What kind of values does a Business Analyst Provide?

Understand Need: what “exactly” the business needs

“Exactly” here is an idealistic concept. However, as BAs, we should aspire to be as close to it as possible.
In fact, how close a BA gets to know the “exactness” of a need, defines his progression in this art form.
With experience and several hits and misses, a BA develops the eye for looking for that mythical “exactness” of a need.
This proves it is just another skill. And how do we become good at a skill; get the right education and sufficient deliberate practice.
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.
Understanding the “exact” need and converting it into a solid “requirement” that brings SMART value is the real task of a BA.

Some BAs can be on the functional side or the business side.
They look for opportunities in the business and push for projects that would materialize those opportunities.
They push for projects that would enable changes to get the most positive impact.
On Non-Functional side: I used a technology called Redis. It was used for a single project to improve the speed of data transfer. Faster speed means better user/customer experience which means happy user/customer. Isn’t that what every business’ primary goal is. It was such an efficient technology that we could replicate it in almost every application.

They make the processes more efficient.
They employ various techniques to reduce the cost to businesses like the cost of losing a customer, actual monetary cost, the time-saving cost that generates additional efficiency and value to the business.
E.g. it is said that if a user doesn’t find what he is searching for in 3 clicks then we lose the user. A Business Analyst understands this and while helping the UI and User-Experience team build the interface, he points out the fact to keep the UI such that the user finds what he is looking for in 3 clicks. If this is achieved then the user stays and should sign up for the service. This was the BA stops the user from being lost.

They push for new software, technologies, efficiencies, reworking of things to realize those benefits. They generate their own value by pointing it out.
Businesses pay BAs so that they can go in and save more money by reducing cost, increase revenue, etc
Companies have had and will have projects without BAs. Change and Need analysis was done and will be done on those projects irrespective of BA presence. There were problems like poor requirement collection, in the beginning, the original project need is not met, the scope of the project would change, the project would go over schedule or budget or both, etc. BAs exclusively can control and improve these factors which help the business to have more confidence in a project.

The post is based on my notes and understanding from this BA tutorial