Decoding the world of a business analyst
In a post-pandemic world, as more businesses across the globe embrace technology and become increasingly data-driven, business analysts can become the key enablers in delivering impactful digital journeys.
At its core, a business analyst is a person who can strike a reasonable friendship with a tech-oriented development team as well as business-oriented, presentation-loving people - aka your clients.
For the Indic-political folks, imagine business analysts as an army of people representing a country like India, a tech-focused country like the United States, and a numbers-oriented, revenue-focused county rich in natural resources like Russia. India is an important strategic ally of both these nations, maintains a cordial relationship with them while pursuing an independent foreign policy reflecting civil values and an enlightened national interest.
The success ingredients in both analogies (politics or the corporate world) largely remain the same. You have to be responsible, action-oriented, and delivery-focused, and make use of analytical skills to navigate and tackle tough situations to arrive at conclusions that are of mutual benefit. But there is a distinction between the two. Unlike the political world where complex geo-political and national interests are taken care of while building relationships, the world of corporate product delivery is much simpler, at least from an individualistic perspective.
The two actors - the tech team and the business team - each have their strengths and limitations and you are brought in to be the catalyst that optimizes their processes and positively impacts the digital journey. Business teams have:
- Sound understanding of functional processes.
- Are better enablers in response to blockers faced during product development.
- Are advocates of digital transformations.
- Want quick wins to get a sense of accomplishment or evaluate the possibilities of solutions.
- Want to audit work at continuous intervals to ensure their investments and goals are aligned as per business needs.
- Are delivery-focused.
- Have varying levels of digital literacy - from knowing basic email etiquette and Excel skills to knowing specialized tools and frameworks.
People in senior management often have more generalized roles that focus on organization-level visibility and delivery. Some of those roles can be Customer Success Manager, Corporate Delivery Manager, Digital Partner, etc. The higher they are in the hierarchy, the better communicator you should be.
Just like business teams, tech teams also have their set of strengths and limitations. They:
- Have good hands-on and implementation experience.
- Possess good troubleshooting and debugging skills in their respective tech domains.
- Are usually less focused on documentation and maintenance of project-oriented artifacts.
- Require a minimum groundwork to be done to kick off their scope of work.
Junior developers or engineers may also lack the perspective to think about project practices, or the best approaches that need to be adopted for areas critical to clients such as team or organization-wide adoption, phase-wise success criteria, identity, and security compliance, meeting product vision, and adopting governance practices.
This is where a business analyst comes into the picture. One needs to understand that there is a lot more that goes into launching a successful product than just a great team of developers or business experts. Every successful digital venture can essentially be broken down into three key ingredients:
- People: Subject-matter experts (SMEs), tech leads, developers, managers, consultants, and analysts.
- Processes: Product lifecycle, quality control, risk assessment and mitigation, governance, compliance policies, training, and project tracking.
- Technology: A combination of tools used in the development, design, tracking, deployment, and maintaining of digital solutions.
Every organization has certain goals in mind when they are making investments in adopting technological solutions. They could be:
- To increase revenue by automating mundane, repetitive, and pattern-oriented tasks.
- Forecast future spending numbers, usage, and other business metrics.
- To adapt and expand their technological footprint.
- Gathering data-based insights to take better decisions.
Even though organizations may be tech-savvy or investing aggressively in their digital solutions, the success of the digital product or service depends on many factors:
- How good is the adoption rate? How likely is it for an employee of an organization to use that product? If not promoted or incentivized, would they still use it?
- How much business value is generated out of it and how much of it is responsible for directly increasing revenue?
- How frequently does the organization care to maintain and integrate the functionalities that cater to the needs of its users.
Now, all of this might seem irrelevant and you might be thinking what does this have to do with my work? The honest answer to this is that it matters.
Seeking answers to these crucial observations will not just help you deliver things but also intuitively get involved in the product journey. Knowing answers to these kinds of questions will also help you reason logically in case you decide to be the next entrepreneurial star. Every entrepreneur starts as a customer and so they must know their customers well.
A business analyst will get to work with a diverse set of people in the industry ranging from software developers, consultants, testers, salespersons, managers, solution architects, and team leads to name a few roles. The actual diversity and size of your team depend on the organizational goals, expected outcomes, financial investments, etc. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach here.
To conclude, for a business analyst to deliver impactful and qualitative product deliveries, having a sound understanding of the client’s vision, challenges and technological impact is essential in addition to understanding technology and the audience.
