Underlying Competencies of Business Analyst

Underlying Competencies provide guidelines of the behaviors, uniqueness, understanding and personal qualities that are essential for a business analyst.

Analytical Thinking and Problem Solving

Creative Thinking - Business analysts must be effective in coming up new approaches to problem solving and in giving alternative solutions.

Decision Making - Business analysts must be effective in comprehending the criteria concerned in making a decision, in making the decision, and in supporting others to make better decisions.

Learning - Business analysts must be proactive at learning about different business domains and how they function, and then translating it to the benefit of the organization.

Problem Solving - Business analysts must be effective at identifying and solving problems in order to ensure that the real, core problem is understood and those solutions actually solve the problem.

Systems Thinking - Business analysts must be effective at understanding how the people, processes and technology within an organization interrelateto create a system as a whole.

Behavioral Characteristics

Ethics - A business analyst must be able to act ethically to earn the faith and admiration of stakeholders and propose ethical solutions to problems.

Personal Organization - Personal organization assists the business analyst in efficiently managing tasks and also in decision making.

Trustworthiness - Earning the key stakeholders’ trust isessential to ensure that the business analyst is able to acquire requirements around insightful issues and to ensure that solutions are evaluated properly.

Business Knowledge

Business Principles and Practices - Business analysts require an understanding of prime business principles and best practices, in order to ensure that they are integrated into and supported by solutions.

Industry Knowledge - Business analysts should have complete knowledge of the industry that their organization is in so that they can face new challenges that may be posed by the competitive market, and have knowledge about the effective solutions.

Organization Knowledge – Understanding of the organization is significant in business analysis.

Solution Knowledge - Knowledge of existing solutions help business analysts identify the most effective solution among existing ones.

Communication Skills

Verbal communication - Verbal communication skills enable business analysts to capably communicate ideas in ways that are suitable to the target audience.

Written Communication - Written communication skills are required for business analysts for the documentation of results, requirements and other information.

Interaction Skills

Facilitation and Negotiation - Business analysts should make possible interactions between stakeholders to help resolve disagreements, if any, regarding requirements, etc.

Leadership and Influencing - Business analysts need to be able leaders, to give guidance to others in investigating requirements and to help encourage stakeholder support for a necessary change.

Business Analysts should develop these and other competencies to in order to execute project assignments successfully. What Underlying Competencies would you add to the list to improve the chances of success in Business Analysis?

About Author:

Sachin Poojary is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: sachin.poojary@spluspl.com