Tuesday, July 7, 2009
What skills should business analysts acquire to add value on a project?
One way for a business analyst to really add value on a project for a customer is when he/she understands the customer, industry and competition well enough to be able to give valuable solutions and suggestions. Analysts, in most of the projects that I have worked on, do not specialize in a specific domain. They start on a project with very little knowledge of the customer’s business and slowly learn the domain as they go. They are mostly taking requirements from the customer and managing scope. What should the analysts learn in order to really make a difference to the customer (and also remain in business ☺) and how should they go about doing this?
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3 comments:
I completely agree that analyst needs to have knowledge of a domain to add more value and recommend solutions. But it is not easy to have complete knowledge of an your clients industry until you have worked in it. If you take for e.g. Manufacturing industry you should have worked at least 4-5 years to know about this industry. The Q is whether clients want analysts to give them solutions outside their project?
To learn about their business analysts need to go a lot ground work to understand the importance of the application and also have good interaction with client SME. I learn't a bit on manufacturing industry in my project when i worked with an SME who has worked in Manufacturing for 10 years
For a client to even listen to a analyst's suggestion outside the project, confidence and trust needs to be built which obviously takes a lot of time. Till then, one way of adding value would be to identify the pain points in the clients business within the scope of the project. If your client get a feel that the pain point does exist, bingo - you get a requirement and his confidence too...
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