5 Books That Will Make You a Better BA

If you’re a Busi­ness Ana­lyst who’s look­ing for ways to improve, have you con­sid­ered a lit­tle read­ing to up your game? If you have, you’re in good company.

Rene Descartes said

“The read­ing of all good books is like a con­ver­sa­tion with all the finest men of past centuries.”

Or in this case, all the finest men and women of past projects.

It’s worth your while to get bet­ter at what you do — a good Busi­ness Ana­lyst can make a good liv­ing on projects that are occa­sion­ally interesting.

But what does a great BA make?

MyCa​reer​.com​.au shows salaried BAs and Sys­tems Ana­lysts mak­ing between about $90,000 and $120,000 per annum in Aus­tralia dur­ing the 2010 cal­en­dar year:

I also know through my per­sonal net­work that BAs who are able to nego­ti­ate con­tracts often do even bet­ter. A great BA will make fan­tas­tic money on truly excit­ing projects — and will never be out of work.

What’s the dif­fer­ence between a good BA and a great one?  I believe it’s pri­mar­ily how much you’re will­ing to invest in your own edu­ca­tion and experience.

Buy­ing and read­ing the fol­low­ing 5 books will make you a bet­ter BA. They’re def­i­nitely not the only thing that will help, but they’ve cer­tainly been invalu­able to me over the years.  I hope you buy them for your library and they make a dif­fer­ence for you too.

1.  Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing by Ian Som­merville.  This was one of my text­books at uni­ver­sity, and I still use it as a ref­er­ence years later.  It cov­ers the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of design­ing soft­ware sys­tems in a struc­tured way.  Some parts of this book may not be acces­si­ble if you don’t have a tech­ni­cal bent — but noth­ing in it is so arcane that a BA with more of a busi­ness back­ground shouldn’t be able to make sense of it.  This book will help you under­stand why some busi­ness require­ments are a good idea and some are plain fool­hardy from a tech­ni­cal view­point.  It will help you to write bet­ter require­ments and spec­i­fi­ca­tions because you’ll under­stand the pos­si­bil­i­ties and con­straints of engi­neered soft­ware. Throw some mem­o­rable con­cepts from this book into con­ver­sa­tion and you might even make friends with a developer.

2.  The Lit­tle Red Writ­ing Book by Mark Tred­denick.  Writ­ing is vital for a BA.  If you don’t write well, you lose both cred­i­bil­ity and effec­tive­ness.  Your job as a BA is in large part com­mu­ni­cat­ing what you have learned about a prob­lem, unam­bigu­ously and for mul­ti­ple audi­ences (man­agers, devel­op­ers, archi­tects, users).  This book is a great, no-nonsense source of tips to improve the style and the clar­ity of your message.

3.  Mas­ter­ing the Require­ments Process (2^nd Edi­tion) Suzanne and James Robertson.

Widely applauded, I think this book is invalu­able.  It is an end-to-end method for exe­cut­ing the require­ments process. Any time I’ve brought this book to the office it’s been “bor­rowed” and proven very dif­fi­cult to recover.  The Robert­sons run some great train­ing pro­grams that are worth attend­ing if you can afford it — or con­vince your employer to pay.  Google “vol­ere process” to find out more and get hold of some great tem­plates for gath­er­ing and build­ing requirements.

4.  BRS Rule­s­peak orig­i­nally by Ronald G Ross, now sold by Busi­ness Rules Solu­tions.  Learn how to write busi­ness rules in a way that removes doubt about their mean­ing.  The Rule­s­peak method also helps in build­ing a man­age­able and scal­able sys­tem of busi­ness rules for use in Enter­prise Archi­tec­tures, because the rules are defined in a con­sis­tent and stan­dard­ised way AND they can be eas­ily under­stood by busi­ness people.

5.  UML Dis­tilled: A Brief Guide to the Stan­dard Object Mod­el­ing Lan­guage (3^rd Edi­tion) by Kendall Scott.
Every dia­gram­ming method you’ll ever need, and some that you won’t.  UML seems to have fallen out of favour in the last few years, but I still rely on many UML model types to spec­ify the prop­er­ties and behav­iours desired of sys­tems.  Even if you don’t use UML, you’re bound to come across sys­tem doc­u­men­ta­tion that does.  This book is a com­pact resource when you need to know how to use a sequence dia­gram, a use case or a state machine dia­gram.  It will help you under­stand the impor­tant dif­fer­ences between a data flow model and an activ­ity diagram.

Are you a BA with great ideas?  Are there resources you’ve used to improve your BA skills?  Why not share them in the com­ments, or share this arti­cle on your favourite social media platform?

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