The Key Responsibilities of a Business Analyst

Primarily, a business analyst is responsible for the following:

• Elicitation- Discovering the underlying business need to be addressed and information related to the product and project requirements, often through conversations with stakeholders.
• Analyzing Requirements – Organizing, specifying and modeling the requirements to ensure they are complete and unambiguous.
• Specifying Requirements - Documenting the requirements in a format that can be shared with stakeholders.
• Validating and Verifying Requirements – Ensuring the requirements map to the real business need, are approved by all relevant stakeholders, and meet essential quality standards.

Depending on the role, the BA professional may also take on more senior-level activities such as planning the business analysis activities or managing requirements.

And they may do a whole host of things not formally part of the business analysis role, such as manage the project, test the solution, or write code.

Reasons To Start a Business Analyst Career

#3. Seeing Through Great Ideas. You might not be the one with the best idea, but you know a great idea when you see one. And you are motivated to see through that idea when everyone else’s attention has moved on to the next great thing.

#4. Helping People Communicate. You always seem to sense when people are talking at each other but not communicating with each other. And your at your happiest when jumping into the discussion to clarify things.

#11. To build on your deep business experience, whether as a subject matter expert, technical writer, project manager, sales person or recruiter, just to name a few possibilities. All of this experience you have adds up to something and has prepared you to be a great business analyst.

#12. To build on your technical expertise, whether as a programmer, software architect, or quality assurance engineer.

#13. To do something big and  make an impact, but you don’t want to be a manager. Or, like me, you’ve been a manager and decided it wasn’t the best fit for you.

#14. To drink from a fire hose. The idea of learning a lot of new stuff in a relatively short period of time is exciting.

#15. The money. Given that the average salary of a business analyst in the U.S. is over 80K/year, many professionals are attracted by the prospect of a nice pay increase once they solidify their BA career.

#32. See the big picture. You don’t get lost in the forest. You pick your head up often to see where you are at and guide your team through it.

#33. See the details. But you know that some trees are important, or important to some people. So you don’t lose track of important details either.