Business analysts need assistants in their quest for professionalism

Business analysts currently spend upwards of 20% of their time writing documents and building models in a variety of different modelling tools. This equates to at least one day per week they could save for more useful analysis tasks if they could automate some of these more mundane manual tasks. That's about 50 days a year of additional analysis work. Clearly this is a productivity issue that cannot be ignored.

Doctors, lawyers, and chartered accountants - other professionals - have assistants and clerks to handle the more administrative and mundane functions of their roles so that they may apply themselves to activities that make the most of their knowledge and derive the greatest returns. It's a simple yet highly effective financial strategy. Business analysts should follow their example by looking at their daily tasks more critically to minimise the mundane portions as much as possible.

An interesting starting point is to consider some of the modern analysis tools that have matured to the point where they can convert plain English into models at the click of a button thereby eliminating the need to build models manually. This results in improved productivity, consistent and ongoing alignment between text and models, less human error, and makes the user sign-off process more efficient.

In their quest to become true professionals business analysts must ensure they productively deliver consistent results across projects throughout their organisations and the matured software assistants now at their disposal - the software tools - make this possible.