How to hire for an IT Business Analyst?
Summary:
Business analysts (BAs) are responsible for bridging the gap between IT and the business using data analytics to assess processes, determine
requirements and deliver data-driven recommendations and reports to executives and stakeholders.
BAs engage with business leaders and users to understand how data-driven changes to process, products, services, software and hardware can
improve efficiencies and add value. They must articulate those ideas but also balance them against what’s technologically feasible and financially and functionally reasonable. Depending on the role, you might work with data sets to improve products, hardware, tools, software, services or process.
Standard Job Description:
BAs are responsible for creating new models that support business decisions by working closely with financial reporting and IT teams to establish initiatives and strategies to improve importing and to optimize costs. You’ll need a “strong understanding of regulatory and reporting
requirements as well as plenty of experience in forecasting, budgeting and financial analysis combined with understanding of key performance indicators,” according to Robert Half Technology.
A business analyst job description typically includes:
1. Creating a detailed business analysis, outlining problems, opportunities and solutions for a business.
2. Budgeting and forecasting
3. Planning and monitoring
4. Variance analysis
5. Pricing
6. Reporting
7. Defining business requirements and reporting them back to stakeholders.
Identifying and then prioritizing technical and functional requirements tops the business analyst’s list of responsibilities. Elicitation of requirements and using those requirements to get IT onboard and understand what the client really wants, that’s one of the biggest responsibilities for BAs. They must work as a product owner, even though the business is the product owner.
Business analysts use real-time user data and analytics programs to identify user trends, successful functions and potential user adoption problems with the applications. As data becomes more valuable to organizations, so do business analysts.
A BA working in a classic waterfall development environment is more heavily involved at the front end, when gathering, analyzing and prioritizing user requirements, before handing those off to developers and then moving on to another software development project. Meanwhile, BAs working on agile projects generally stay with the project through implementation and even through multiple releases.
Organizations often assign BAs to several projects at a time if the projects are small enough, or they may assign a BA to a single project if it’s complex.
Business analysts typically rely on software such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Access, SQL, Google Analytics and Tableau. These tools help BAs collect and sort data, create graphs, write documents and design visualizations to explain the findings. You won’t
necessarily need programming or database skills for a business analyst position, but if you already have these skills, they won’t hurt. The type of
software and tools you’ll need to use will depend on your job title and what the organization requires.
Key Job Responsibilities:
1. Liaising between the IT department and the Executive branch.
2. Acting as an information source and communicator between business branches.
3. Understanding strategic business needs and plans for growth.
4. Enhancing the quality of IT products and services.
5. Analyzing the design of technical systems and business models.
6. Utilizing IT data for business insights.
7. Analyzing business needs.
8. Sourcing and implementing new business technology.
9. Finding technological solutions to business requirements.
10. Producing reports on application development and implementation.
11. Running A/B tests and analyzing data.
12. Analyzing data to inform business decisions.
Ideal Candidate:
1. Technical expertise regarding data models, database design development, data mining and segmentation techniques.
2. Strong knowledge of and experience with reporting packages (Business Objects etc.), databases (SQL etc.), programming (XML, Java
script, or ETL frameworks).
3. Knowledge of statistics and experience using statistical packages for analyzing datasets (Excel, SPSS, SAS etc.).
Desired Education:
Degree in Computer Engineering, Business Administration or related field.
Certifications Associated:
1. IIBA Entry Certificate in Business Analysis (ECBA)
2. IIBA Certification of Competency in Business Analysis (CCBA)
3. IIBA Certified Business Analyst Professional (CBAP)
4. IIBA Agile Analysis Certification (AAC)
5. IQBBA Certified Foundation Level Business Analyst (CFLBA)
6. IREB Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering (CPRE)
7. PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PBA)
8. Certified Scrum Master (CSM)
Key Skills:
SQL, ITIL Certified, Incident Management, Change Management, IT Infrastructure, Disaster Recovery, Business Analysis, ERP Implementation,
Service Level Management, SOP Preparation, MS Office, Business Analytics, Project Management, Business Research, Requirement Gathering, Analysis, Documentation, SDLC, Agile, SRS, BRS, FRS, BRD, FSD, Acceptance Criteria, Use Cases, User Stories, Workflow, Scrum, Gap Analysis, Impact Analysis, UML, Swim Lane, Wireframe.
