I’m reading a lot about what is exactly a business analyst since the beginning of the year. I do know what I do as a business analyst, but I’m often asked (either by colleagues, managers or my undergraduate students at HEC Montréal) what is exactly a business analyst. I can provide them an convincing answer, but it’s never short to explain nor easy to understand without some context (for students, it’s a lot harder to understand as most of them don’t have any business analysis experience).
My first personal tentatives to define what is a business analyst were essentially focused on categorization (strategy analyst, business process analyst, functional analyst, system analyst, etc.). However, I didn’t find the result very convincing, nor easy to understand for non-business analysts.
Then I tried to look at the IIBA definition (in the BABoK), but it does not give a full understanding of what we really do, or how we think, as business analysts (although it provides very useful information on how to perform business analysis work).
Although I didn’t find one unique answer yet, I did find some interesting thoughts that I printed and put in my office. It’s not perfect, but it provides a good source of motivation when I feel lost 
We, the Business Analysts
Out of chaos, we create order.
Out of disagreement, we create alignment.
Out of ambiguity, we create clarity.
But most of all, we create positive change for the organizations we serve.
Business analysts lead teams from the inside out. We create positive change for our organizations. We inspire others to follow us on our path toward positive change. We help everyone understand exactly what that change is and how they can contribute to it. We help teams discover what the change should be.
As business analysts willing to create value for the business:
- We will understand what the business needs, and help our teams deliver a solution that the business will own.
- We will balance our goals with our constraints to achieve a valuable result.
- We will lead our teams toward the best possible solution to the problem we are trying to solve.
As business analysts willing to create value for the users:
- We will do what is easy for the reviewers and users of our deliverables, instead of doing what’s easy for us.
- We are not specifying requirements because we am important, but because those who will use them to deliver solutions that satisfy the requirements are important.
- We will not demand that users of our requirements put up with our quirks (bad spelling, bad organization, sloppiness).
- We will model and package the requirements so that they might be easily understood by those who will be using them.
We are not simply translators. We create and maintain a conductive holding environment that enables our teams to achieve a shared understanding of a business problem for the time required to deliver the solution that will solve it.
(Thanks to Laura Brandenburg, Jonathan Babcock and Paul Culmsee for their precious input).
Feel free to comment or add any reflexion you have on this matter. I will also submit this to my students at the next semester to see what are their impressions on this, and if it helps them to figure out what they could do as business analysts.
Stay tuned!
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