Why and How To Improve Your Business Analysis Skills?

What is Business Analysis?

The Business Analyst is an agent who brings change. Business Analysis is a disciplined approach that introduces and manages changes in an organization, whether they are for corporations, governments, or non-profits.

Business analysis is used to identify and implement the need for change in an organization's work and is also used to facilitate that change. A business analyst identifies and defines the solutions that will maximize the value delivered by an organization to its shareholders.

Business analysts work on all levels of an organization and also get involved in everything from defining strategy to creating the enterprise blueprint, to taking a leadership role by defining the aims and requirements for programs and projects or supporting improvement in its technology and processes.

How To Improve Your Business Analytical Skills

So, now you know the importance of business analysis, let’s discuss how you can improve your business skills in order to take your business to new heights:

• Read More: An important part of being analytical involves being alert and remaining stimulated. Join a book club or pick up more books from the library that relate to your interest. Reading more frequently will help keep your mind running, force your brain to think in a different approach, and encourage you to view ideas in a different way.

• Build your mathematical skills: Mathematics involves solving an equation through different methods to reach an answer. As all mathematics is highly logical, improving your mathematical skills is a great way to polish your analytical skills. Practice various math problems that will help build your logic and problem-solving abilities. Solving these equations is trial and error. Enroll in an online math class or join math camps. Reasoning with different people will help you build your analytical skills.

• Be more observant: Being detail-oriented and observant is a great way to improve your analytical skills as it allows you to process the way things work and process. Utilizing your senses and engaging in the world around you will help you prone your analytical skills. Go for a walk and observe the birds and how they interact. Being more attentive to small details in life will help you bring this set of skills required for the workplace.

• Keep a journal: Recording your daily routine gives you time to reflect. When things don’t go as planned, you can learn from the mistakes and take them into consideration for your future actions. Most of analyzing involves trial and error. Keeping a journal to remind you of your past events is a great way to prone your thinking and analytical skills in the coming future.

• Ask Questions: When you ask questions, you often ask for clarification and understanding. Expressing curiosity provides you with different opinions and allows you to compare your own opinion with different people. Sometimes your questions will lead you to a different answer than what you expected. This is common in any problem-solving situation and very beautifully wires your brain to think more analytically.

• Download Apps and make use of Technology: Not all apps can help you in improving your analytical skills, but many brain game and organizational apps can. Keeping a track of what you’re eating each day through food diary applications, for example, Apps that allow you to track and analyze your caloric and macronutrient intake each day. These apps allow you to analyze the data and take the required steps to adjust and improve the next day. In a similar way, using budget tracking apps can help you see your past expense habits to determine how to proceed with your future. Analyzing these types of data will help you boom your analytical skills.

Business Analysis Tools

Business analysis is important, this is clear but now the question arises what are tools that can help us analyze our business even better. Your friend Divyanshu has analyzed these to help you analyze your business even better, so let’s get started:-

• MS PowerPoint: This software is used to create and deliver formal presentations. A business analyst often gets trapped in situations where he needs to communicate ideas and create or deliver project updates to shareholders. This communication gets more effective in a presentation format through PowerPoint.

• Google Docs: Sharing project documents is counted under collaboration, and at present Google docs proves itself a very useful tool for sharing documents online with team members and shareholders. Google docs support all types of files like .pdf, .txt,.docx, etc.

• Rational Requisite Pro: It is one of the most loved business analysis tools for hiring managers. This tool provides a brilliant solution for business requirement management for bigger projects. Requirements management tools like Rational Requisite pro offers the feature of word processing. Apart from that, it can curate and sort data using a dynamic database. Hence, it makes tracing requirements easy along with the changes. Rational Requisite pro also has functions like conducting impact analysis and managing an audit trail of changes.

• SWOT: SWOT analysis is mostly used for strategic analysis and evaluating a business. These features make this tool even more fun to use:-

• The tool is free of cost to use and is one of the most secure tools.
• It has a feature to load and save analysis to local XML files
• One can very easily export and view .png files

• Pencil: Prototyping is the best way to get confirmation from the customer on the requirements. Moreover, making a prototype helps the consumer to understand the look and feel, and a prototyping tool helps a lot in accomplishing that task. The pencil is one of the best prototyping tools that come as a most unique tool that can be downloaded and used locally. With a simple interface, it allows an analyst to drag and drop elements to build a screen.

The Takeaway

So, business analysis is important but learning these skills takes time as most of the things you learn by hit and trial. Hence, it is recommended to continuously learn new skills and keep on practicing, and most importantly, practice as much as possible.

If you have enjoyed reading this Blog, TWN recommends you to read our Blog on "What Are The Key Essentials of Being A Business Analyst, A TWN Exclusive." Click on the Image Below!