activity.
Analysis is also understandable. This is when we take something, consider and draw conclusions.
It turns out that business analysis is an analysis in the narrow commercial activity. But we will consider commercial activities.
At the same time, it is important to understand that analysis does not just happen. Let’s take a blood test as an example. Nobody does it just like that. A blood test is done in order to get certain results. Protein, sugar, something else is measured. They get some numbers, on the basis of which the doctor will be able to draw conclusions about your health, make a diagnosis.
That is, the main goal of any analysis is to get some kind of result.
Let’s see what kind of result is expected from business analysts. Below I will rely not only on the name, but also on my own experience.
What is a business analyst
If we follow all the descriptions that now appear in Runet, it turns out that any leader is a business analyst. Because he must be communicative, must be able to talk and the like. Let’s immediately discard this, as well as common words from incomprehensible definitions.
It is worth talking about business analysis, first of all, from the point of view of more complicated work. That is, business analysis makes sense if it is necessary to obtain the data that one or another group of people cannot obtain without the help of a specialist.
For example, a manager has an understanding that something needs to be changed, a business analysis is needed. In the classic case, the manager gathers his subordinates, requests the necessary data, they send him some information, a description of his work, and he already understands what is wrong here and how to fix it. At the same time, the manager communicates or rewrites, collects data, and then he can change something.
But in reality, the head of the company simply cannot do this work due to his own workload, and also often because he does not quite understand what exactly needs to be received from his subordinates and analyzed.
This responsibility is assumed by the business analyst. Those. a business analyst is the same person who collects, analyzes and, most importantly, formalizes information about activities. This is the essence of his work.