The Business Analyst: as seen by the layman...

Does a picture really speak a thousand words? Why then, do I need to jot down those thousand words to describe it! Let’s see why!

When a layman on the street stops to ask what I do for a living, that’s what I say – I write to pay my bills! And I’m no J. K. Rowling who can sit through on a couch thinking of what colour the next snitch would be! I’m someone who simply tries to read your minds and make that black and white.

 A Business Analyst’s life is primarily made up of two kinds of people. There’s these folk called the ‘Business’ or the visionaries who think they know what they want, and what the world wants. Then there are the people who I call the ‘Producers’ who possess all the skills needed to make what they think the business wants! And in between somewhere sits yours truly, the Business Analyst, who makes sure the ‘thinking’, is in sync and what the Producers are thinking is what the Business is thinking.

To make life simpler, there is another bunch of folks who (yet again!) ‘think’ that the three of us (my Business, my Producers and me) cannot think the same without them intervening. And guess who these are – of course the Quality Assurance guys a.k.a., the QA bandwagon; they thrive on our differences. So that makes it 4 of us!

So quite logically, here’s how the flow of information goes, and you will see where I fit in (all due credits to the makers of these individual very creative images that I found on Google)

So coming back to the original point of a picture and the 1000 words, it often so happens that all that the business really wants is the moon on a stick, obviously not knowing, or dare I say not wanting to know, the implications (cost, time, impact, feasibility – none of them!) of such a desire. On the other hand, the producers are all but ready to deliver just half a stick, leave alone the moon being ON it! This is where I step in. With some focused number crunching and a broader 30-thousand-feet perspective, many a times I need to present either parties with multiple options and help them come to a mutually agreeable solution.

So it’s not just about finding the right words to describe the picture; a lot of times it is also the art & skills of analyzing and describing what’s on it. And that is what companies look for, in business analysts. After all someone did say that a world without business analysts would be like a game of rugby with neither a referee nor a scorer! Directionless & inexplicable!

Please Note: If any part of this article fees like it is poking fun at you, it is purely your imagination!