A Day in the Life of a Business Analyst!

Are you thinking about becoming a business analyst? One of the questions on your mind would be what a typical day at work would look like? What are the day-to-day activities you’d be doing? These are critical questions to answer before making a choice. They will help you evaluate your chances of enjoying your new career path. That is why in this article, we will discuss what a day as a Business Analyst would look like. 

Right off the bat, let me emphasize that there is no typical day in the life of a business analyst. Business analysis is not one of those career paths that you’d perform repetitive tasks, day in day on. As a business analyst, you should expect slightly different challenges, depending upon the project the team is handling at that given time.

That said, there are still general patterns in the activities of a Business Analyst at work. Let’s begin by discussing those activities. 

What does a Business Analyst do?

The primary function of a business analyst is to solve business problems using facts and figures. They do this by carefully analyzing historical data and distilling actionable insights. As a business analyst, you would need to guide the team on the best decision to make based on the available data, and also, when it is right to make those decisions. It is expected that you ensure the team is straying away from their initial goals and objectives. 

To correctly perform this, you should be on the lookout for global trends and the latest development in the niche. You should ask a lot of whys and hows. Having found answers from figures, it is your responsibility to communicate your findings to the team members and other stakeholders. 

It is important to note that a Business analyst does not necessarily need coding skills. However, it is crucial that you have a great deal of domain knowledge. In whatever field you are working, you must understand how the market works, the various players in your supply chain, and a decent knowledge about the intricacies of your product. 

You can learn more about business analysis by enrolling in a business process analysis training course. Meanwhile, let’s now discuss what a Business Analyst typically does in a day. 

What a Typical Day in a Business Analyst would Look like

• Prepare for meetings: You will be required to prepare for meetings generally. In your preparation, it is important to have sorted the things you will discuss. Business Analytics generally involve shuttling from your personal space (or independent work) to meetings. In your personal space, you will need to review the requirements, think about the best approach for maximum output. Depending on the nature of the meeting, you may work with other team members by sensitizing them on what they should get prepared for. In cases where they need to prepare some documents before the meeting, it is important to let them know prior to the meeting to avoid unnecessary delays. 
• Attend Meetings: As a Business Analyst, you should be prepared to attend meetings. You will mostly find yourself in meetings discussing the product requirement, discovering new requirements based on trends and data, validating requirements, and other things in between. You will also be discussing issues and brainstorming on ways of tackling them. 

In addition, you will constantly update the team on your findings, the next technology that should be adopted, and why it should be adopted. 

• Resolve issues: You would also work on resolving issues from past meetings. As a Business Analyst, you are expected to be a good researcher, mine relevant data, and perform analytics that can help resolve issues. You may also be required to work with the development team to leverage their domain expertise and come up with plausible solutions to problems. 
• Communication: As a Business Analyst, you should have impeccable communication skills. This would include both verbal and nonverbal. You will generally be working with various stakeholders at different phases of the project. While you may find yourself sharing ideas sometimes, you may also be convincing other times. You should also master the art of active listening as you can get insights from anybody. Bottomline is that, be clear on your communication, be less ambiguous, try to accompany data with graphics/visualization, and finally, be good at storytelling. 
• Evaluating solutions: You will also find yourself in situations where you need to adopt a solution from a list of solutions. This will involve you evaluating each of them based on some defined key performance indicators (KPIs). You will also need to check how these conditions meet your initial business requirements.
• Implementing solutions: As a business analyst, you will then need to monitor the solution as it is implemented. You will need to check if the change is yielding the expected result or it is a miss. This is an important part of your day as a miss can cause devastating results. You would need to ask yourself real questions. Are your end-users appreciating the changes made in the software? What is the KPI results from the changes made thus far? Answers to these questions would help you decipher whether or not you are on the right track. 

In summary

You can see that a Business Analyst wears many hats and would require a wide range of skills. Nevertheless, you can master these skills by joining a business analysis fundamentals online course.