What Does a Business Analyst Do Day to Day

what does a business analyst do day-to-day the core work is generally the same even if each day looks a little bit different hi I'm Jen and today I'll take you along with me as I consult as a business analyst right now I'm working with a client that is looking to grow their service based business it's been mainly owned or operated up until now a major challenge for them is to standardize and automate their processes so they can serve more customers hire employees that can easily integrate into how they work and still provide the same high level of service that cause them to be in the spot they are being in to man and a growing company the work I'm doing today is going to be specific to this company but it's not so different from what I have done in the past consulting for other business clients or working in more business analyst roles within a corporation you're really trying to find more efficient ways to do things to streamline them to standardize them and make it easy for other people to understand the concept of what's happening this day should show you what a business analyst does on a day to day basis regardless of the particular setting that they might be working on let's jump into the day I'm working from home today which is typical of most of the business analysts work that I do being on site with clients can be really beneficial when kicking off a new project or when we get into the implementation phase of the results of all of this analytics work it's sometimes just easier in person to talk about scope requirements and to gain more stakeholder buy-in this is possible to do without ever being on site and a lot of the work I do is like that but sometimes if it's convenient being on site can be really beneficial for both me as an analyst and for the client the main topic I'm working on with this particular client today is streamlining their pricing and quoting systems so that they give standardized quotes to all of their customers but also can do it extremely quickly I already have a lot of inputs that I need from the client to be able to go ahead and do the work normally I start my day looking over an action list that I share with whichever clients I'm working with currently this is just a good way to double-check any deadlines that I might have if there's any priorities that have changed and also make sure that the client is up to date on the latest status I still email text and call clients to go through this but this one shared document is a really easy way to have a reference point if they thought of anything in the previous evening or since we last talked they can make a note and I can also make my notes on where we are any inputs that I might need from them to keep moving forward with figuring out this pricing structure and they're quoting system my starting point for this work is a 10 page document that the client has that they've used to quote things and they've just continued to add to it over the entire time they've been in business which at this point is over 10 years so it makes a lot of sense so the person that created it but even the co-owner sometimes can have difficulty making sense of the reference sheet because it's it's made to work well for one person it's not made to work well for people that are coming into things with a low odds context it also means there's no easy way to put in a few different inputs and get a price back the person doing the quoting needs to really understand and then nowhere in the sheet they should reference to get the exact price for the service that they're performing for their clients this morning I'm going to go into their CRM their customer relationship management program where they have all the information on everybody they've quoted for at least the past five years who ended up buying what the final price ended up being and I want to start to understand where are most of the services that they're offering they have a 10 page spreadsheet that references pretty much every service that they do offer have offered in the past but my suspicion is the majority of their work is coming from about 20% of their services the 80/20 rule is pretty consistent when it comes to looking at business problems you generally have this small group that's responsible for the majority of what's happening I don't have any reason to suspect they're going to be different but I want to look at it and understand and then take a more agile approach to how we implement these changes so rather than saying I need to optimize everything right away and then implement it I want to see how can we optimize the things that they're spending most of their time on if they're quoting on five services 80% of the time then I don't need to worry about the other 60 services they offer right away I want to focus on those five services because then we can get those streamline they can implement it and there's a little more room to think about do they want to offer all the other services they have do they want to refine what they offer and how can we simplify it especially if they're really not getting that many people purchasing those other services because of the size of this company their days currently pretty easy to extract into Excel to work so I'm going to go ahead and extract their data out of their CRM into Excel I'll do a little bit of analysis in Excel and then if I need to import it into it another analytics program to do some additional coding work or whatnot it's easy enough to do that I'm gonna jump into that and I'll check back with you in a little bit to show you how my day is progressing I've got my results and they're about what I expected most of their sales are coming from less than 20% of their products so I'm planning to pursue this path in optimizing how they price and how they quote on those well I know from the data what they're actually selling and what they're quoting it's still helpful to me for stakeholder buy-in to talk with people and see Anatole do they agree with what I came up with if it disagrees with the data then I do have that hard data that information that I can show