A good business analyst needs to have a basic understanding of key business concepts and best practices in order to fully understand the business need and recommend a suitable solution.
Business acumen is the ability to understand the business needs using past experience and knowledge.
Organizations usually have a baseline standard which they abide to such as legal and regulatory requirements, finance, logistics, sales, marketing, supply chain management, human resources, and technology.
Understanding how other organizations in the same business domain have solved similar problems may be useful when searching for potential solutions.
Though organizations might be in the same domain there might be some differences between them such as the industry, location, size of organization, culture, and the maturity of the organization.
These differences could have influenced those organizations solution choices so the business analyst should identify these differences and make note of them during their analysis.
There are some measures of effective business acumen and which include the following:
- Demonstrate the ability to identify possible limitations and opportunities.
- Demonstrate the ability to spot when changes to a situation may require a change solution, understand the risks involved in the change and make decisions on how to manage those risks.
- Demonstrate the ability to spot an opportunity to decrease expenses and increase profits.
- Understand the options available to handle changes in the circumstances.