So, Now I'm a Business Analyst

Hello all, I’m back from under my rock. Job hunting was getting pretty desperate there for a while but happy to report I’ve landed a job out of attending a hackathon. I started a couple of days ago as a Business Analyst—a UX Analyst/Strategist, as I see it.

Looking to hit the books hard and hit the ground running so any other fellow BAs or UXAs out there please please let me know if there are good resources I should be absorbing. I’m coming in on the ground floor for a rebuild, re-imagine and relaunch for an older existing project and the possibilities are dizzying for a newcomer.

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Congratulations! Keep up the hard work.

Yay Jason – that’s fantastic news! Well done.

Congrats, Jason! I’ve worn the mantle of BA for little over a year now, and I love my job. As I’ve been studying UXD the last 6 months, I’ve found a tremendous amount of overlap in the two disciplines (in fact, I wrote a blog post about it!).

I wouldn’t doubt for a second that employers say they are looking for a BA when they actually need a UX analyst/researcher/strategist. Employers may be unfamiliar with the idea of UX or think of UX as more of the surface-level visual design rather than encompassing the whole experience (as my current employer does). The BA career path is more established and professionalized than UX, at this point. Employers probably feel more comfortable calling a position a BA rather than a UX professional.

As a BA, I would recommend a few resources:

  • BABOK - Business Analysis Body of Knowledge - This is created by the IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis). If you google BABOK, I believe you’ll find version 2 as a free Google book, though to get the latest version 3, you’ll need to be a member of the IIBA.

  • ModernAnalyst.com - Plethora of articles, webinars, resources, and an emailed newsletter! (because we need one more of those, right?) This site is geared toward the wider analyst world, not just BAs.

I’m curious about how you described the role as UX Analyst/Strategist.

  • What makes you say that?
  • Can you provide any insight / details?
  • Job description or overview?

A UXD friend was telling me about a new role being called UX Strategist, but I haven’t yet seen it in the wild. Are you referred to by others as a UX Strategist? I’m curious to learn what this looks like in the real world. I’ll be doing my own research, of course, but I’d love to hear what you’re observing!

Thanks!
Marie

I have just linked this thread to one of our BAs (hopefully they will sign up and help out :slight_smile: )

Thanks all!

So the company refers to the role as Business Analyst, I started thinking UX Strategist/Analyst based on the job description and what I was hearing in the interviews. I think there’s definitely a case for it being UX-centric.

The Business Analyst must analyze and synthesize information provided by a large number of people who interact with the business, such as customers, OEM staff, IT professionals, and executives. The BA will be responsible for eliciting the actual needs of stakeholders, not simply their expressed desires. The BA will also work to ease communication between organizational units. In particular, the BA will play a central role in aligning the needs of business units with the capabilities delivered by information technology, and may serve as a “translator” between those groups. The BA will translate business requirements to System/Functional requirements, and then these will be passed on to Application Developers

So I see a lot of UX research with customers and service reps to work out where our site products are falling down and where they could improve but I’ll also have to translate those UX opportunities to the sales and marketing folks.

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Congrats on the new job. I was once in a BA/UX role that I thought worked really well. I gave a presentation about it a few years ago. The slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/LeonBarnard/leon-barnard-productcamp-sf. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions.
- Leon

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Leon - Really enjoyed going through your presentation! Great stuff - great advice, too! I especially liked the advice to employers to look for UX designers that can “tell a good story”, by explaining their designs, defending them, and carry them through to implementation.

It’s awesome - thanks!
~ Marie

So happy to help! Best of luck! -Leon