I recently had a chance to sit down with our president David Mantica.  David has been in the training business for over 18 years and has an interesting prospective on the role of the Business Analyst.  Here are some of his thoughts on how the role of the BA depends on one’s ability to incorporate art and science.

“The BA role is about 50% art and 50% science.  The art side of the BA role deals with communication, presentation, leadership, negotiation and adaptability skills.  A BA must understand how to motivate people without direct authority and question decisions or ideas made by those in positions of authority.  They become a bridge between the world of “need” and the world of capability.  The art is in how to ask the right question.  How to get a someone to explain what they need clearly, how to get a project sponsor to get to the essence of what they need, how to negotiate with the technical team to get needed system capabilities secured and how to adapt to an ever changing project landscape.

The science side of the BA role comes in how they write the requirement, how they model the “as is” and “future” state of a system, how they develop a business case and write a use case or a user story.  There are very specific analysis techniques and tools that must be used to develop these outputs.   With the role of a developer, the specific coding is a science it is a language that can be learned and followed.

Yes there is art involved in how the code is developed but the art skills are not at the same level of inter-personal complexity as that required by a BA.

A science-type IT job is much easier to outsource than one that includes a higher level of “Art” and it was the developer and tester roles that initially were outsourced.  The key to that outsourcing success was having a strong team of Project Managers and BA to ensure the project ran smoothly and the output developed gets used.”