Jess,
Welcome to this forum. First, the best analysts are those who have liberal arts degrees. A Masters in Ecology will do you well. Second, interviewing business users and documenting their requirements is a very good start. I think you need a bit of methodology, systems thinking, process analysis and data analysis skills in your kit bag.
Now it would serve you well to read up on DFD (data flow diagrams) in the old structured analysis design technique (SADT) of such gurus and DeMarco and Ed Yourdon (I think Yourdon has made his old book available for free to download). This is an old and dated technique; but it intuitively teaches you to think of deconstructing your users’ sentences into Process (actions) and Data (things). Why the old DFDs? Because it stresses that a process has INPUT and OUTPUTs. This point is not explicitly emphasised in the newer techniques, and you may miss a fundamental conceptual building block.
Once you have some understanding of the old technique, focus you energies on UML as a technique (Its not a methodology). Again, you will again notice that the UML diagrams are split into two groups: one group for process (actions) and the other group on Objects (things). A light tome to digest is “Fowler, M (2004),UML Distilled, 3rd Edition”.
Once you’ve intuited the UML and the old SADT, its prudent to focus on Process and Data (Objects) techniques. The description of Activity diagrams in UML is deficient as it an extension of state diagrams, so its better to focus on BPMN. You can download information from the BPMN.org site. As you digest the BPMN compare it to UML Activity Diagrams (see http://www.bpmn.org/Documents/Notations%20and%20Workflow%20Patterns.pdf). A point that is oft missed with these beautiful diagrams is processes have INPUT and OUTPUT flows. Suddenly you are thankful that you’ve spent a bit of time with the old DFDs, which emphasises INPUTs and OUTPUTs.
Data (Objects) analysis is akin to the old ERDs (entity relationship diagrams). So get some information on data and how to normalise data and to simplify cardinality. For example you often get the relationship cardinality of Many-to-Many: a Customer can order many Products, and a Product can be ordered my many Customers. You will also notice that some classes (objects) contain other classes. Eg. Hotel contains rooms. Again, you’ll be glad you’ve read UML distilled because suddenly the object/class relationships make sense?
Some smart people have noticed that we use the same process patterns as well as the same object patterns. You’ll notice that the BPMN site refers to process patterns, and the reference above compares the famous Vander Aalst process patterns in BPMN to UML activity diagrams. As an analyst part of your job is to save time and money, and if you can recognise patterns it makes life much easier. I’ll skip the notion of Object patterns (Google object patterns, and you’ll find lots). From a business perspective you begin to notice some end-to-end process patterns eg. order-to-cash etc. These patterns make the analysis process so much easier.
Having done a Masters in Ecology, I’ll skip systems thinking part. But, lets focus on methodology. BABOK is not a methodology, its a meta model! This means that such methodologies like ICONIX, AGILE and RUP and even the old SADT can be deployed and governed by BABOK. I like the ICONIX methodology. It takes you through the steps to create software from the initial user requirements (see http://www.iconixsw.com/). It also starts with USECASE driven approaches.
I hope this rather lengthy description helps!
Warm regards,
K