Key Ingredient for a Successful Business Analyst
This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Top Trends for Business Analysts." The speaker is Rick Smith, Senior Business Analyst at InetSoft.
The second key ingredient for a successful business analyst is having good business skills. One of the things I hear an awful lot from the business analyst community out there is the challenge that they have to sit at the conference table with senior executive leaders and quantify strategies about the next fiscal year. Where are we going? What are we doing? What sort of insights do the senior BAs have? How can we guide the future?
I think the profession still needs to grow, I think the acknowledgement still needs to be there, but I also think one of the missing pieces is what I would call ownership accountability. We need to get in synch with the phases our executive management team is using, return on investment and the creation of efficiencies.
You should be able to talk about strategic plans and be able to articulate it. Be able to present that information which is relevant and important to a senior executive audience. I am not suggesting that we don’t do this already, but I’m suggesting that we need to really fine tune this ability.
Things like critical thinking and problem solving, change management, things like integrity, things like setting goals and objectives, these are all the soft skills that are important.
Business Skills That Will Help Propel Us Forward
These are the business skills that will help propel us forward and be able to sit at the table and strategize as business analysts. You want to be able to look at current state and help provide insight into the desired future state. I think one of the things we have to really focus on is the practice of modeling.
Let’s put up the next poling question and ask, ‘is modeling a mandatory practice for your requirements, management and development activities?’ Is it required for you to procure models as part of your requirements or business analysis practices? Let’s see what the audience says. The key word is mandatory.
Well I think that they should but I think the reality is, is that they don’t. The results are, yes is 24%, no is 76%. I am very sad that the numbers are as they are and some people perhaps might argue that modeling is very time consuming. I would argue the other way. I would say modeling is actually much, much faster. It’s a lot easier for me as a business analyst to sketch out things on a white board or just sketch out things on an iPad and share them with our customers.
You know that picture is worth a 1,000 written words, and so it really strikes me that these practices are not mandatory even if it’s the hybrid of practices. I look at an activity diagram where I can quickly and easily identify where bottlenecks are occurring or how we can increase efficiencies by moving data and processes through a system faster so I’m really surprised.
Trend number 7, ladies and gentlemen, and this is COEs business analysis. Centers of Excellence provide a framework for discipline, and increasingly we‘re starting to see Centers of Excellence pop up. COEs were on the rise, and then we got into economic crisis, and COEs were on the downturn. We saw community practices, and that hung on for a year, a year and a half. Now we’re back to COEs again, and it’s interesting we're starting to see business analysis Centers of Excellence manifest themselves both in the public sector and in private sector.
Even more interesting is that the most mature business analysis Centers of Excellence that I have seen are those from India, and when you think about India we think immediately business outsourcing and outsourcing solutions. A lot of organizations that I work, some of the big ones are divided by industry vertical and each vertical within an organization has a Business Analysis Center of Excellence.
Enterprise Business Analysis Centers of Excellence
What I find even more interesting is that sitting on top of all the industry verticals are Enterprise Business Analysis Centers of Excellence. I don’t think in North America we’re quite yet at the Enterprise Business Analysis Centers of Excellence but you know in some of the state and local government agencies that work with COEs are beginning to manifest themselves.
At a lot of larger pharmaceutical organizations or manufacturing organizations we’re starting to see BA Centers of Excellence show up. We’re starting to understand the order of magnitude necessary to bring this discipline together. PMOs and IT organizations have said this is real, and we need a forum. We need a structured and organized approach to understanding how this is done. We see this manifest itself through a lot of engagements.
Enterprise Business Analysis CoE Delivers Improvements and ROI for a Large Pharmaceutical Organization
A leading global pharmaceutical organization established an Enterprise Business Analysis Center of Excellence (CoE) to standardize how business analysis was conducted across its R&D, manufacturing, and commercial divisions. Prior to the CoE’s launch, projects varied widely in requirements-gathering quality, documentation standards, and stakeholder engagement, leading to delays and duplicated efforts. By defining a common framework for business analysis, introducing consistent tools and templates, and providing professional development programs for analysts, the CoE created a unified language and approach that bridged business and IT. This alignment improved the speed and accuracy of capturing user needs across hundreds of initiatives, ranging from clinical trial data management to regulatory compliance projects.
The CoE also deployed analytics dashboards and reporting mechanisms to monitor project health and value delivery. Metrics such as requirements volatility, cycle time for approvals, defect leakage, and realized business value were tracked consistently across portfolios. This visibility allowed leadership to prioritize high-value initiatives and intervene early when projects veered off track. For example, the CoE’s structured requirements validation process reduced rework in a major drug launch program by 30%, enabling the company to meet regulatory filing timelines and avoid costly delays. These data-driven practices established a culture of accountability and continuous improvement that rippled across the enterprise.
Beyond project execution improvements, the CoE delivered measurable ROI by lowering overall IT and business change costs. Standardized elicitation and documentation practices reduced redundant solution design, allowing the company to retire several legacy systems and consolidate overlapping capabilities. Business analysts trained through the CoE became trusted advisors to executives, identifying automation opportunities and process optimizations that generated millions in annual savings. For instance, a CoE-led assessment of pharmacovigilance reporting identified opportunities to streamline workflows and integrate with AI-driven monitoring tools, cutting manual processing time by half and reducing compliance risks.
Finally, the CoE’s value extended beyond financial ROI into strategic agility. By establishing a shared repository of business capabilities and requirements patterns, the organization accelerated innovation cycles, making it easier to evaluate new drug development platforms, respond to shifting regulations, and support partnerships with biotech startups. Stakeholder satisfaction scores for IT and business collaboration improved year over year, demonstrating that a mature business analysis discipline fosters trust and transparency. In the competitive and highly regulated pharmaceutical industry, the Enterprise Business Analysis CoE became a catalyst for delivering products to market faster, with greater quality and at lower cost — a clear win for patients and shareholders alike.