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7 Important Soft Skills Every Business Analyst Needs
7 Important Soft Skills Every Business Analyst Needs

March 17, 2022

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Business Analysts (BA for short) help solve problems by leveraging their creative thinking and analytical skills. They use insights and visualizations to help concerned team members get clarity, letting them collaborate around issues more effectively. A BA must possess many skills.

But, what are some soft skills that are crucial to be a successful BA?

1. Listen Carefully and Articulate Well

Effective listening skills help identify, accurately understand and adequately address the needs of customers, stakeholders, and team members. Being a good listener shows that you are patient and empathetic.

This useful skill can help you maintain effective communication with concerned parties when the development team states that a feature cannot be developed. Not only does this encourage transparency, but also highlights the importance of being able to explain the concepts/ideas/justifications at all levels, to different stakeholders in different domains.

A BA should be able to articulate answers to questions clearly and clarify his or her points. In situations where you don’t know the answer, you can always mention the same with a promise to find out and get back to the concerned stakeholder later.

2. Ask Better Questions

The wrong questions could lead to wrong answers. Commit to spending time prior to every interaction, meeting, or workshop in preparing questions that truly get to the essence of what you are trying to achieve.

This is especially crucial during the requirement elicitation process. Rephrase what you hear from the responder (stakeholder) to ensure that you properly understand what the responder meant. If not, the responder may not have the opportunity to correct the misinterpretation. This act also shows the responder that we care about how well he or she understands us.

3. Manage Stakeholders and Maintain Professionalism

Stakeholder management is the most important ingredient for successful project delivery. As a BA, managing your emotions is key. Not all stakeholders play nice. You need to understand their motivations and the reasons behind why they are being difficult.
The key is to maintain professionalism and not allow emotions to get the better of you.

Our reputation helps significantly in getting things done. If we do what is best for the company or client, stakeholders will be more likely to see things from our perspective.

4. Build Strong Relationships and Avoid Being Transactional

  • Strong relationships revolve around trust. To build trust, we must be focused, and this takes time. A few key relationship focus points are as follows:
  • Always strive to deliver on what you commit or promise to do. This builds trust and integrity.
  • Manage expectations. This is truly difficult and requires constant diligent work.
  • Respond. Prioritize communications in order of importance. Avoid responding straight away. However, this is a balancing act since simply ignoring people shows we have little or no regard for building strong relationships.
  • Be a human being and try to connect with people in a way that is not only transactional but also transformational. Trusted relationships make life simpler, helping you get things done quickly and efficiently.


5. Think Critically

This lets BAs distinguish between requirements that add value to the business and those that should be given a lesser priority. Critical thinking is significant because there is a huge difference between what an end-user wants and what he/she needs.
BAs must be able to think critically to differentiate between the two. Let us see how this would work with an example:

Let’s say a stakeholder asks for a ‘new functionality.' A critical thinker must invoke questions like:

  • Why is this functionality needed?
  • Who will be the end-users of the functionality and how will it be used?
  • Is this functionality similar to any existing functionality?
  • What is the frequency of use?

At the end of this questioning, you may discover that:

  • A similar functionality already exists;
  • The functionality may not be necessary at all;
  • The frequency of use implies that the requirement can be of a lower priority.


6. Be Adaptable

Adaptability is a skill that can be developed and mastered. We should be able to handle pressure and stress. For example, we must be able to work towards deadlines that might change at the last minute.

To cope with this, drop things you are working on and begin work on high-priority tasks first.

Here are the 4 tips that can help improve adaptability.

  • Observe and monitor the changes in your environment
  • Be willing to learn
  • Avoid postponing tasks
  • Acknowledge the fact that changes are bound to occur


7. Leadership Skills

Business Analyst leadership skills include business-related decision making, information circulation, and being able to coordinate with team members to build a strong team.

Conclusion

In this post, we summarized a few of the many soft skills which are essential for a Business Analyst. Effective soft skills can help an individual perform better, and allow for smoother project delivery.

As a BA we should reflect on the future. We should analyze, be creative and think outside the box. If we do not have the right soft skills, we will struggle as a BA since this job role is not just about the ability to read, write and converse.
Hope this helps, thank you for reading!

Author — Sreekanth Mallela, DLT Labs

About the Author: Sreekanth is an experienced Business Analysis practitioner at DLT Labs who has worked on various documentation platforms.


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