The collaboration tools for business analyst are the set of tools that provide the most ease of communicating, meeting, communicating, analyzing requirements among many etc. The most effective tool is the Meeting. It is the place that brings Business Analyst with stakeholders together to discuss, understand each other
In addition to the above Business Analyst role description, these collaboration tools for business analyst will help you find those missing job requirements that will give your employer a unique edge over his competitors.
Modern Requirements
Modern Requirements is recognized as a leading business analysis tool. It provides a collaborative requirements elicitation, definition, and analysis. It helps define requirements textually and visually. It supports diagramming, mockup, Smart Docs, use case, trace analysis, baselining, review management and various elicitation tools.
Features:
- Planning boards and Customizable dashboards
- Three visualization types: Diagrams, Mock-ups, Use Cases
- Online document authoring in pre-defined templates – Smart Docs
- Customizable document generation
- AI inspired BA Assistant- Alice
- Online review and approval with eSignature
- Baselining, Requirements reuse and Impact assessment
- Test Case Automation and User Story generation
- Supports BABOK, BABOK Agile, Scrum, Agile, CMMI and Hybrid methodologies
ClickUp
ClickUp is a highly customizable business analyst tool that allows you to create your custom views. This business analyst tool offers highly comprehensive time management and task management and facilitates collaboration between business units. This application allows you to assign and resolve comments to tasks. It helps you to set priorities for the work with no hassle.
Features:
- You can filter and search for a specific task with ease.
- It offers a wide range of templates.
- Helps you to automatically import documents from other apps.
- Allows you to collaborate with other people.
- It allows you to assign multiple tasks with just one mouse click.
- ClickUp enables you to sort tasks by project.
- You can sync with Google Calendar.
Wrike Work Management
Wrike work Management is a real-time Work Management tool for the business analyst. It stores all information centrally. Thereby decreasing the cost of project analysis.
Features:
- Core Building Blocks of Work
- Request Forms & Automation
- Live Editing & File Management
- A visual timeline allows viewing the project schedule
- Balance resources and track performance using workload view
- Project & Team Reporting
- Keep track for the time spent by team member for precise planning and budget management
Adobe Acrobat X
Adobe Acrobat X allows you to change content or images without leaving PDF file. Using this software, you can edit the PDF document in your office. You can also use this software to create, secure, and distribute PDF files. It helps you to optimize PDF documents for CD/DVD applications, and also allows you to print.
It helps Business Analysts to enhance productivity while creating reports or project artifacts.
Feature:
- Simple and easy to make changes in the document.
- When you edit a PDF document, an existing paragraph adjusts automatically.
- Add or edit page content in PDF from anywhere.
- Automatically checks the spelling.
Rational RequisitePro
The Rational Requisite Pro is a must-have tool for every business analyst. It is one of the best tools for requirements management and working on requirement gathering and elicitation. It has a robust architecture that can easily manage documents that are dynamically linked to a project database.
Rational Requisite can be used for:
- Conducting impact analysis
- Managing an audit trail of changes
- Querying and sorting data using a dynamic database
- Tracing of requirements
Pencil
A pencil is free to use and an open-source tool. It is used for prototyping and creating easy mockups. It acts as a standalone tool that can be downloaded and used with a simple interface.
Pencil can be used for:
- Creating a prototype for the user
- Helping the customers understand the final product’s look and feel
- Implementing all the changes asked by the customers based on their needs to deliver the best outcome
- Modeling the decisions using a standardized approach
Balsamiq
Balsamiq is a leading cloud-based tool for designing wireframes that provide content and user interaction. This tool is an excellent tool for business analysts working on new product design, brainstorming, mind mapping, and sketching new business ideas that provides immediate feedback from stakeholders. This collaboration tool helps BAs communicate their vision for the product to the relevant stakeholders.
Some of its cool features that help analysts to work faster and smarter include:
- Facility to host the projects online
- A top-notch and easy to use user interface
- Allows to build wireframes
- Pre-installed libraries
- Users interface controls and icons
SmartDraw
To make project management work more comfortable, business analysts use SmartDraw. It is a diagram tool that helps you prepare flowcharts, organization charts, brainstorms, project charts, and other business visuals.
