In my view, the most important value a Business Analyst can bring to the table is the ability to understand a business’s needs, or more precisely the “exact” business need.
“Exact” here is an idealistic concept. However, as BAs, we should aspire to be as close to it as possible.
With experience and several hits and misses, a BA develops the eye to look for that mythical “exactness” of a need.
This proves it is just another skill. Furthermore, to become good at a skill, we must have:
- Right Education
- Sufficient deliberate practice
Right Education:
Can we really learn to find a “need”?
Theoretically speaking, yes!
There are implicit and explicit ways to learn to look for “needs”.
Explicit:
We can directly ask.
We can draw conclusions and verify them.
Implicit:
Please analyze the below examples.
E.g.1:
The 5 why’s analysis technique helps us to find the root cause of a problem. Once we know the root cause we can know what “needs” to be done to solve it.
E.g.2:
The active listening technique can help us to understand the correct message of a speaker. Only when we have fully understood the speaker we can know what the real “need” is.
From the above examples, it is clear that understanding needs may not always be explicit.
Various elicitation techniques are recommended by IIBA BABOK to discover needs aka requirements.
Deliberate Practice
Deliberate Practice is the key here.
What does it mean?
Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.
Right education, deliberate practice, and real-world experience are the ways to hone our “need-finding” skill.
I hope I’ve been able to convince you that “finding-need” is a learnable skill.
Each one of us can learn a skill and then perform it in our own unique way. The more we practice the more subtle it gets as part of our personality. Over time, it will appear as a natural trait of ours, whereas the reality is that it is just a skill that we have mastered.
This way, we can say that “finding need” is an art form.
The excellence in this art form can be measured by how close we get to the “exactness” of a need.
How close a BA gets to know the “exactness” of a need, defines his progression in this art form.
Knowing what exactly the business wants is the biggest value a BA could provide. Irrespective of how trivial it sounds, it is the most complex skill.