Common Misconceptions About Business Analysis in 2020
It’s 2020 and yes although information disbursed every second seems almost inexhaustible, there still seem to be a lot of knowledge lacking. While working with a consulting firm, I discovered that there were a lot of misconceptions still surrounding the business analysis profession. This is especially important for people looking to start a career in Business Analysis. So, in this article I would be identifying 6 common misconceptions about Business Analysis and the actual truth about them.
1. Business analysis is a technical Profession
I once heard a lady say “Business Analysis is a technical profession; it involves only people with Technical knowledge and skills”. Well you see even though Business Analysts may require an understanding of technologies in order to properly communicate with the technical subject matter experts it doesn’t mean the BA has to be involved in writing codes, debugging or anything of such. In fact, as the name implies their focus is on the business, ensuring Business needs are met by understanding and analyzing capabilities of the business, associating meaningful requirements to these capabilities, recommending solutions and that’s not all.
2. Business Analyst starter pack; 3 days masterclass and a certification
So even though getting training and professional certification is great, experience is greater. A vast majority of people who attend masterclasses have little to no knowledge or experience. So, it would be a wrong move for someone seeking to start a career in Business Analysis to attend a masterclass or a couple of trainings or write a certification exam and then call oneself a Business Analyst. As of 2019, a survey carried out showed that 30% of individuals who sat for the IIBA CBAP exam failed reasons attributed to lack of knowledge/competency. Before you can regard yourself as a BA, start with understanding the key things a BA does, you could look up Job descriptions of a BA, match it with your current skills, continue to skill up, get involved in projects, apply for graduate/entry level jobs, intern, volunteer ,If you are so eager to get a certification take entry or lower level certification exams to prepare yourself, Eventually when you have gathered a reasonable amount of experience and knowledge you can consider taking a higher level professional certification exam.
4. A Business Analyst role is vague
“What would I be doing as a BA?” Many may wonder, The role of a BA is as clear as day, the assumption may be based on the fact that BA’s in many organizations carry out alternative job roles such as Product Manager, Data Analyst, Process Analyst, BI Analyst, Business Architect and so on. The aforementioned clearly shows that BA is a general term ,So the professional roles streamlines it to various aspect of BA . To assist you in understanding the role of a BA, you need to know what type of BA you are projecting yourself to be, what are your interests and which job role matches them ,A good starting point could be to look up the various job descriptions and see if any matches your interests, experience, background or skillset.
5.Business Analysts progress to become Project Managers
As mentioned earlier , A BA work may cut across multiple Job roles ,the foremost one being that of a Project manager and this is clearly because the roles complement each other well, The PM ensures timelines ,scopes, budgets are met or done while BA ensures all those activities are done the right way, even though they may seem closely related or aligned, they still perform distinct functions and so viewing Project management as a logical progression from Business Analysis does not necessarily have to be the goal.
6.Business Analysis only applies in a project lifecycle.
In as much as BA’s are highly involved in the pre-project and project phase, a lot is still yet to be done in the post project phase. According to the Business Analysis Book of knowledge V3, the Solution Evaluation knowledge area shows that even after a Business/IT solution has been deployed fully or in testing phase, continuous evaluation is required in order to optimize value delivery, It is an endless circle! The BA’s are actively involved all round in ensuring everything goes smoothly from managing requirements to gathering feedbacks to identifying improvement opportunities, the list is endless.
7. Business Analysis doesn’t support agile approach.
Agile has taken over most organizations project approach which is a good thing, the ability to constantly adapt to changes during project has saved organizations from a lot. Nonetheless, there are still assumptions that Business Analysis does not support the agile approach, Although Initially there were skepticism around the idea of adopting an agile mindset , In recent years Agile has been the backbone of a lot of BA work done. There just seemed to be a lot of issues with the traditional approach especially with the evolution of information and technology. In fact, The IIBA in recent years has placed a lot of emphasis on agile Business Analysis and even issued a separate certification for it. Business Analysis aim is value delivery & optimization, clearly this can’t take place without actively adapting to changes.
