Core competencies of business analyst:

Discuss about the Knowledge Audits of Business Analysis for Ecosystem Services.

The BABOK guide recognizes the dynamic nature of today’s business requirements and provides guidance to the organizations for the skills they must seek in a business analyst role to select the appropriate one for the position (Hathaway 2014). It is a framework that describes the process that must be followed for doing a business analyst task for delivering solution as per the organization needs (Prahalad 2008).

These skills are very important to realize and do justification to the role and serve the organizational requirements effectively. However, these skills are not the only requirement for the role (Hailes 2014). Some additional skills that help the professional to survive in the competition are (Park and Jeong 2016):

The ability to connect to the stakeholders and the team members and build trust.

Ability to work independently in a project and analyse the requirements

Ability to identify ambiguity at the beginning of a project to avoid faults in the later part.

Ability to facilitate project specific meetings to extract necessary information for the execution of projects. It is also referred to as ‘JAD sessions’ or “requirements workshops.”

BABOK guide categorize and organize the task of business analysis into six knowledge category (Paul, Yeates and Cadle 2014). Knowledge areas specific to the BABOK guide are:

It requires analyst to do a thorough analysis of a business problem to have a deeper understanding of the requirements and make the correct judgement of the topic. This helps to make effective planning for completing the task correctly.

The analyst should have the ability to elicit proper information from the team members so that the team members get much more engaged in the project so that effective collaboration can be arranged for any project.

 It is not only enough to understand the requirements for any project but also the analyst must have the ability to manage those requirements effectively for the entire life cycle of the project.

This requires the ability to analysis various strategy to suggest the appropriate one for completing a project.

It describes the ability of a business analyst to analysis various requirements and based on that design effective solution to meet the requirements perfectly.

It is not sufficient to design a solution to problem, it must be properly evaluated to assess the quality of the solution and this quality is must for the role for the business analyst.  

Critique:

Traditionally the role of business analyst was often limited to the SME or the subject matter expert (Hass 2011). However, in these years the organizations all over the world has realized that it is not enough to have persons that are expert in only one domain as business have more dynamic and complex in nature and so is the role of a business analyst (Yeoh and Popovic 2016). Still, it is very much important to analyze the methods and various qualities that are relevant to the role of a SME.

This section has clearly mentioned the core skills that the organizations should look in a business analyst for enhancing their business practises beyond just requiting SMEs. 

The core skills are very important for the role for the business analyst. Apart from the core skills some important skills specific to the business analyst role are (Lang et al. 2015):

It can be thought of a part of the written communication skill which is very important for creating effective documentation which is very much essential considering the agile nature of the business world. The documentation must be unique to avoid any legal issues due to plagiarism.

It is essential for business analyst to have knowledge of various business analyst tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Knowledge of some visual modeling tools like Microsoft Visio is an advantage. 

The core skills that are must for the role of business analyst are listed below:

Business analyst should have a good communication skill as they often need to handle the clients, lead various teams and attend important meeting for the organization. In order to effectively listen to the team, clients and then forward opinions on that needs good communication skill (Muler et al.2016).

Business analyst should have excellent problem solving skills as various projects the organizations deal with often face various problems in terms of planning, designing and execution.

The ability to think critically is another important skill for the role business analyst. This very skill helps to choose particular option from various available options as proposed by clients and stakeholders to suggest the most effective solution for the need of a project (Yeoh and Popovic 2016).

Models for strategy formulation analyzing the external and internal environment:

Synopsis:

Environment analysis constitutes the strategic toll that helps organizations in identifying the internal and external factors that has the potential in influencing the business process and thus the performance of the organization as well (Hass 2011). The analysis helps to identify various opportunities and threats specific to the business. The assessment of various opportunities and threats helps in effective strategy formulation with proper decision making.

Reflection:

Reflection:

There are various models that are used for environment analysis. However, not all the tools are of same quality. Following are some well recognised tools for environment analysis.

PESTLE analysis:

Often the organization needs to analyze the political, economic, social and technological factors to gain knowledge about the internal and external environment to better understand the opportunities and threats for the business (Fozer et al. 2017). PESTLE analysis helps to do that.

SWOT model:

The model by analysing the strength , weakness , opportunities and threats of a specific strategy or decision making process , helps  in understanding the internal and external environment in more intuitive way (Bull et al. 2016).

Porter five forces:

The model helps in understanding the  external competitive environment and thus helps in formulating the effective strategy for maximizing the profit for the organization (E.Doobs 2014).

Critique:

The model mentioned above are very standard in the field of business strategy making process. However, out of those models PESTEL methods are often preferred as it conduct more detailed analysis on the factors that influence the business environment both internal and external. It helps the business analysts to understand the current market scenario as well as the future performance of the organization in the market (Johnson 2016). 

Knowledge audit helps the organizations to understand the knowledge management plan that has already been identified and implemented by the organizations to develop the knowledge resources for the organization as well for the employees (Rodgers, Mubako and Hall 2017). It also helps to understand the effectiveness of the existing knowledge management plan and helps to identify the flaws in the strategy and propose effective solutions to address those needs (Mutch 2008).   

Based on the discussion it can be said that the knowledge audit plan plays an important role in formulating correct strategy for the organization by managing two interconnected concept of knowledge system and knowledge management (Costan and Popoa 2017). The knowledge audit plan must be in perfect alignment to make full use of the systems to serve the business requirements effectively.    

