A business analyst, BA for short in the digital space is a role that puts the customer at the focal point for product design and development.
In agency land the importance of a business analyst is very much realised. The value of having a business analyst goes beyond meticulous requirements gathering. It’s a role that reduces risks to agencies by documenting the scope required for build. To the client, this means outlining the deliverables.
I’m not going to preach to the converted. For those who don’t understand the role of a business analyst in an agency; let’s break the role down.
What does a business analyst do for an ecommerce agency?
A business analyst in an ecommerce or digital agency can wear many hats. In that, I mean, the business analyst role will be a mash of other roles such as solutions architect, product manager and at times project manager.
For the most part a business analyst is involved in the discovery phase of a project. Where they facilitate requirement gathering sessions with clients. These sessions are generally structured where the client gets taken through a journey. This journey enables the client a clear avenue of thinking to gather the requirements.
Business analysts are often called in throughout the project to ensure that items that are developed are to scope. This is for quality assurance (QA) purposes; as the BA is closest to the scope.
How can a business analyst help you
Here’s the top 5 reasons why a business analyst is important:
- Provides the client and agency a clear guidance of work to be conducted.
- Helps understand and solution for problems you didn’t know you had.
- Highlights risks and triages them with the tech team.
- Quality assurance on the work that has been delivered. Check that it is to scope.
- Extract all your requirements and help you groom the requirements to meet budget and timeframes for delivery.
Along with the 5 reasons above, business analysts are meticulous at documenting. Business requirements document (BRD) and functional requirements document (FRD) are some of the artefacts created by the business analyst.
These documents serve the purposes of outlining scope but a good level of documenting goes a lot further than that. It serves as a time capsule for work conducted in the past.
A business analyst, although important, can be expensive to hire on a full time basis. Solutions Business Analysts provides a service to meet all your requirement gathering needs. Like to know how we can help you? Reach out to our friendly sales team sales@solutionsbusinessanalysts.com