Business Analyst: Tools and Principles for Professional Self-Development

Dmytro Lenda, CFA, FRM, CBAP

15+ years of experience in business analysis across different industries and domain areas; CBAP, CFA, and FRM certificate holder; EPAM professional assessment expert

Target audience: Senior+ level analysts with the desire to expand their professional toolset or get an alternative point of view on their further self-development (although more junior people may also find something useful here)

I am thankful to Denis Gobov, CBAP, PMI-PBA, PhD, Head of BA in DataArt and business-trainer; Roman Sakharov, BA manager, and other EPAM colleagues; Lyubov Posvalyuk, CBAP; and Olga Cherkasova, CBAP for their help and advice in preparing this article. My English teacher Sean Meyer helped me with editing the draft. My family supported me all the time I was working on it.

Intro

During my long journey in the BA profession, I found many valuable sources of information and tools that may be useful for BAs. In addition, I generalized my experience and distilled it into a few principles. Both tools and principles presented will help BA professionals in their way to Mastery of the BA profession. Moreover, they may be helpful for practitioners of other related professions, including developers, testers, POs, PMs, etc. I have assembled the most valuable items from my perspective, so this list should not be treated as exhaustive. At the same time, it may help you select valuable items for your professional collection or at least hint to you about the direction of your search or investigation. Business analysis is not a brand-new profession, so you will definitely benefit from the learning experiences from your predecessors in the BA or peer occupations.

I intended to create a place where you could not only detect your gaps in skills, but also return (maybe multiple times) to find a mention of information or link to a resource you need to deepen your knowledge.

Contents

Principles

Follow the global benchmarks

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something

Knowledge as a background

Overcoming existing limitations

Constant experimentation-learning cycle