What should be in a business analyst skills assessment?
Presentation skills – demonstrates basic presentation skills. The business analyst should have effective verbal communication skills including use of proper visuals, volume and clarity, use of fillers, pace, using focal points to keep attention and good handwriting. Web conferencing is so popular for virtual requirements gathering the analyst should have ground rules, agendas and appropriate web conferencing techniques and tools.
Facilitation Skills – demonstrates the ability to use the basic facilitation tools such as active listening, neutrality, questioning and observation. The business analyst should demonstrate clear questioning, open ended questioning and probing type questioning. In addition, summarizing and restating for confirming and clarifying is important.
People Skills – demonstrates the ability to work with people. People skills are important for the business analyst. They will need to be able to control the group, draw out full participation, keep the group focused and reach consensus.
Elicitation Techniques Skills – designs an effective agenda/approach and demonstrated the ability to understand and use the specific tools for the requirements gathering process.
Business Modeling and Use Case Analysis Skills – demonstrated the ability to depict business processes using context diagrams, process flows, state diagrams,domain object models and use case modeling. The business analyst should be able to capture business use cases, detailed use cases, user stories and write requirements lists.
Business Analyst Process Skills – understands and uses the Business Analyst Process effectively to elicit and document requirements to include the Project Charter, Business Requirements Document (BRD) and Functional Specification Document (FRD).
Overall – an overall rating of the person’s ability to function as a business analyst.
For more information on these skills attend Pierson’s Requirements Gathering & Writing Class.
