Introduction and some proofs
The profession of a business analyst raises many questions. Moreover, in different situations, the term “business analyst” means a variety of specialists and, accordingly, expect different competencies and results. I propose to look into this issue in as much detail as possible.
I’ll tell you right away the group that will be discussed further, I don’t advertise here, I’m closing it, since I opened it with goals that I had already achieved. So don’t look for it and don’t add it. I’m attaching screenshots as proof.
The information in this article is based on open sources, my personal professional experience, as well as surveys that I periodically conduct among my colleagues and subscribers. At
FB group
I have a closed Facebook group with over 16,400 members at the time of publication. Periodically, we discuss professional topics in the group itself, personal
One of the old events
correspondence, going to meetings in Moscow. I analyze all the information received from subscribers, including using it in a generalized form in my publications.
Why is it important to understand what a business analyst is?
In my profession (and I teach and consult), I often come across these people. And I understand that one of the main problems is a misunderstanding of what a business analyst should do. It is this question that I decided to reveal in this article.
Of course, at the same time, we will understand what you need to demand from an analyst business. This point is no less important. Indeed, without an answer to these basic questions, the result of cooperation is sad for both the specialist and the employer. A person spends a lot of time and energy on unnecessary work.
The employer does not know what to demand from him, by and large. And if you do not know what to demand, then you will always get not what you needed. Just because you didn’t demand anything specific, the expectations were blurred. As a result, any result will not be what you wanted.
At the same time, the specialist will feel that he is not in his place, he himself will not understand what is required of him. And this will definitely affect the quality of work. An unhealthy situation arises. It is in order to avoid it that we will deal with who they are – business analysts.
What they say about business analysts
Now let’s see what others write. For example, I will take three links from the top of the Google search results for the query “business analyst”. In the first place, as expected, I got a link to Wikipedia with the following definition:
A business analyst is a person who uses business analysis methods to study the needs of organizations in order to identify business problems and propose solutions to them.
Further – an article on the RBC website dedicated to this profession. A clear definition was not given here, but a lot of attention was paid to the formalization of the issue, for example, 7 levels of specialist certification are described here.