Skills Every Business Analysis Team Manager Needs

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Managing a business analysis team is no small task. The best candidate for this role is often a business analysis professional. This is because those with business analysis experience have a deep understanding of the tasks each BA team member has and can provide direction as needed.

 

As a business analysis professional, you can be successful in the role of business analysis team manager or lead. All you need to be effective are some specific skills and techniques.

3 Skills a Business Analysis Team Manager or Lead Must Have

A business analysis team manager or lead has a lot of responsibilities. The right skills enable them to carry out these responsibilities and get good results. For example, a business analysis team manager should be strong in leadership, coaching, and management skills. According to Modern Analyst, they must also possess the ability to:

1) Set up and manage the requirements process. This entails building relationships with stakeholders and individuals who will act as the source of the requirements for a given project.

2) Manage scope creep. This requires analyzing changes and determining which ones are most likely to affect the project schedule. After changes are analyzed, the manager or lead must communicate their findings to the appropriate team member. “The impacts to the business stakeholders must also be communicated in order to determine if the change is worth the cost or duration increase,” Modern Analyst explained.  

3) Act as a business analysis professional on the team. At the same time, the business analysis team manager must facilitate requirements. They should be sure to balance their business analysis responsibilities with their managerial tasks.

Last (and this may seem redundant), a business analysis team manager or lead must be able to lead well. “In everything from interpersonal issues to documentation issues, they are the responsible party for seeing that these issues are resolved,” explained Modern Analyst.

Related Reading: “Business Analysis Leaders Can Support Their Teams in Uncertain Economic Times”

Effective Ways to Support Your Business Analysis Team

Interested in learning some additional ways to support your business analysis team? Here are a few, suggested by Kathy Claycomb, contributor to NetMind:

• Give all team members access to requirements artifacts from other projects. This provides a learning opportunity for team members and also enables requirements reuse. 
   
• Make good use of peer reviews. “Implement peer reviews as part of your project best practices so they can form networks,” commented Claycomb. 
    
• Ensure business analysis team members have plenty of time to read articles and blog posts about requirements management.  
   
• Identify skill gaps. Once you know what skills are missing, provide training to help close those gaps. 

Claycomb also recommended that business analysis team managers and leaders spend time with individual team members and ask them to elaborate about their work and the challenges they face. “Assure them that you have confidence in their ability to analyze and that you want to support their efforts as much as possible,” she wrote.  

Last but not least, IIBA's Corporate Program provides the support you need to help advance business analysis competencies and drive professional development and growth.

Business analysis teams are becoming increasingly agile. Business analysis team managers must become agile, too. The IIBA Agile Analysis Certification strengthens your agile skills and expertise by teaching you to apply an agile perspective within a business analysis framework. This will help you manage an agile business analysis team and make you a more competitive business analysis professional in general.

 

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