Open Up Your Career Opportunities with Business Analysis
Fifth of five articles drawn from “Turbocharge your Skills and Career with Business Analysis,” presented at Dreamforce 2022.
The Opportunity Hub
Firing up a business analyst mindset and expertise expands your horizons, revealing new career opportunities. Your curious, benefits-oriented attitude combined with communication and domain skills empowers you to discover what an organization needs to achieve its goals and fulfill its purpose.
As you gain organizational perspective in a business analyst role, you’ll find yourself at a point where you can advance your career in one of three general directions:
The Business Analyst Journey
You can pursue a business analyst journey if you’re unsure about committing to a business or technical direction.
The concept map below illustrates essential business analyst responsibilities:
As a business analyst, you learn about an organization, its domains (specialties), and processes. You work with domain experts to discover process enhancements that achieve domain goals. You form alliances with stakeholders to drive process and organizational improvements. As you upgrade processes in multiple domains, you gain insights into how the organization works to fulfill its purpose.
You work with the development team as a business analyst, ensuring they understand the requirements. You take on a diplomatic role between the team and business stakeholders, leading them on a mission to get the solution right the first time.
The Architect Journey
If you’re technically ambitious, you can pursue the architect journey. Architects aspire to understand requirements like business analysts. They work in concert to deliver a solution fulfilling the organization’s needs. This concept map outlines how that works:
A solution’s success depends on the business analyst curating requirements to reflect the organization’s needs, and the architect ensures that the final product will fulfill the requirements.
The Leadership Journey
A business analyst role prepares you for leadership when you:
Define business problems with managers and executives
Organize and run discovery meetings
Show stakeholders the value of their participation
Delegate tasks to allies and stakeholders
Drive a solution to completion
The more productive people become from your solutions, the more they’ll appreciate and respect the differences you make in the organization as a leader.
The Reward is the Journey
Business analysis immerses you in business and the technology that improves it. If you enjoy enhancing business processes in any domain with a dash of technology, business analysis provides an exceptional journey.
If you decide to go in a technical direction with your business analyst talent, you can become a solution architect. You’ll still work with stakeholders to understand what they need from a solution. You’ll provide alternatives for them to decide how solutions will best fulfill their requirements.
You can pursue a leadership journey if you want to go from improving processes to transforming the organization. Playing a business analyst role lays the foundation for leadership when working with management to brainstorm business challenges, leading stakeholders to define requirements, and developing solutions to meet the challenges.
Developing a business analyst mindset and expertise pays off with broader organizational insights, leading to exciting career opportunities.