3 types of Business Analysts you want to know before putting yourself into one
Explore the perfect fit for you as a Business Analyst
In 2021, when I decided to switch my job role to Business Analyst, I remember how badly my overconfidence broke into pieces as I found this to be the most mysterious and confusing profession.
Looking at different job descriptions, I was shocked and started to question whether I would be able to fit into any of these types or not.
Now I can very well understand the pain of aspiring BAs who try to categorise themselves into one of those types based on their current job role. As a newbie, when you are exploring this area, the question is most common and obvious — “In which category do I fall”?
So let me make that easy for you and I bet, at the end of this blog, you will be able to answer this question by yourself.
Don’t get confused with Business Analytics
The very first mistake you might be doing is, using Business Analytics and Business Analysis interchangeably.
There is not just a difference of “tics” and “sis”…lol😄.
There’s a lot more here which you need to make clear in your head first, to make sure you are looking at the right job profile.
As I have explained in my previous articles, a Business Analyst is an individual who straddles the line between IT and the business to bridge that gap and improve the efficiency.
They understand the current process, product or service and guide accordingly for the improvement. To do so, they take the help of data but the focus is more on processes and functions.
On the other hand, Business Analytics professionals are involved in working with the company’s raw data and making sense of it, so that the leaders can derive some major decisions through the provided data and improve the business outcome.
No doubt, their dictionary has more words like statistics, investigation, data analysis, reports, etc.
3 major types — Process, Product & Project
You know your strengths and capabilities but you’re not able to put yourself into one of the buckets. Let’s do this together now.
- Process Analyst BA
A Process Analyst BA looks at the current process of a business, tries to understand what the pain points are and then suggests twists and turns to those functions to achieve the desired results.
For example, improving the process of sorting packages in Amazon’s warehouse.
- Product Development BA
These are the ones who work on building new products and are found mostly in the digital world.
Their focus is to understand the needs of end users, identify them and, along with stakeholders, provide a viable product as the best outcome.
I can give examples here, as I am currently working in an E-commerce environment, building a new generation platform for end users to enhance their shopping experience.
- Project Management BA
The ones who are more concerned about managing any of the above — either process or product.
They don’t bother going into details but rather how effectively the approach can be taken for project success. You will see that there is no such job title as a Project Management Business Analyst.
Technical & functional BA
“Should I be learning coding languages to work as a BA?”
Yet another repeated question. The answer is — it depends on what role you are applying for.
Ideally a Business Analyst role does not require you to sit and code; you will be given a development team for that. But sometimes, depending on the employer or project need, you have to dive into technical specifications as well.
That’s the basic difference between technical and functional roles.
A functional role requires you to perform the more generic responsibilities of a BA, such as gathering requirements, communicating with clients, drafting business scope and functional requirements, and maybe use cases too.
A technical role requires you to perform generic responsibilities as well as delve into high level technical requirements to prepare technical documents such as test cases, high-level code, etc.
Looking at a job description, it’s quite easy to identify, as functional roles will demand general day-to-day activities to be performed, whereas, for technical roles, companies might specify a particular technology to have an understanding with, such as JAVA, RPA, Hadoop, etc.
There can be many more categories or job titles for a BA profession, such as IT Business Analyst, System Business Analyst, Data Business Analyst and what not. But if you look with a broader perspective, they all fall in one or another of the buckets stated above.
So, at a very core level, first you have to think and decide if you are a process driven person or a data driven person and you’ll be able to clear the first hurdle.
As a next step, write down your core strengths and skills (write as much as you can). You can consider your current or previous job roles here.
Then try to put them into the given buckets above. For example, if you had performed an extraordinary job in figuring out the issue of handling huge customer requests and, after changing the process the results were tremendous, that signifies that you are good in process improvement (put yourself in the process bucket).
At the end of this activity, try to identify in which bucket most of your strengths lie and ask yourself, “Am I comfortable with this?”
Look at the job descriptions and do this every time to figure out whether the role matches your capabilities or not.
You’ll be able to get your answer.😊
Every Tuesday, I talk about the common pain points of aspiring Business Analysts and try to provide them the answers based on my personal experience.
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