Be the Best Digital Business Analyst you can be

As a Digital Business Analyst your skills will be used across a wide breath of challenging and leading-edge projects. Key day to day tasks might typically include:

• Establishing and validating requirements
• Curating and managing projects, epics and stories
• Crafting user centred experiences that solve identifiable pain points
• Establishing user personas and journeys, business rules, optimised processes, data models, decision trees and any other elements required to bring the requirements to life for all of your interested parties.
• Creating documentation i.e. use cases, prototypes, specifications, wireframes, proposals and strategy documents
• Championing user experience fundamentals
• Collaborating with the solutions team to design effective solutions
• Facilitating workshops with large groups of customer and internal stakeholders

There are a number of core competencies that will keep you on the straight and narrow, however that is not to say you cannot deviate from them to serve you client’s needs.

Core Competencies

1. Understand strategic imperatives: It all starts with an understanding what our customers are trying to achieve. This allows you to bring the strategy down to actionable initiatives and provides clarity into the outcomes we’re trying to achieve.
2. Understanding the customer experience: Focusing on the customer experience requires adopting an outside in focus. Understanding the customer and the challenges they face (using tools such as Customer Journey Maps) allow you to take that outside in approach and create solutions your customers need, want, and love.
3. Reimagine business processes: The digital space moves quickly. In many cases, you may not only need to improve a process, but also completely reimagine a process and create disruption in your industry. To be successful, you need to understand business processes, how to analyse processes, develop new processes, and drive organizational change.
4. Embrace agility: Embracing agility goes beyond the frameworks such as Scrum or Kanban and includes an understanding of Lean mindset and practices. We can harness the power of Agile and Lean thinking to bring about change.
5. Continuous stakeholder collaboration: While stakeholder engagement is core to business analysis in any environment, engagement activities need to be continuous in a digital environment. The evolutionary and experimental approach with Agile and digital will require frequent feedback and conversations with stakeholders.
6. Strategic use of data: One way to enable better collaboration with stakeholders and understand customers is through data. We collect a lot of data about our customers; through our interactions and through social media. Using data analytics to interpret that data and better understand our customers allows us to build better solutions. It also allows us to take an evidence-based approach to decision making.
7. Understand technology: You don’t need to understand technology at a software engineer level but understanding technology will allow you to find new ways of working and new capabilities for your organization. You need to be able to work with business leaders and help them understand what is possible.
8. Embrace product management: More and more organizations are shifting from projects to product thinking. As Business Analysts, we need to understand how to work with Product Owners and sometimes serve as a proxy for the Product Owner. We need to be accountable for the outcomes resulting from our products and establish a deep understanding of our customer and their needs.

Your background, but not limited to;

• Business analyses with digital experience
• Confident in constructing and leading workshops
• Ability to influence stakeholder relationships and drive conclusions
• Passion for and proven capability in user and/or customer experience design, responsive design, and mobile first concepts
• Excellent documentation and communication skills to ensure clarity and alignment of understanding across the numerous parties
• Proven ability to develop new concepts, design solutions, and shape a project
• Keep up to date with the latest digital technologies and design trends
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum teams and Waterfall environments
• Passionate about applying your skills to improve unit processes and drive team performance
• Change management experience
• Development background and/or knowledge of the SDLC

Below is the summary of a day in my life as an Analyst Consultant, where I’m wearing the hat of Business Analyst for a particular client project.

• Analyse procedures, processes, systems and provide improvement recommendations to the Stakeholders, Business Centre to continually improve efficiency and effectiveness for their customers and the business.
• Define projects and initiatives that support the Business Centre strategy, by outlining the objectives, scope, impact, implementation options and recommendations. Assist managers when they lead and develop Business Centre projects and simplification initiatives.
• Define and document business requirements that are clearly outlined and understood by the Stakeholder.
• Utilise the most effective business analysis techniques and tools to help the business to reach a desired set of goals and objectives, e.g analysis of Objectives, Outputs, Outcomes and related benefits, current and future state gap analysis and impact mapping.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to obtain information to determine and define business needs, requirements for change, enhancement or process improvement, and confirm the results.
• Design, develop, and deliver accurate reports and analytical insights of the Business Centre data, presenting that information in a format that is easily understood by all stakeholders.
• Identify the reporting/information gaps, plan and implement automated reporting solutions improving business centre performance.
• Work in partnership with developers and system users and act as an intermediary to assist in assuring that digital solutions are successfully delivered. i.e. DevOps, CI/CD
• Develop and produce accurate reporting and quality analysis to fulfil information requirements for the Business Centre. Activities range from leading new projects and initiatives within the business to sourcing data for regular and one-off reporting requests.
• Deliver quality data and Information based on generated reports and in depth analysis that is used by management to assess business performance, make business decisions and develop Business Centre strategy and plans.
• Responsible for the maintenance and development of data models and the flow of quality information in the business unit.

In a nutshell, I provide Business Architecture Analysis and Consultancy Services by working closely with business and technology stakeholders to gain in-depth understanding of business goals, and the context in which the business operates.