What is a business analyst? A key role for business-IT efficiency

• IIBA Entry Certificate in Business Analysis (ECBA)
• IIBA Certification of Competency in Business Analysis (CCBA)
• IIBA Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP)
• IIBA Agile Analysis Certification (AAC)
• IQBBA Certified Foundation Level Business Analyst (CFLBA)
• IREB Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering (CPRE)
• PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PBA)

For more information about how to earn one of these certifications — and how much they cost — see “10 business analyst certifications to advance your analytics career.”

Boot camps

Unlike certifications, which are designed to prove the skills you already have, boot camps are designed to teach you new skills or improve your current skillset. Boot camps can be anything from traditional workshops held over the course of a few days or full-fledged, instructor-led courses that run for weeks or months at a time. No matter what your preferred learning style is, you can find a boot camp to suit your needs.

Courses are often offered both in-person and online; alternatively, your organization might bring a boot camp to the company to run a four-day workshop. Some boot camps are free, while others might require a subscription fee or a one-time fee that ranges from $100 to $2,500, depending on the program. They’re all designed to give hands-on experience and help you build your resume and portfolio — some even offer career guidance and mentorship.

To find a business analyst boot camp that will fit your schedule, budget and skillset, see “10 boot camps for business analysts.”

Master’s programs

If you have a computer science or business degree, you might want to look at a master’s in business analysis. Exactly what type of degree you go for will depend on what area of BA or IT you want to work in, but there are plenty of programs designed to give you a formal business analyst education.

Business analytics tools and software

Business analysts typically rely on software such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Access, SQL, Google Analytics and Tableau. These tools help BAs collect and sort data, create graphs, write documents and design visualizations to explain the findings. You won’t necessarily need programming or database skills for a business analyst position, but if you already have these skills, they won’t hurt. The type of software and tools you’ll need to use will depend on your job title and what the organization requires.

The role of business analysts in software development

Business analysts use real-time user data and analytics programs to identify user trends, successful functions and potential user adoption problems with the applications. As data becomes more valuable to organizations, so do business analysts.

“One of the key values in the concept of the BA moving into being a product owner, as the whole line between IT and digital and software development and business shifts, is that this role has become more and more exciting,” says Kelly Emo, director of product and solutions marketing for application lifecycle and quality at HPE Software.

Given the expanding list of responsibilities put on the position, some organizations have created product manager positions that work with BAs or have teams of BAs reporting to them, Hammond says.

Similarly, the expansion and the faster, more iterative pace of software development has changed the timing of the BA’s involvement with a given development project. A BA working in a classic waterfall development environment is more heavily involved at the front end, when gathering, analyzing and prioritizing user requirements, before handing those off to developers and then moving on to another software development project. Meanwhile, BAs working on agile projects generally stay with the project through implementation and even through multiple releases.

Organizations often assign BAs to several projects at a time if the projects are small enough, or they may assign a BA to a single project if it’s complex. Hammond notes that organizations also assign multiple BAs to very large software development projects. But some IT departments today are not involving their business analysts in all in-house application development projects, Emo says.

According to Emo, organizations are less likely to assign BAs to development work on new classes of applications such as mobile marketing apps and apps for temporary sales promotions “because they’re operating very lean or doing DevOps.”

“It’s all happening very rapidly in continuous delivery mode, and it’s data-driven and not [driven by] lengthy requirement documents. What I see today, especially in the digital first applications, like digital e-commerce, it’s not the traditional business analyst involved.”

On the other hand, BAs are almost universally used for the development of back-office applications and core business software products, where identifying and documenting requirements is particularly critical, Emo says.

“A lot of those applications are under a lot of regulations, so [organizations] need that BA interface to document and ensure compliance,” she says.