Business Analyst Job Description & Profile

Job Description for Business Analysts

A Business Analyst’s (BA for short) role is to review, examine and evaluate various metrics related to a company’s business activities. The areas of responsibility are not restricted to one business vertical and can cover the entire gamut of corporate actions and functions. As one can imagine, this means that BAs have a relatively wide area of responsibility and thus need to possess various skills and qualifications; see the article on skills and qualifications for Business Analysts to execute their roles properly. Here are some examples of what a BA’s Job Description might look like.

Monitoring Special Projects

It would therefore be crucial to compile all the necessary data, arrange it, and evaluate it to determine whether the project is advancing following the goals and budget. Special projects are ad-hoc assignments; thus, studying them is more complicated too. The initial effort might be towards defining measurable goals for the project and creating milestones and specific tasks within the project’s overall scope.

BAs might have to develop special matrices and creative ways to judge the progress of such projects. The goal of the entire exercise is to ensure that the project is a success, and BAs are the ones who help management track the progress of such tasks.

Analysing the Performance of Routine Business Activities

Many departments and field offices may contribute to this broad task. For instance, a BA can create a thorough workflow diagram of the functions moving forward in a specific department. An awareness of how that department operates and how its many parts interact with one another is necessary. It also calls for the ability to follow a job from inception to completion.

Another example may be studying operational objectives for a specific department and measuring their throughput. It also involves identifying bottlenecks, designing modifications to remove them, and recommending workflow enhancements.

Market Analysis

At the end of the day, a business operates to meet the market’s needs. Companies spend billions on market research to understand what their consumers want so that they can fulfil those needs by designing and marketing products/ services. While market research agencies often do the fieldwork and gather the raw data, it often comes down to Business Analysts to make sense of such data from other agencies or the company’s sources.

BAs must collect and analyse information regarding market trends and consumer preferences to develop an in-depth business strategy.

Financial and Operational Effectiveness. BAs might spend a lot of time working with financial numbers, which could mean budgeting and estimates for various departments, analysing weekly, monthly or quarterly performance results, tabulating such data and presenting it to management for review.

In addition to financial metrics, operational data might require a similar treatment from BAs. For example, reviewing the procurement figures, analysing throughput efficiency, tracking exceptions or error rates, etc.

A Day in the Life of a Business Analyst

The role of a business analyst is to gather information and then use that information to maximise the efficiency of a business. To achieve this goal, a BA will spend roughly a third of her day in meetings, calls, or writing emails to get all the information that she needs. This data is only sometimes readily available, especially for special projects, and thus must be acquired skillfully.

The next part of the job is using that data to perform the analysis and make recommendations. Therefore, the BA may spend the rest of her day pouring over spreadsheets, communicating with people to understand any discrepancies or trends, polishing that data to make it presentable to senior management, etc.

Like many business roles, BAs must spend most of their day communicating, analysing data, understanding trends, making presentations and tracking the progress of others. It is a role suited for extrovert and analytical individuals who love learning about all business verticals’ inner workings. See also Business Analyst Qualifications, Skills & Requirements here.

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See also Operations Manager Job Description & Profile here.

See also Business Analyst Qualifikationen & Kompetenzen hier.