Advance Your Business Analysis Career
From the category archives:
Our business analyst community needs your help! We receive questions from new, potential, and experienced business analysts nearly every day. People have questions about skills, jobs, responsibilities, and next steps to advance their career. This series opens up Bridging the Gap as a forum to help other business analysts and a platform for you to share your expertise.
See a question below that you can answer? Please take a few minutes to drop in a comment.
Have your own question? Ask a business analyst and receive input from the Bridging the Gap community.
A reader asks: What is the best way to/how to tackle behavioral interview questions? Laura’s answer: Honestly. I thought about ending the post with this one-word answer. But then I just couldn’t do it. So let’s take a step back and address the underlying components of this question. What is a behavioral interview question? Behavioral [...]
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A reader asks: What is the difference between business analysis and business development? Michelle’s answer: Business development is just that; the growth of new or existing business. It is usually associated with the sales team within an organization. Sales and marketing are responsible for growing existing business – so finding areas of customers that have [...]
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Reader Question: “I am getting ready to send in my CBAP application, and I am wondering if it’s ok to submit the same person both as project contact and reference. The person I would like to use as reference was a project manager in two of my projects and is the only person I kept [...]
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Reader’s Question: I have been working in the medical and spa industry for over 10 years. It seems every position I have involves some BA type duties from rewriting policy and procedure manuals to doing efficiency studies. I need to find a mentor to assist me in turning all this random experience into a BA [...]
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A reader asks: How much is too much information to go over with the users? Would you go over technical details with users in a requirements meeting? Such as, if there were additional requirements pertaining to a technical implementation of updating mail server, changing AD roles/groups retrieved etc… I would think this would be overkill, but [...]
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Let’s face it, who has time for traditional face-to-face study groups anymore? Being a mother of two while running a small company and trying to keep up with friends, family, and managing a household, there is no way you can pencil me in for anything face to face these days. That’s why I love the concept [...]
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Reader’s Question: “I’m wondering about the CBAP® certification. Is the work experience component to be 7500 hours with the title of “Business Analyst”, or do all activities that a business analyst would perform count towards these hours? For example, if you have been a BA for 2 years (4000 hours), and QA for 3 years [...]
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One of our older posts to Help a BA!! had our reader asking the following… I started off as an IT BA putting together functional specifications and detailing user-interface screens. Later, moving companies, I worked as a Business BA undertaking requirements facilitation, BPMN process mapping as-is, to-be, covering Lean/Six Sigma practice. I then moved into [...]
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A reader writes: It’s tough to get a BA post with just 5 months experience. I was working as Business Analyst in the Travel Domain. It was my first position as a BA. Before I had experience in Sales in different fields. The company did not have the right technology in place. They used to [...]
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Reader Question: Is the term “best practice” a misleading buzzword? A current process is normally referred to as “best practice” until analysis is done to identify a new “best practice.” So was the former process not the “best practice” at all and can you reach a point of diminishing returns on the analysis/improvements that could [...]
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