7 BA Tools I Can't Live Without!

Morning. This is Better BA. A practical newsletter for business analysts that gets straight to the point.

We won’t give you pointless buzzword sentences like ‘Employing an integrated paradigm of predictive analytics synergised with agile frameworks’ 🤮 If that sentence really gets you going, then you’re probably in the wrong place.

Lets get to it

INSIGHT
7 BA Tools I Can’t Live Without!

There’s loads of tools out there. New tools, old tools, AI tools. Good ol’ pen and paper... The list goes on!

Here’s the heavy hitters that I rely on for 90% of my workload ⬇️

^{psst, I’m not getting paid to recommend these. I just find them genuinely useful}

1. Otter.ai
   Great little app. Just hit record and it’ll transcribe your whole conversation. It’s a ‘must have’ if you want to give your full attention during user interviews.
   

2. Miro 
   The most intuitive white-boarding solution out there. I mainly use this during workshops to gather and prioritise requirements in real time. 

3. Lucidchart
   User flows, Swimlane maps, Value Stream maps - they’re all created in here. If you need to create beautiful, business-facing documentation, then this is the best of the best.

4. Visio
   Lucidcharts ugly sister. It’s the industry standard, especially in big organisations that already pay the big bucks for Microsoft products. A lot of our team use this for more technical process documentation.

5. Balsamiq
   Amazing for low-fidelity wireframing. No learning curve. Perfect for quickly creating scrappy visuals to help get everyone on the same page!

6. Penpot
   Like Figma, but free and open source. If you need to create high fidelity prototypes then this the tool of choice. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but there always is with ‘high fidelity’ tools like this.
   

7. Bubbles
   Perfect for screen recording product demos. Also let’s users annotate feedback directly within the recording 💪

That’s it folks! 🙌

WISDOM

"A true BA is an optimistic realist. They take a diverse number of stakeholders, extract needs, concerns, and dreams, then help create a beautiful yet tangible solution that is loved by the users and the community at large'.

MEMES