Business Analysis is the core of project management. It is the first major activity starting after project initiation requiring multifaceted skills. Some of the skills or qualities required are prime than the other. The prime qualities are those which make a business analysis process perfect. Without these prime qualities one can not think of conducting a proper business analysis process or becoming a good business analyst. These twelve core qualities of a business analyst are:
1. Process: Business Process understanding & Process Flow is very crucial part of business analysis. Without the knowledge of business process an analyst can’t draw accurate process flow charts without which nobody in the project team would be able to understand the process and requirements.
2. Requirements: Requirement gathering, Requirement Analysis & System Analysis comes along with the process requirements. Once an analyst is clear about the process and its flow, he starts focusing in business requirements, analyze them to draw out system requirements.
3. Documentation: Without proper documentation, an analyst’s life is incomplete. If the documentation is poor, the whole project’s progress may go haywire.
4. Interviewing Skills: An analyst’s role is to interview various people at various levels at customer site to understand the process flow, process requirements, business and business requirements.
5. Business Needs: Identification and prioritization of business needs is what need to be driven out of business understanding and business requirements. Once business needs are understood, and documented, their prioritization is the next step.
6. Business Expectations: What exactly business or in turn the customer expects out of the whole project. What is the core of the software is process has to align with the core business expectations or requirements.
7. Relationship: A congenial relationship with the client team, management and other stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle is very important to maintain.
8. System specifications: An analyst has to take care that properly clear and complete system specifications are drawn out by development or project implementation team in such a way that these requirements fulfill the business needs for a substantial period.
9. Testing: An analyst is a shadow of the customer. He is the one who has been facing customer from beginning to capture their requirements. The analyst has to be a good tester also to develop test strategy and test plan & perform Functional Testing on behalf of customer.
10. At implementation stage: An analyst has to ensure that if not hem then whosoever is assigned the task of integration testing and UAT (user acceptance testing) at customer site must be in sync with the specifications chalked out by the analyst.
11. Technical Support: During and post implementation, an analyst has to ensure a right window to customer to provide them appropriate timely technical support.
12. Functional Support: All issues will not pertain to technical resolutions. Mostly, at initial stages, a user is stuck more at functional level rather than due to any technical flaw in the application. An analyst has to be very clear about the functionality of the software, and that he will be, obviously, to support the customer functional team.
