3 Tips on How to Become a Better Business Analyst

Learn to explain abstract ideas, program and be organized

Photo by Hunters Race on Unsplash

Being a business analyst can be challenging. On your daily basis, you try to understand the needs of stakeholders, manage the requirements, and deal with UX details.

I guess that you already know the basics — how to work in Jira, what the Scrum is, maybe you have even read the BABOK Guide. With that said, I will share with you some more unobvious tips on how to become a better business analyst.

Learn to explain abstract ideas

What landed me my first job as a business analyst?

1. Playing a lot of board games. Do you know these board games with a board, a bunch of cards, million small markers, and a thick manual, that takes 4 hours to read? I have always been the one explaining the rules to new players. And because I wanted them to like the game and not to feel afraid of all the rules and exceptions, I mastered the skill to explain even the most complicated topics in a clear and easy to understand way.
2. Teaching children Math. But not the teenagers preparing for some major exams. They already have a lot of Math experience and know more or less how Math works. The real challenge is to explain to 8-year-old, why 14+17=31. Sounds trivial? After 2 or 3 attempts with no results, you will start to analyze the problem deeper. What processes occur in this child’s mind when trying to add 14 to 17? What strategy does the child use? What is wrong with this strategy? Or maybe the strategy is good, but the performance fails? Having faced this kind of problem a lot, I have learned how to ask proper questions to receive the answers I was looking for. Also, how to ask questions not to annoy the interlocutor. I succeeded in explaining this addition finally, and the kid looked happy and satisfied in the end. I managed to understand the kid’s thought process and find all the weak points in the process.

You have a lot of people near you to test this skill.

Try to explain to your grandma, how she can text you on Messenger, or watch her favorite show on YouTube, without her saying “This new technology is not for me!”.

Next time your child asks you some questions, be explicit in your answer and make the child really understand you. Or try explaining to your not-IT-friend, what business analysis is really about.

Learn to program

If you want to work with software, you need to understand how programming works. At least a bit.

Choose one programming language, preferably the one your project is written in, and learn the basics. There are a lot of tutorials on the internet, I always suggest Udemy as the best one for beginners.

You will be surprised how much more insight into programmers’ daily struggles you got thanks to completing even a simple course. It will be much easier for you to estimate if a new feature is a small or big task, or if it requires rewriting the whole application.

Additionally to that, you could take advantage of understanding databases. If you are working in a software project, ask one of the developers to show you their database and explain how it is structured, and why.

It would be great if you also learned the basics of any query language. Free tutorials on SQL by W3schools should be enough to start and to understand most of the queries you would need.

Learn to be organized

As easy as it sounds, it’s harder to execute if you don’t have a habit to stay organized.

But what does it mean to stay organized?

My answer would be to remember every important issue and recall it at the right moment. When you are dealing with a lot of topics every day, it is easy to forget about some of them. There are two strategies to eliminate this problem:

1. Do everything right away. It may not be possible every time, but if you can, don’t postpone simple tasks for later. If you need to talk to someone — book a meeting first off, or at least text them to set a date. If some user story requires small adjustment — don’t hesitate and correct it as soon as possible.
2. For all these situations where acting right away is impossible, you need to take notes. Take notes about everything you need, but remember to keep them structured well, or you will get lost. A good free tool for that is Trello. It has saved me countless times from forgetting about important matters. The simplest way would be to set standard columns To do — Doing — Done, and label every task with areas it concerns.

To become a good business analyst you will need much more than these 3 simple steps.

But you have to begin somewhere!

Remember, that becoming an analyst starts in your everyday activities, and not only by your desk. Try to be inquiring, curious, and best organized, and you will rule the analytical world.