I’ve written this article to provide an overview of AWS (Amazon Web Services) for Business Analysts.

The cloud (in particular AWS) is now a part of many projects. If you’ve been in meetings where people have mentioned: ‘EC2’, ‘ELB’, ‘AZs’ and thought ‘WTF’ then this article should help you.

This article will provide:

• an overview of AWS (what is it, why its popular, how it’s used)
• typical AWS architecture for a project (e.g. VPN, Regions, AZs)
• cheat sheet for other key terms (EBS, EFS etc)

This article discusses record types supporting the concepts product, customer, sale, and location. The names given to these records varies depending on the line(s) of business an organization is in and, in particular, the organization’s sales processes.

There are many other valuable requirements activities besides these six. However, these practices greatly increase your chances of building a solution that achieves the desired business outcomes efficiently and effectively. Applying them doesn’t guarantee success for any BA, product owner, or product manager. But neglecting them likely ensures failure.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Charts offer visualization and help to understand and comprehend things that would be more painful and time consuming to understand by reading free text. Diagrams help us design systems and processes, organize our screens, while facilitating a common understanding of the big picture. They help us make visible the invisible.

Αs a BA you can exploit a big variety of diagrams to help you communicate better and more accurate information concerning the requirements and the solution. Diagrams leverages the effective use of visuals and modeling techniques in helping organizations and individuals work from the 30,000 foot view down to the level of detail that is needed by those who are actually going to perform the process activities. Moreover a diagram can serve as a single point of truth navigating what should be done and saving time from questions deriving from ambiguous point may found in a text.

As a data analyst, you feel most comfortable when you’re alone with all the numbers and data. You’re able to analyze them with confidence and reach the results you were asked to find. But, this is not the end of the road for you. You still need to write a data analysis report explaining your findings to the laymen - your clients or coworkers.  That means you need to think about your target audience, that is the people who’ll be reading your report.  They don’t have nearly as much knowledge about data analysis as you do. So, your report needs to be straightforward and informative. The article below will help you learn how to do it. Let’s take a look at some practical tips you can apply to your data analysis report writing and the benefits of doing so.