Career as a Business Systems Analyst

Many BAs (especially the most experienced ones) should be familiar with processes...  Let us try to reveal, how BA skills are applicable to BPM and which steps a BA should take to transfer their knowledge to a state sufficient to fully enter the BPM sphere.

I’ve come to the conclusion that most projects produce better results when they have specialized people playing the various roles, rather than trying to be resourceful and wear multiple hats.

As a Business Analysts we work with goals and objectives of our clients or companies in order to deliver business value, but how often do we sit and work on professional goals and objectives? How often do we use the skills that we possess on ourselves and our own professional activities? This year I plan to do exactly that, I have put together four BA resolutions that I believe will make me a better BA.

The first core responsibility of the BA Manager is managing the team. BA Managers tend to be practice oriented. They strive to help grow and challenge their BA’s to be the best BA’s that they can. The BA Manager must know and understand the skills every BA needs and have the ability to help each BA perfect them. Understanding each BA’s strengths and weaknesses will help them create a development plan for their BA’s.

The lines between business analysts’ and project managers’ responsibilities seem to be becoming increasingly blurred, particularly in these tight economic times where candidates are sometimes expected to fulfill both roles. But it is crucial that companies understand the difference between these roles if they want their projects to be executed in the most efficient manner.

You’re a successful Business Analyst, but are now ready to take the next step to advance your career. So what is your next step? Do you need to move out of business analysis to advance? Are you a BA who wants to see where your career may go in or beyond Business Analysis? Are you interested in managing BA teams or leading BA teams on projects?

The traditional axiom in business analysis that there should be a “Berlin Wall” between analysis and design is being torn down these days. Several authors and thought leaders are arguing that you cannot do analysis without designing and that you cannot design without analysis. This article is striving to visualize why this is really so.

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.

Since its inception, the CPRE Foundation Level certification has evolved to become the most achieved certificate in Requirements Engineering (RE) worldwide. Right now, over 10,000 people have been certified worldwide in more than 35 countries. So what is it all about, how is it set up, what are the contents of the CPRE syllabi and how does the CPRE compare to other certifications?

The product owner is an ideal. I have experienced this myself as product owner and business analyst in a scrum team. How many organizations have a job title that can cover the role completely? If not, is your organization ready to change in order to fit the scrum method? The organization I work in is not but it is still possible for the scrum team to have an efficient product owner. In our team, it was decided to adapt the role to fit our organization by establishing a product owner team in which I as business analyst am a member.

In this article, I’ll show you how you can apply three specific business analysis elicitation or requirements gathering techniques as part of facilitating all or part of a meeting even if you aren’t in a business analysis role.

What comes first, the business analyst or the business analyst experience? If you’ve looked at BA job postings lately, you’d probably say the experience, as most BA jobs require experience. From one perspective, you’d be correct. But from another perspective, you’d be wrong.  For if every BA role requires experience, how is it that there are hundreds of thousands of practicing business analysts across the world?

The once lowly business analyst is suddenly in high demand. Here's how to work well with the ones you've got.   The hottest job in IT right now might be the least "T" of them all: business analyst.
 

As businesses acknowledge the value of business analysis – the result of the absolute necessity to drive innovation through projects – they are struggling to figure out three things: (1) What are the characteristics of their current BA workforce, and how capable does their BA team need to be?  (2) What is needed to build a mature BA Practice?  (3) How are we going to get there?

Many run into the problem of differentiating between a systems analyst and a business analyst. The differences in some organizations do not exist. In other companies, the comparison is almost an insult. Depending on the business or corporation, there are many differences. The job title is not the only thing with which to compare these two separate roles. The problem occurs when the title is not so conclusive. The business systems analyst or the systems business analyst can actually be one or the other or both. Job description is the only way to tell when this happens. There are differences, though.

Author: Tony de Bree