Some of its features include:
- Easy integration with Microsoft tools and others
- An option to install a firewall for security purposes
- Offers different features for the automation of tasks
Microsoft Office Suite
The following applications of Microsoft office suite come under the best business analysis tools list –
MS PowerPoint
This software is used to prepare and deliver formal presentations. A business analyst often faces the situations where he needs to communicate ideas, justify or deliver project updates to stakeholders. This communication becomes more effective in the form of a presentation through PowerPoint.
MS Excel
Data analysis is also a part of the business analysis, and it can be of different forms like
- Pivot tables
- Examining the trends in data
- Sort and filter data
- Creating charts or graphs
All the tasks mentioned above can be well performed using Microsoft Excel which is a spreadsheet-like tool. Along with it, Excel provides several built-in mathematical and financial functions which can aid data analysis.
MS Word
Microsoft Word serves the purpose of requirement specification document. Organizations can create their specific template for documenting the requirements. It is a utility application which allows user preferred fonts, theme, objects, shapes, smart arts, charts and even option for embedding Visio diagrams.
MS Visio
MS Visio is a modelling tool that business analysts use to effectively capture and present stakeholders ideas in the form of business functions and user interactions. The main utilities of Visio are –
- UML diagrams creation such as use case, sequence diagrams, and activity.
- To prepare process flow charts
- To create data models
- To generate architecture diagrams
Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool for business analysis which helps to collaborate and communicate between teams and share information securely. Along with that, it allows admin to analyze the business data.
Features:
- Provides secure collaboration with a team
- Allows to view team activity across boards
- Allows to include members from Google Apps account
- Associate and organize boards with Collections
- Assigns admins for privacy settings management
- Helps to deactivate old members along with saving their work history
- Exports data within a single click
Version One Lifecycle
This is one of the best business analysis tools concerning its unique feature of integration capability with enterprise applications and open source software development tools.
Features:
- It is primarily aligned with agile software development
- Flexible to scale up with ease project workspaces, portfolios, across teams and locations
- Inline editing and immediate update of the attributes by users is possible
- This enables advanced analysis to take a fact-based decision
- It provides a special feature like Agile Data Mart designing
- Automate decision-making during the software lifecycle
Blueprint:
A blueprint is a useful software for the Business analyst. This tool helps enterprises to build better applications. It allows aligning business strategy with IT execution.
Features:
- Ensure regulatory compliance
- It helps to reduce IT compliance risk by defining and standardizing the usage of certified compliance
- Support organizational transformation
- Easy-to-use dashboards and rich reporting tools.
- It helps managers to receive reports and analytics on every project in the portfolio.
Enterprise Architecture:
Enterprise Architect is a business analyst software. It helps managers to develop and view their organization’s strategy, processes, and IT assets.
Features:
- Collaborate effectively globally
- Real-time and embedded development
- Helpful tool to collaborate globally
- It can easily improve business outcomes
- It is possible to load large model in seconds.
iRise Business Analysis Tool:
IRise business analysis tool offers working visualizations of business software. It allows organizations to visualize and interact with important business systems prior development.
Features:
- It allows managing users, track projects, to gain critical insights about the project.
- It offers Seamless ALM Integration
- Live customer service and support
- Set up automatic revision tracking to track instant changes
- Monitor the review cycle
- Flexible deployment options allow managing businesses according to their organization’s needs
Top Team Analysis:
Top team analysis is a useful require management tool. It converts textual requirements into easy-to-understand diagrams. This tool helps all business owners to understand requirements without the need of reading too many documents.
Features:
- Simulate Application Behaviour
- Automatically Generate Test Cases
- Easily Visualize and Manage End-to-End Traceability
- It provides complete version history
- Quick traceability & Impact reports
- Feature for Integrated Change Management
- Integrations with Microsoft Visual Studio and HP Quality Center
Conclusion
The collaboration tools provided by Business Analysts, allow project managers to collaborate with their external (and internal) clients during the solution development process. This is achieved through the use of business intelligence (BI) dashboards and social media like Facebook or Twitter.