Being a Business Translator

If you find in normal day to day life that you talk about the one topic but to many different people, then you’ll realise that this isn’t necessarily an easy task. An example of this is organising a kids birthday party, one may have to talk to party goods suppliers, kid’s parents or even the kids themselves about party games. However, for each of these groups, how you talk about the games is slightly different, not only do you need to talk at various levels of detail but the concerns are slightly different too.

This is the exact same case with being a business analyst. You have the one requirement that needs to be discussed with various stakeholders but how the BA executes that, is in accordance to the primary concerns of each group. Developers will want to know about the requirement from a functional point of view, how it will work, what are the data flows, how the functionality is triggered etc, This contrasts to the business, where their concerns are around meeting usability constraints, how the functionality aligns with business processes and how it should improve existing functionality.

These different concerns will permeate the language the BA needs to use as well. Concepts will take different names between the business and the software and the type of detail needs to change as well.

In addition to this, an experienced and skilled BA will modify their style of communication according to who specifically they’re talking to, based on past experience.

Overall, an effective business analyst is skilled in forming the language and the content of the communication according to the audience. This, I think, is an appealing part of the job because its a constant and challenging aspect and a skill necessary outside work as well.