Are you thinking of a career as a business analyst? Do you know about the top four soft skills you need to walk the road to success? BA Training in Virginia makes it easy for you to groom and polish your skills as a promising business analyst.
In the present era, BA’s are critical to the success of any IT company or software project. However, not everyone succeeds in this profession. Certain skills play a key role in making you a successful BA. Learning those skills is the best way to start your BA career.
The skills of a Business Analyst can be categorized as – Soft Skills and Technical Skills. Well, the list is long and confusing for many aspirants. The best way to get started is by enrolling in a course that prepares you for the highly competitive IT sector. Here, we have picked up the top four soft skills that a successful BA must possess.
Be Politically Neutral
As mentioned above, business analysts play a crucial role as a link between the technology team and customers. They carefully understand the business requirements and convey and explain them to the technical team.
The focus is on lossless communication and that requires you to be neutral in your political preferences. You should not relate to anyone in particular. At this point, it is understandable that the term customer means multiple individuals. A customer might be responsible for coordinating while there can be several stakeholders from the side of the customer. Each stakeholder carries a varying degree of influence on the project. This type of analysis is performed during the analysis of stakeholders.
Chances are that you might encounter pulls from several directions however it is essential to be politically neutral instead of aligning to an individual in particular. Associating with a powerful stakeholder might be risky in the long term. Even an insignificant stakeholder can make things difficult at the time of acceptance testing.
Have good writing skills.
Communication is an indispensable part of the Business Analyst’s Routine. Here, communication is related to the requirements. Unfortunately, communication, in this case, involves the technology team and customers, who understand and speak diverse languages. Keeping both the parties in synch is essential and thus BAs use a form of documentation. The documentation refers to presentations, user stories, use cases, or SRS.
Having good writing skills is important for putting the requirements in a language that is easy to understand for everyone. Saying that does not mean you have to be a great writer, as in writing poems and prose, however, you should be able to express requirements in an easy-to-understand language.
For instance, sometimes users might enter Airport Code that the system will understand, however, there are times when it will be replaced by the closest city. Thus, the user does not have to know what airport code is, and the system will automatically understand it.
The above snippet can be written in the following simple way.
The system would identify the airport depending on either a City Name or Airport Code.
The above example explains how writing skills play an important role in making things easy to understand for the technology team and customers.
Thus, if you want to become a successful business analyst, you should have a politically neutral approach. This one skill of a business analyst helps in developing a great relationship with the user and customer.
Should be Able to Tackle and Handle Conflicts
This is one of the most used business analyst skills. A disagreement of requirements, missed deadlines, and poor quality of software often leads to conflicts and issues in software projects. How to resolve conflicts? Through persuasion and negotiations, conflicts can be resolved. You should have the skills to persuade both parties to reach an amicable solution so that the project can be completed timely.
Must be Good Listeners.
This, perhaps, is the most business analyst skill. Such professionals have to interact a lot with the technology team and customers regularly. They interact with different teams continuously to understand diverse business requirements. They interact with the development team to convey and understand the requirements. Thus, understanding business requirements is one of the most essential business analyst responsibility areas.
Active listening is equally critical to this profession. It is important to understand that you are working on a software project that is developed for the customer. You must understand the end customers' needs. Thus, the perspective of the customer is the key.
You might be thinking what exactly is active listening? Active listening is all about being attentive to what others are saying. The objective of this kind of listening is to understand the views and feelings of the person. Listed below are techniques to make sure active listening is done properly.
Ask open-ended queries so that customers can provide a proper explanation. There is a difference between close-ended and open-ended questions. Close-ended questions lead to answers like ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. These answers are not useful in creating a strategy.
Paraphrase the statements of the customers. This means you should understand what customers are saying in your own words. This is an effective yet simple way of confirming you have not skipped or missed anything important.
To Sum Up
Listed above are the top four soft skills required to Become A Successful Business Analyst. Being one of the most competitive and demanding fields, only those who have exceptional skills can make it to the top.
Business Analyst (BA) Training in Virginia is the right step to learn more about this evolving yet promising field. Choosing the right training program provides you a platform where you can learn and understand the diverse concepts of this emerging profession. QABATraining is one institute that lets you explore the best of both worlds when it comes to business analyst training. A short duration course, they design it to polish and groom the skills of aspiring BA’s. The institute is driven and managed by a team of experienced, trained, and skilled professionals who believe in nurturing talent.