September 12th, 2008, 12:30 pm
I've been a business analyst in one guise or another for 6 yrs (trying to move into quant and IB domain now). Because i had expert business knowledge in another business domain i was able to circumvent the developer stage and have never worked solely as a developer. one point worth making, is that in my experience roughly 50% of developers are incapable of building relations with business stakeholders. the role of BA has to a certain extent arisen from that simple fact. BA is more a 'people' job, working and managing multiple stakeholders and elicting requirements. the skills to do this are frequently hard to find amongst developers. the other skill is to communcate to the developer which is widely different from working with the stakeholders. a BA from a developer background will find that bit easy. another point is the variation in the role description. somtimes the BA is really a systems analyst and mainly does technical systems design. on other occasions, like a guy i know at dressdner, who is employed as a BA knows nothing about IT and works solely in the business domain. he resides with the traders and has probably alot of success communicating with the business but struggles with the devloeprs and IT in general.the quant role itself is a funny one. sometimes it seems like its a specialist developer who is his own stakeholder. so the quant could somtimes be viewed as a BA who is an expert in financial engineering with associated maths, c++ and is also the main stakeholder. mmm, anyway that's a view from a BA who wants to be a quant.