Where business analysis fits into your organisation

What’s the point in investing in training if it’s not going to directly benefit your business?

It’s a legitimate question to ask and one that all businesses who are looking into training courses for their staff need to consider.

After all, progressing someone’s career and providing them with the opportunities to expand their skillset is beneficial, but it’s important to ensure the business itself is able to benefit directly too.

What can business analysis bring to your table?

There are many benefits a business analyst can bring to the table but one of the most impactful ways they can deliver value is by helping businesses make the right decisions and implement change at different levels within the organisation both tactically and strategically.

So, how might they go about doing that? Well, the right business analysis training will provide your candidates with the skills and techniques to deliver real change within your business:

  • Business analysts can save your business money by not only driving efficiencies within workflows and processes, but also by streamlining and often minimising the amount of investment needed to be put into a project in order to successfully achieve the required outcomes.
  • Business analysts can save your business time and labour costs by identifying wasteful work processes and tasks that are being duplicated. Using analysis as part of their methodology right from the start of the process, they can often reduce the amount of drafts and versions of plans needed within a project so that less time is spent on re-visiting work already carried out.
  • Business analysts can help to facilitate communication across projects, as well as across different departments and different levels of a business, so that visions and ideas are well-shared and misunderstandings or mis-communications avoided.
  • Business analysts will create logical decision-making processes, so there is less time spent going round in circles and more time spent on driving your organisation forward. It can also make a big difference as to how senior members of the business are able to use their time, particularly when varying stakeholders are having to join multiple, often lengthy, and sometimes unnecessary meetings.
  • Business analysts will find cost-effective efficient solutions to the challenges your organisation is facing. This may involve big technological change but it doesn’t have to; very often systems can be tweaked or tools used that you already have in place, which can deliver maximum impact at minimal cost.
  • Business analysts can effectively prioritise the tasks and requirements your business needs in order to overcome challenges. They will be able to implement prioritisation from a whole-business perspective, and can do so not only for those tasks that are most pressing but also for those that will offer maximum value to the business.
  • Business analysts can provide a scalable framework for the workflows and processes they help to put in place so that you can be confident that as your business grows, so too can your IT framework and its capabilities.

What might this look like in practice?

There are many different scenarios as to how successful business analysis might look like in your business.

It may be that you have several new product development ideas you are considering investing in, but your team can’t agree which to go with. Using convergent thinking, a business analysist will be able to identify and process the different sets of ideas put forward, and then go on to evaluate them based on defined selection criteria to inform which would be best to implement for the business.

Or it might be that your business analyst is able to identify inefficient workflows that have come to their attention when analysing another part of the system that is undergoing change. Because the system is already in the process of development, an additional tweak can be made that is easily included within the investment, which goes on to deliver even more value to the organisation.

It’s clear that businesses can benefit hugely from business analysis, and training up your top talent within your team to acquire the necessary skills, experience and techniques can prove incredibly cost effective for your organisation, and invaluable to both your people and your business.

To find out more about the breadth of BCS accredited courses we can provide for your team, and the flexible ways in which our training can be carried out, please do get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.