Common Positions:
1. Business management analyst
2. Business performance analyst
3. Business analyst
4. Junior/Senior IT business analyst
5. Application business analyst
6. Business intelligence analyst
7. ITSM business analyst
8. Technical business analyst
9. Agile business analyst
10 .IT business analyst
11. Business solutions analyst
12. Systems business analyst
Screening Questions/Assessment Parameters:
What tools or systems have you worked with?
Where do you go when you are researching new solutions for a requirement?
How do you go about prioritizing requirements from different stakeholders with similar deadlines?
Which analysis and modeling techniques and methodologies do you apply to your work as a business analyst, and why?
Basic Terminologies:
1. Acceptance Criteria. Criteria associated with requirements, products, or the delivery cycle that must be met in order to achieve stakeholder acceptance.
2. Business Analysis Communication Plan. A description of the types of communication the business analyst will perform during business
analysis, the recipients of those communications, and the form and frequency of those communications.
3. Enterprise Readiness Assessment. An assessment that describes the enterprise is prepared to accept the change associated with a solution and is able to use it effectively.
4. Domain Subject Matter Expert. A stakeholder with in-depth knowledge of a topic relevant to the business need or solution scope.
5. Decision Analysis. An approach to decision making that examines and models the possible consequences of different decisions, and assists in making an optimal decision under conditions of uncertainty.
6. Deliverable. Any unique and verifiable work product or service that a party has agreed to deliver.
7. Entity-Relationship Diagram. A graphical representation of the entities relevant to a chosen problem domain and the relationships between them.
8. Focus Group. A group formed to to elicit ideas and attitudes about a specific product, service, or opportunity in an interactive group environment. The participants share their impressions, preferences, and needs, guided by a moderator.
9. Impact Analysis. An assessment of the effects a proposed change will have on a stakeholder or stakeholder group, project, or system.
10. Metadata. A description of data to help understand how to use that data, either in terms of the structure and specification of the data, or the description of a specific instance of an object.
Industry Jargons:
1. Adaptive Approach. An approach where the solution evolves based on a cycle of learning and discovery, with feedback loops which encourage making decisions as late as possible.
2. Fishbone Diagram. A diagramming technique used in root cause analysis to identify underlying causes of an observed problem, and the relationships that exist between those causes. Also known as an Ishikawa or cause-and- effect diagram.
3. Evolutionary Prototype. A prototype that is continuously modified and updated in response to feedback from stakeholders.
4. Change Management. Planned activities, tools, and techniques to address the human side of change during a change initiative, primarily addressing the needs of the people who will be most affected by the change.
5. Create, Read, Update, And Delete Matrix (CRUD matrix). A two-dimensional matrix showing which user roles have permission to access specific information entities, and to create new records in those entities, view the data in existing records, update or modify the data in existing
records, or delete existing records. The same type of matrix can be used to show which processes, instead of users, have the create, read, update and delete rights.
6. Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM). A project delivery framework which focuses on fixing cost, quality, and time at the beginning while contingency is managed by varying the features to be delivered.
7. Horizontal Prototype. A prototype that is used to explore requirements and designs at one level of a proposed solution, such as the customer-facing view or the interface to another organization.
8. Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). A business intelligence approach that allows users to analyze large amounts of data from different points of view.
9. Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, And Customers (SIPOC). A tool used to describe relevant high-level elements of a process. May be used
in conjunction with process mapping and ‘in/out of scope’ tools, to provide additional detail.
10. Unified Modelling Language (UML). A notation specified by the Object Management Group for describing software application structure,
behaviour, and architecture. It can also be used for describing business processes and data structures. The most common UML® diagrams used by business analysts are use case diagrams, activity diagrams, state machine diagrams (also known as state diagrams), and class diagrams.
Benchmark Profile:
Benchmark Profile on LinkedIn (1)
Benchmark Profile on LinkedIn (2)
Benchmark Profile on LinkedIn (3)
References:
https://www.betterteam.com/it-business-analyst-job-description