Useful Tools for Business Analysts - Part 1

on



Tools are undoubtedly an essential part of our day to day lives. The very same applies to your professional life as a Business Analyst. With the constantly advancing technology in the modern world, there is a wide variety of tools to choose from.

In this article, you will discover a plethora of tools that are essential, and some of these, you may have to master depending on the organization you are employed at. 

I will also be reviewing them based on my personal opinion. 

JIRA

Although JIRA is famously known as a project management tool, I will be touch basing on this since it will go hand in hand with your business analysis and documentation activities. 

JIRA is one of the most commonly used tools in the IT project context. This is built for every team member. It allows you to plan, track, release, and create essential custom reports. It is also customizable based on your delivery strategies. 

What's good? 
  • It can be integrated with a lot of external plugins
  • Very flexible and you can really take control of almost all it's aspects
  • You can create custom workflows and enforce necessary validation and checkpoints. 
  • It can be used as an effective bug tracking tool
  • The JIRA suite also has an effective documentation platform called Confluence. Although you have to pay additional dollars for this, it comes in real handy!
What's bad? 
  • It is cumbersome to set up
  • There definitely is a learning curve (I switched from Trello to JIRA in my career, and to be honest, it was a little overwhelming initially, but then there is a lot you can do here than in any other management tool)
  • This tool is certainly expensive
  • For a very small project, I'd use something simpler. 👀

Trello

Trello is a much simpler tool that lets the team collaborate and track projects. However, its simplicity comes with a limited amount of features in comparison to JIRA. This is again one of the most commonly used tools in the industry. 
You can even use this to track your personal tasks. 

What's good? 
  • It is FREE! 
  • Setting up is VERY simple and easy. So, the learning curve is minimal. 
  • Very colorful, relaxing interface
  • All the essential features are available
What's bad? 
  • Not as customizable as JIRA
  • Report generation needs third party integrations and is often cumbersome
  • Limited email integration
  • Comprehensive bug tracking cannot be done easily
MS Planner offers a simple, graphical way to organize teamwork. However, I would recommend this for your personal task list and maybe creating some plans, assigning tasks, and checking the progress of the same. This is hardly a replacement for JIRA in my opinion. 

It is quite easy to set up since it is a part of the Microsoft Suite. Any updates or changes that you make to your plans will be instantly notified to the other project team members, keeping everyone informed. 

It is difficult to say which app you should use or which is better. Everything depends on the context you are using it for and the level of granular control you need to have. 

Here are some physical tools that really work for me! 

Sticky Notes

To make my workspace colorful and organized at the same time, I am a big fan of sticky notes. 
You can even employ the use of different colored sticky notes for your day to day tasks. 

You can differentiate colors based on priority. 

Red - High Priority or urgent
Orange - Medium priority 
Yellow - Stuff you can casually do

 or, 

You can sort them based on the project or any other classification you wish. 

Notebook and pen

This is something I cannot live without. For a person who doesn't always trust memory, this is where I note down everything - ranging from the brilliant ideas that come to my mind randomly to some important meeting notes. 

A stack of A4 sheets

Papers come in handy when you want to brainstorm your way through things with your colleagues, stakeholders, or for storyboarding purposes if that's your kick! (We will get to storyboarding later). 

A whiteboard

A part of this could be used to paste your sticky notes and the rest of it for all the other brainstorming work, random erasable notes. 



It is important to identify what tools work best for you. Hence, before plunging into using the tool, do a trial run to double-check if it has all the features you are looking for and it's limitations.

Something to watch out for:

There had been times I have burnt my hands, realizing the limitations in the free plans, only once a good deal of my work is done - resulting in a lot of rework. If you are considering buying a tool, make sure you do a good amount of research, check the limitations and capabilities of your plans, and most importantly read some reviews.

Here are 2 sites you can use to dig up software reviews:

https://www.g2.com/

https://www.capterra.com/


Stay tuned for a lot more interesting tools to come. 



Comments

Post a Comment