These Are the BA Techniques You Should Be Aware Of
For aspiring and new BAs
How can you prepare for a Business Analyst role?
The first answer to this question is to start reading BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge).
This is a very famous name you’ll hear in the BA market, a book with more than 500 pages to cover each and every BA concept.
I also started my preparation by reading this book independently, a sort of self-study approach. But after 1 week, looking at the length of the book, my consistency failed.
Why I am talking about BABOK because this book also includes 50 different techniques that a Business Analyst can use to make the work-life easy.
The question is, what to learn first or which ones are used in a practical BA scenario?
And the reality will hit you hard. A normal BA lifetime doesn't involve even half of those mentioned techniques.
As I said in my last article too, everyone prefers simplicity.
Today I will be listing out those techniques which are really a helping hand for a BA and one must learn to use.
MOST Analysis (mission, objective, strategy and tactics)
Although I haven’t used this technique personally, I feel this analysis is really important to understand a business before you start working on anything as a BA.
Mission — defines the business purpose and core values.
Objective — specifies the desired result to be achieved around the mission.
Strategy — actionable plan to work on the objectives.
Tactics — individual steps under a defined strategic plan.
Business Use Cases
It is one of the important techniques to make sure you understand a system thoroughly and do not miss any requirements.
You’ll be using this when you have to identify various ways how a system/software can be used and hence define its functionalities.
Brainstorming
There is no ideal time to brainstorm. It is considered the best method to come up with multiple ideas while solving a problem.
My favourite way of brainstorming is to sit with my team and draw out the ideas/flows on the whiteboard.
Flow Diagrams
This is again an additional way to understand a process from start to end.
It can also be used to explain an ideal user journey in a system.
Business Process Modelling
It gives an overview of the business process lifecycle.
It will help you to understand and optimize business workflows by creating certain visuals that represent the key business processes.
Estimation
It is a huge topic in itself to learn.
But keep in mind, at every step of a BA lifecycle, estimation has to be taken into consideration to move ahead with multiple tasks.
For eg, estimating the time and effort to complete a user story.
Mind Mapping
It is one of the easy ways to brainstorm ideas.
The visual representation of joining ideas with related topics makes it simpler to think about.
Requirement Analysis
A Business Analyst is not expected to just take the requirements from stakeholders and start building.
The requirements have to be analysed in a way that makes it relevant and detailed enough to be built.
Prioritization
As a Business Analyst, this can be your saviour.
If you know how to prioritize your to-do list then you can manage everything smoothly.
Designing
When a requirement is taken and before discussing it with the development team, you should have a crisp idea about how it will appear to the end user.
Working on rough wireframes or prototypes can immensely help here.
Risk Analysis and Management
Every business problem has a solution but it brings a set of risks too.
Analyzing those risks beforehand and managing them effectively will never delay the work with any blunders.
Root Cause Analysis
Ideally, this approach should be taken at an initial level while working on a business problem and figuring out the solution.
But Business analysts use this technique in almost all types of scenarios where they have to sort things out within their team or outside it.
Stakeholder Identification
Every requirement comes from a person who actually gets affected by the problem you are solving.
Identifying those people at an early stage will make sure you do not miss a key perspective of anyone involved.
Persona Identification
Building a product will result in definite success if it is built keeping in mind the end user.
Persona is the personality of that user where you focus on how he/she uses a certain product and try to mould your solution accordingly.
Conducting surveys, workshops, interviews, focus group sessions etc.
Every business wants to be close to their customers.
But how that can be done?
A Business Analyst utilizes various techniques such as workshops, interviews or surveys to do so. Also, these techniques can be used to get connected with the stakeholders while taking the requirements or whenever in need.
Conclusion
No doubt, there are much more than you see above.
But the journey has to get started from somewhere.
This list gives you an overview of which techniques to pick for the starter and prepare for your interviews as well.
You can learn these techniques in a more descriptive way to help you better utilize them.
Connect with me through the below link for any queries you’ve related to a BA career.
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Hi-Fi!!