them and say well this is a reality of what's happening but most of the time they generally agree and it helps validate that the whole purpose of looking at the data is not to tell someone they're wrong a lot of times it's confirming what people already suspect or know so I'm gonna hop on a video chat with this client and just run through the results that I've gotten talked through the items that are driving most of their sales and I'll also see if they want that to drive most of their sales in the future they've talked about expanding into different areas so I want to confirm before we move forward with this that these are areas they still want to sell in and see if there's anything that they want to upsell on these that I want that I might need to keep in mind or packages they want to offer that I might need to keep in mind as I'm going through and recommending methods for pricing I've confirmed with the client that what I found is generally what they were expecting and they're on board with moving forward with addressing those few items in the the first round of pricing updates so now I'm going to work on sketching out a pricing structure to recommend to the client as I come up with the pricing there's a few things I want to keep in mind I want it to be easy to understand and easy to use for someone I also want it to be easy to use with a software right now it's all done manually but implementing a software designed to help with quoting can really help them right now they're using their CRM which works okay but is not really designed to have a flow of asking for different criteria different inputs about the potential product that they're servicing to be able to really get a good quote out of that system my general process as a business analyst with this is to start making groups and subgroups and see how I can combine it all together in this case they're doing residential cleaning and I can segment that into a lot of different groups if we think about cleaning it can be interior can be exterior it could be roof or washing houses or tax so I'll start to move those groups into different segments to make sense out of them and see what groups I can have underneath I want to end up with a process flow where I can start at the top and for instance say is this or commercial and then depending on that answer move over to a flow once I know it's residential I can say do they neither interior exterior cleaned exterior ok exterior is it they just want the roof washed because it's getting algae growth or do they need they're siding cleaned or the exterior of the house once I know that the house needs washed what type of facade does that have on it is exciting is it brick I can start going into more detail about all of the different aspects that may end up affecting the price because in some cases certain materials or areas are cheaper or more expensive to clean I need to know information about the area they're servicing whether it's residential or commercial a tiny one-story thousand square foot house is going to be a lot different than an apartment complex or a church or a gas station that might need the canopy and a lot of oil gas type spills clean off of their concrete surfaces this process is going to take a while I'll probably be working on it the rest of the day maybe even into tomorrow to come up with an initial sketch of a flow again once I'm finished with that I'm gonna check in with a client some clients may want the entire process run end to end and they'll just take the output at the finish but this is a real mindset shift for this client so I want to check in and make sure that they understand what I'm doing why I'm doing it because it will help them in the future as they look at other areas of their business that they want to streamline that they want to standardize so I'll run through the flow I come up with for them and see if again if they can confirm that that's a good flow or they may want to make changes that have been really difficult to make in their current setup when they're pricing everything as an individual item there may be changes when we come into a flow setting where they can standardize some more things or they need things broken out more but haven't been able to manage to do that with their current setup I've been working on this pricing structure for a few hours I pretty much got it figured out so I'm gonna wrap up for today and I'll keep working on it tomorrow this has been a pretty typical day as a business analyst I've been analyzing what the problem is talking with the clients and stakeholders about what they want at the end of it I've been pulling data out of their systems and analyzing it and using it to draw conclusions and make some recommendations that can really make a difference in the clients business one of the things that I really like about doing work it's a business analyst is you can often see the amount of relief in a client when you can solve a problem for them they know that they need to make this change to be able to move to the next level in their business but they haven't quite been able to get there themselves and sometimes it's a matter of they don't have the right skill set to do it other times they just don't have the time if they've been running a business for many years on their own and it's grown and grown they have a real difficulty to be able to step back out of the business and look at it objectively and say how can we make this better how can we do all of the analysis and implement the changes because the reality is they've run a business that relies on them doing the work for the client every day so they haven't had the chance to be able to step back I really like being able to make that much difference for a client that makes their lives easier makes them be able to expand their business and also helps them see how to think about problems or challenges a little bit differently the next time they might run into them thank you so much for watching

Channel: The Career Force

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Id: 9rMYgG6tNkg

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019