What are some key business analysis skills ?

There are some important skills that every successful business analyst should have.

These skills are used to describe the conduct, attributes, knowledge, and personal traits that help them to successfully practice business analysis.

These key skills are the basic skills which are required for an effective business analyst and are a starting point for building the knowledge and skills that would make business analysts to become skilled and versatile.

So what are these skills ?

These skills or competencies include the following :

  1. Analytical Thinking and Problem Solving : analytical thinking is used to quickly understand information such as diagrams, stakeholder concerns, customer feedback, schematics, user guides, and spreadsheets, and figure out which ones are relevant.

While Problem Solving is used to understand and solve problems to ensure that the root cause of a problem is well understood and fixes the problem.

2. Business Knowledge: Business knowledge is defined as the understanding of the business domain and the customers’ needs.

It helps you to understand the principles that guide the enterprise, its interests, and value as it is related to the change or need.

3. Communication Skills: Communication is the act of transmitting information to a person or a group of people in a way that delivers the intended meaning.

When information is effectively communicated both parties involved should have the same understanding of the information being communicated.

4. Interaction Skills: Interaction skills are defined as the business analyst’s ability to relate, cooperate, and communicate with different stakeholders such as executives, sponsors, colleagues, team members, developers, vendors, end users, customers, and subject matter experts (SMEs).

5. Tools and Technology: Business analysts use a range of tools and technologies to model, document, and manage business analysis activities work products.

Tools that are specific to the field of business analysis need to have specialized capabilities in:

• Modeling.

• Documentation.

•Analysis and mapping requirements.

• Recognizing relationships between requirements.

• Tracking and storing requirements artifacts.

• Communicating with stakeholders.

Some business analysis use tools and technologies focus on a single business analysis activity, while others combine multiple business analysis functions into a single tool.