What does a business analyst job description look like, what are the principles of business analysis and who are business analysts? Today we gonna discuss it in detail.
What is business analysis?
Business analysis is a set of techniques that help to understand the structure, features of the client’s company, determine its needs, and offer options for solving the problem. During business analysis, experts in different fields like marketing, economics, business, sales help to assess business assets and determine the optimal strategy of operation on the market. This is helpful in case of entering the market or planning for growth. First of all, business analysts help to indicate where business is located on the market, what direct and indirect competitors it has, what are hidden opportunities and threats. After detailed analytics experts of business analysis prepare a plan of further actions, this is how business analysis consists of both theoretical and practical parts, which give clients not only understanding but also tools to improve the situation.
Typical business plan consist has next structure:
- Business overview
- Business needs determination
- SWOT analysis, Porter’s analysis
- Optimal strategy determination
- Documentation
- Consulting and post-service support
Business overview
During this stage, experts get acquainted with the business with its principles, practices, processes, and so on. This is the entry-stage and it is important to provide analysts with as much information as possible just to give an understanding of how business works. In Japanese kanban or lean philosophy, this stage is called “observation”, because by observing the process from the outside you can point out weak and strong sides and improve it at the end.
Business needs determination
All this stage is about communication between business analysts and business owners. Proper determination of aims is already half of the success. Business targets should be realistic, with a strict budget, limited in time. Without an understanding of business aims, it is impossible to prioritize work and manage processes according to any of the project management systems as scrum or agile.
SWOT analysis, Porter’s analysis
After determination of aims and having the idea of what is needed, what are priorities, and why it is possible to objectively analyze them according to one of the methods mentioned above. There are many of them, but the most popular are SWOT or Porter’s analysis. In essence, they are the same and help to provide customers with a better understanding of what are strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities.
Optimal strategy determination
When the preparational part of the job is done it is possible to analyze what strategy is better and why thus choosing and developing it.
Documentation
This is probably the most important part because the client will interact with it. All related to hitting target processes should be provided in text format with statistics, graphs, and evidence of possible practical applications of provided decisions.
Consulting and post-service support
During the post-service support, business analysts help businesses to implement those strategies they designed. Often businesses don’t know where to start from, post-service support is needed to resolve this problem