Productivity tips for Business Analysts

While business analyst plays a vital role in promoting growth and development of an organization, there are certain tips that could enhance the productivity of business analyst. Let us examine some of them in this blog.

Scheduling the meetings efficiently

While attending meetings are certainly a required part of the job, as a Business Analyst (BA), your performance is ultimately judged on your ability to create meaningful and well written documents that clearly define a project’s scope, value to the organization, and/or business requirements. Therefore, it’s to your professional advantage to have blocks of time within your work schedule to get these documents written. The concept of meeting batches is to schedule all your meetings in clusters, within the same day or within the same parts of day, thus leaving you these blocks of time to get your work done.

Eradicating the middlemen wherever possible

Business Analysts often spend much of their time meeting with two groups separately, for example, business users and computer programmers, and then updating each group with the needs, issues and concerns of the other. For example, the BA may first meet with the business users, then meet with the programmers to describe the business user’s needs. This requires two meetings and only gives the programmers second-hand knowledge of the users’ wishes. If, as the BA, you meet with both groups at once, it allows the programmers to hear first-hand what the user wishes to have developed and allows you to have one meeting instead of two. This extra time can then be spent on more meaningful work, such as documenting user requirements.

Combined Meetings

Often times when gathering the requirements for a new system or system upgrade, you must meet with multiple application users. A meeting with two or more of these business users at one time in a group meeting has various advantages. First and most obvious, it requires you to have fewer meetings because you are meeting with multiple people at once. Second, it facilitates dialog and brainstorming between the business users which may provide you with greater insights and higher quality requirements. Third, it may help you gain a higher degree of user buy-in to the requirements because needed functionality compromises made between users provides them with deeper insights as to why the compromises were needed.

Collaboration of Documents

From a logistics perspective, reviewing a document collaboratively online has many advantages over doing it asynchronously. When emailing a document to a business user, project stakeholder or other interested party, you must wait for their feedback before you can proceed. Then, you make the needed document changes, send it back to them and again wait for feedback and/or approval. If you review the document together, either in person or using collaborative software, you can make the needed document changes in real-time. This allows you to simultaneously, get user feedback, make the needed changes and gain approval in a single meeting.