Business Analytics Trends & Skills Expected from a Modern BA Specialist

Everything is clear about developers and testers — the first ones develop, while others test. But the phase of business analysis seems more mysterious. For example, fintech, where BA is responsible for systems analysis in one of the most complex domains for business analysis, evokes much interest to learn and try.

Who is a business analyst?

Business Analysts (BA) are responsible for resolving misunderstandings between IT and business through data analytics usage. The latter allows assessing processes, identifying requirements as well as providing recommendations and reports to managers and stakeholders.

BA needs to work with business owners and users to understand how changes (in processes, products, etc.) can increase efficiency and value. They must articulate these ideas, taking into account the technological, financial, and functional capabilities of the company. Depending on the composition of the team and goals, it can work with datasets to improve products, hardware, tools, software, services, or processes.

What does a BA job description look like?

First, BA bears responsibility for creating new models that support business decisions, working closely with financial reporting and IT teams. This requires a good understanding of regulatory and reporting requirements, a considerable experience in forecasting, budgeting, and financial analysis combined with a grasp of key performance indicators.

The analysis of variance and pricing also belongs to the list of BA's responsibilities. When working with businesses, they must act as both a product owner and the interests defender of the development team. Identifying requirements and using them to engage IT and understand what the customer wants is one of BA's biggest responsibilities.

The role of business analyst is constantly evolving and changing, especially because companies rely more on data to advise business operations. Every company has different problems that a business analyst can solve, whether they're outdated systems, changing technologies, broken processes, poor client/ user satisfaction, or isolated large organizations.

Both technical and personal skills of a business analyst are important for ITOMYCH STUDIO.

What are the key features of BA?

Team Lead of ITOMYCH STUDIO Business Analysts Yuriy Honcharuk is ready to share what skills are important for BA in the field of fintech.

Hard skills

Technical knowledge allows thinking big, fully understanding the issues of the project.

Therefore, BA must be able to:

• identify, collect, and specify requirements;
• come up with the classification of requirements and different ways of documenting them (User Case, User Story, SRS, etc.);
• understand the requirements of the management process;
• build business process diagrams (BPMN);
• model data (UML);
• build prototypes and mockups;
• know the cycle of development of fintech products;
• have the expertise in the field of banking/fintech — to deal with calculation and analysis of various financial transactions, taxation, audit and accounting, profit-oriented capital management, electronic and processing card payments, tokenization, Apple/Google Pay mechanics, etc.;
• understand the difference between a mobile and a web solution;
• read and document the integration between systems (web services, REST, XML/JSON);
• know the standards according to which technical tasks are written (ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148: 2018, ISO 27001);
• know the Scrum Framework, tracking, and wiki systems (Jira, Confluence).

Soft skills

As this specialist has to work with large amounts of information and interact with people a lot, software skills are no less essential.

Therefore, BA must have:

• communication skills,
• analytical thinking,
• critical thinking,
• systems thinking,
• a clear statement of opinions,
• rapid learning of new information,
• ability to negotiate.

Business analysis trends that cannot be ignored

As in any other field, BA is remarkable with its trends and tendencies. Having analyzed them, we can say that in the coming year we should pay attention to the following aspects:

1. Promising NLP sphere: The greatest value of analytics will be gained by understanding the various workflows that NLP can enhance.
2. Artificial intelligence: Machine Learning will allow you to better and faster analyze any amount of data.
3. Multi-Cloud Strategy: In many cases, the deployment of a second cloud deployment environment is already used as a backup in the event of a primary cloud environment failure.
4. Data insurance: This is one of the fastest-growing areas of insurance related to cybersecurity.

Because a Business Analyst has a pretty wide range of duties and can fully immerse himself in the business, a deep understanding of all the intricacies is a must (it should coincide with the client's version). As a result, BAs can be also trusted to make tactical or even strategic decisions.

The presence of such a specialist on the project allows you to clearly understand the direction of work and make up-to-date forecasts. Speaking both languages ​​of customers and developers, a Business Analyst can easily identify and solve all existing problems on time.

And what projects do you face more often? Have you ever felt that without a business analyst, work progresses more slowly?