Have you recently accepted your first business analyst position? Are you starting a new business analyst role and wondering what skills you should work on first? ...what follows are the 10 skills that new business analysts tend to need to work on first.

I became a father two years ago. Shortly thereafter, I realized that many of my professional skills were readily transferable to my new role at home: Goals and expectations setting, listening, perseverance, flexibility and facilitation. But it would take a tense encounter with 18-month-old some time later to understand that my problem-solving skills as a dad were far more applicable to the workplace than I had ever imagined.

The world of business rules and business rule management has grown up. It has evolved into the world of business decisions – a much more compelling discipline by which companies can master their business logic.

Interaction skills are a soft skill set that includes tactful communication, mediation, and diplomacy. BABOK divides interaction skills into three broad areas: facilitation and negotiation, leadership and influencing, and teamwork. All of these skills encompass the ability to navigate politics, even in tricky territory, in order to bring people together in consensus on a project, to mitigate conflicts, and to help people feel heard.

In an ideal world, a single, full-time, expert user would indeed be sitting within view—“on sight”—of developers, ready at a moment’s notice to speak definitively for the entire user community. In reality, this is unlikely in most situations.

SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. By using these four areas to identify an organization’s characteristics and climate, a SWOT Analysis offers a high-level evaluation of your company’spros and cons.The goal of a SWOT Analysis is to help an organization to identify strategies for success.

There’s little argument that investigating and identifying business needs (i.e. requirements) is a critical task of business analysis. However it’s of little use correctly identifying business needs if we can’t then effectively document them - to the clients who will be paying for the solution and to the developers who will be building it. In today’s time poor world we need to address both audiences in a single document.

I never really understood the hubbub associated with system design. People tend to look upon it as a complicated process. Actually it's not, yet the corporate landscape is littered with disastrous system projects costing millions of dollars, all because developers overlooked some rather simple principles for design and focused on technology instead.

Use case diagrams are used to show the decomposition of a business problem or software solution into a set of discrete functions (the use cases) which can be enacted by or on behalf of users (the actors). In a nutshell, this diagram shows who (the actors) can do what (the use cases) when interacting with the software solution.

With the vast array of data that organizations have access to, Customer Analytics is becoming a top priority so you can predict how customers will behave when they receive a catalog, enter a store, research and buy online, or interact with your organization in any other way. The more you know about customer and prospect preferences, the more successful you will be at creating relevant offers that resonate with them positively.

...Why, even with the word Analyst in our title, is the role of BA more associated with requirements rather than analytics? My hypothesis is pretty simple:  If Business Analysts are not required to produce specific analysis related artifacts, then both analytical competencies and requirements efficacy will be diminished.

The Decision Model (TDM) is a methodology and framework for modelling the business logic behind business decisions. Its popularity, adoption, and number of ground-breaking success stories are increasing significantly. TDM, as a powerful but simple graphical notation, is easy for both business people to understand and IT professionals to implement. As such, it puts business people in control of their business rules and logic and it accelerates IT’s ability to automate them quickly and without errors.

This article describes an integrated system of actions, tasks, and methods for managing project stakeholders. It highlights the strategic business actions, the tactical project tasks, and operational methods conducted by project sponsors, project managers and business analysts respectively.

 Analytics drive key strategic decisions in major corporations every day. However most legacy tools and solutions that help companies make these critical strategic decisions, simply aren’t built to deal with the reality of today’s modern business environment. Below are some essential questions to ask as you assess the potential benefits and limitations of new strategic analytic platforms for your organization.
 

Unified Modeling Language (UML) Activity Diagrams are rather like traditional flowcharts that may be used to describe the steps required to enact high level business processes or low level algorithms. From the software analyst’s perspective these diagrams are most useful for representing business processes, so this will be our focus here. Whereas activity diagrams are often relegated to the final chapters of the UML text books, I prefer to present them up-front as the logical starting point for any UML analysis and design endeavor.