It is not only important to have a knowledge management plan , in order to fully take the benefits of the system there should be proper strategy to use the knowledge management system in effective way to actually get benefited from the system. There should be perfect integration and synchronizations between the knowledge system and knowledge management resources. The knowledge audit plan helps in perfectly synchronizing the knowledge management and the knowledge system (Tay 2017). The knowledge audit, with the knowledge management system provides strategy to use the knowledge resources as per the need of the organization and scope of various project the organization deals with.      

Critical skills of business analyst:

Knowledge system is important to realize the business strategy , but it cannot reflect that whether the knowledge resources is appropriate for the requirement  or whether it needs any modification or improvement to suit the actual needs. The knowledge audit plan with careful analysis of the business requirements can suggest necessary improvements in the knowledge system and in the knowledge management system as well (Gourova and Toteva 2014). This kind of insights helps the organization to formulate the right strategy for the business as per the needs and requirements.  

Due to the evolving nature of the business and dynamic needs, today the role of an business leaders is not only limited to the analyzing business needs  and propose the solution based on that. The responsibilities have become much more diverse. Leadership and team building quality has become an essential for the role of business analyst. Companies these days expect business analyst to be good leader as well in addition to necessary expertise in the business domain.   

The skills that are mentioned are is essential for leadership skills. However there are other requirements that the analyst should be aware to be perfect leaders (Ekpe , Mat and Adeliye 2017)

The analyst should motivate the teams for effective team work

The leaders should look beyond the business scope and provides necessary support to team members and should be available if they need mental or emotional support (Lussier and Achua 2015):

Positive outlooks towards work:

The business analyst as a leader should have positive attitude towards the work, no matter what is the demand of the situation. This helps the team members to remain focused and inspired in tough situations while completing any project or task.   

The essential leadership qualities that the business analyst should have are :

It is one of the prime qualities of leadership. Business analysts should be able to provide information across various departments as per the job needs and should have the capabilities of empowering the team responsible for the product development.

The development teams often face problems to find balance between the actual needs and vision of the project. However it is the quality of the business analyst to talk to the clients and stake holders to find the needs of the project and also keep the vision of the project integrated by staying focused on the project requirements.    

Business analyst should be able to handle multiple projects with ease. The projects varies in terms of requirement, vision , purpose and involved stakeholders and their demands as well. However the analyst should not find it difficult to switch between various projects.

Models for strategy formulation analyzing the external and internal environment:

The ability to understand and manage the key business requirements is to effectively analyze the needs of the business and provide effective solution for the business requirements. The solution should be such that it gives the most effective mean to solve the business problems and maximize the profit by minimizing the risks. The solution should be able to offer excellence in business operation. No organization wants to waste the available resources and want to use the resources in such a way that it provides the desired result. The business analyst should be able to understand the business context effectively to provide correct solution to a business problem.  

The strategies mentioned above are very important to understand the business context and these are very standard rules. In addition to that there are some additional tolls that the analyst should be aware of to be better at understanding the business requirements (Lankoski 2016).   

It helps to understand what business strategy is more effective than others in a particular context (Daniel, Di Domenico and Nunan 2018).

It helps to understand the ownership of various processes so that the limitations and responsibilities are well known before formulating any suggestion for business requirements (Lubberink et al. 2017).   

This is another important strategy to follow when analysing and understanding business requirements as it helps to understand a process by analyzing the efficiency of that particular process, thus the assessment and understanding of the process becomes much more effective in context of the business requirement.

The important strategies that is involved in understanding the business context are:

 It is important to understand the business requirements before proposing any solution. Only correct assessment of the problem can provide enough insights that is needed to deal with a business problem.

In order to be better at decision making , the analyst should be able to analyze  a problem from various perspective to get more clear idea about various available solutions and the benefit of following this approach is that it helps to define the problems in more intuitive way and provide more efficient strategy to solve them.  

 The analyst should be aware of the available resources that the organization has and various limitations and capabilities of the resources.  Correct assessment of the resources help to formulates strategy that suits the organization most and helps in understanding the business needs more effectively.  

The task of choosing the perfect elicitation techniques from the available techniques is not an easy task as every technique has their own strength and weakness. No technique is perfect as such (Paul Yeates and Cadle 2010). Some technique is more suitable than others based on the nature of the task and scope of as well (Prahalad 2008). Some technique is perfect for a specific task or requirement, while other is not. It all depends on the need of the task. 

Based on the analysis it can be said that every techniques has some advantages and disadvantages . some tolls are used at initial stage of the project, some at the later part, some are used to offer quick guide in requirement analysis , while some are used for systematic requirement analysis (Abbasi et al. 2015) .That is why it is more important to choose the perfect one according to the requirement analysis (Yousuf and Asger 2015). However it requires proper knowledge about the techniques, the advantages and disadvantages of each technique to choose the perfect one according to the need of the project or task (Nisar, Nawaz and Sirshar 2015). 

Elicitation techniques can be defined as the tolls that are used to collect the user requirements and then based on those requirements the system is developed in such a way that the requirements of the stakeholders are fulfilled. The classification of different elicitation techniques are listed below:

It is one of the old ways that was preferred by the traditional analyst to meet the requirements elicitation. It involves interviews, surveys and analysis of documents.

It refers to collecting the user requirements at the work environment to analyse them later to build the required system. Techniques in this  category include Observation, Ethnography and Protocol Analysis.

It allows various teams of stakeholders to participate in the decision making process to assist in the designing of the system by offering their expertise. These techniques include: Prototyping, Joint Application Development, Brainstorming, and Group Work .

It allows to analyze and gather information up to the human thinking level. It demands in dept analysis of the requirements. Techniques include Laddering, Card Sorting, Repertory Grids and Class Responsibility Collaboration.

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