Breeze Ripple

Business Analysts are most of all, great communicators.  They would bring the teams together – they are working closely with the technical team, the product manager and the stakeholders. So, they should speak the business and the tech languages well to get along with everyone and understand the “why”, the tech constraints and the business needs. BAs would often facilitate team meetings to make sure that each perspective is understood and to come up with decisions about next steps. 

So, what are the core communication skills you need in order to become a successful Business Analyst? 

1. Master facilitation skills.

I’ll share an experience I’ve recently had: 

Our team is managing a portfolio of products – seven niche magazines under one parent brand.  The websites for all the magazines are built with old technologies that are hard to support and to grow. We want to migrate them to a new tech stack which will be much easier to maintain and can easily scale. Then we can focus our resources on developing the products and increasing the revenue.

We are a small team managing multiple different products. A challenge for us is that they are all too different. So our approach is to technically unify them. To build a platform which will support all the titles. To create generic components which can be then easily modified to match each product’s branding styles. That’s how the  Design System was born. It was developed by a few engineers on our team and it serves as a library hosting all the design elements- buttons, story cards, header, footer, etc. 

All good, however when we started modernising the sites, we encountered a problem – no one except the creators of the new Design System knew how to use!  As everything was so new, documentation was missing. All the questions were directed to the two developers who developed it and so we have created a significant bottle-necks.

So, as a BA my role was to understand what are the dependencies on the Design System for the product I am working on.  I brought together the system’s creators, the engineers on my team and the designers to discuss if everyone is aware how to use the new system, what is needed so that they can it and when in time we can start using it. We agreed that designers will prepare designs for each generic component and then developers will add them to the design system. 

2. Stay curious and be patient.

As the BA is neither the business expert, nor the technical expert, you need to have a thick skin. I won’t deceive you – some meetings would be hard. You should be curious and patient. Curious to learn from the expertise of others. Patient to bring everyone on the same page. Often people tend to look from their own perspective only. You would be the person who looks through all of them and patiently aligns all the colleagues. 

3. Develop visual and presentation skills. Communicating ideas through slides and visuals is a great way to ensure that everyone understands them, to keep people’s attention and you can share them with anyone!

4. Practice active listening . It is surprising how rarely people actually listen with concentration during meetings. Most of the time they are either thinking what they will say next or judging what is being said. This is natural, however, a Business Analyst’s job is to understand the objectives and the context thus a core skill is active listening – to what others are saying as well as to what is not being said, capturing main motivation and circumstances.  

5. Improve writing skills.  As a BA your main responsibility would be to prepare requirements documents, test cases, business cases, communicate via email with internal and external teams.

6. Being able to ask insightful questions. Remember, your mission is to understand what is going on and what is the desired state. Formulating your questions in the right way is a powerful tool to get to the valuable information you need.

7. Be confident.  Ability to work confidently with organisational leaders at all levels is crucial for a successful business analyst.

8. Be flexible and step into other roles when needed to ensure that all dependencies are understood and can be resolved. 

9. Employ critical and analytical thinking 

BAs are observing and questioning: What is being done and why; Are there any rules that have been followed? When they see problems, they restructure them as opportunities to find solutions.  The proposed solution should deliver measurable business value. Systems thinking, the ability to see both the whole and the details, the relationships between elements, how all is interconnected and discover dependencies is vital for a successful Business Analyst.

10. Master negotiation skills. 

Ability to reach an agreement facilitating multiple different perspectives is invaluable and a necessity for a BA. You will work with stakeholders from different backgrounds, departments and interests and your aim is to make them understand the common, shared goal for the whole team and work towards this shared vision. In my experience I have seen that more often than not, big organisations are used to the departmental silos ways of working. Cross-functional teams is a relatively new concept and although popular in theory, it looks it hasn’t been well adopted in practice. As a BA you should work towards understanding the different goals, preparing and communicating a shared vision, be diplomatic and work towards reaching the best solution for the whole team.