What is a Web Analyst?
When working in an IT environment you get used to hear terms that you probably haven’t heard before. And if you’re curious enough you will eventually search for meanings, contexts and relations between what you hear and what you know.
I have always been like that and one of the things that made me wonder in my early years in the web business was the term “web analyst”. – Well, I know what an analyst is, and I know what web is, but I never heard it together – I thought. Soon after I began searching info on this. I found a lot about analysts (financial, business and so forth) but I was unable to find info on “web analysts”. In fact, there is no such thing as a “web analyst”. You can be an analyst, a business analyst, a functional, financial, organic analyst, but there is no “web analyst”. What? How can I be an analyst focused on web projects? This made me think, burn my grey cells for sometime and research a lot. And then I came across some info online. Here’s what I found out.
The obvious website to look for info was Wikipedia. And so I did. And I found out, and quote “A Business Analyst (BA) analyzes the organization and design of businesses, government departments, and non-profit organizations; BAs also assess business models and their integration with technology.”, end quote. This doesn’t help much, does it? But if you continue reading: ”
There are at least four tiers of business analysis:
- Planning Strategically – The analysis of the organization’s strategic business needs
- Operating/Business Model Analysis – The definition and analysis of the organization’s policies and market business approaches
- Process Definition and Design – The business process modeling (often developed through process modeling and design)
- IT/Technical Business Analysis – The interpretation of business rules and requirements for technical systems (generally IT)
“. End quote.
Now we’re getting somewhere. So, a BA – to use Wikipedia’s terminology – plans, models, defines processes, businesses, requirements. Hey, isn’t this the role of a project manager? No, not really. You could mistake this with the planning stage of project management but there is a difference. A huge difference. A project manager deals with resources and business analysts deals with stakeholders. Give or take. The best way to understand this difference is to compare roles, side by side.
This information has been copied from allPM.com and you can read the complete article here.
Now that we’ve cleared that, let’s move on, shall we? A project manager is NOT a business analyst and NOR a business analyst is a project manager. However there’s a great chance you’ll find someone that does both jobs. Me, for one. I do functional analysis and project management. And that is the real reason I’m posting this article. I had to find out myself what I had to do in order to do my job right.
So I have come to the greatest conclusion of all. Really. And you have to consider this from a portuguese point of view. Analysts, whatever kind, shape or form, are usually mistaken with project managers. Further more, analysts in an IT context often are project managers. Or, to be more precise, project managers often do their projects analysis. And though there is a difference in terms of functions and needed qualifications, the work they develop is intricately related and often dependent.
Regarding the concept of a web analyst is as just accurate as a popsicle machine factory analyst or a graphic production analyst. You basically do the same work. The difference is that your technical background or overall knowledges allows you to do a better job on the area you work on.
Concluding, I am a web analyst. But I am that only while I’m working on a web related project. And that’s only because by technical know how ensures I am qualified to do a better job than what I would probably do had I not the mentioned know how. But understand that although that is an added bonus, if you will, it doesn’t necessarily means a non tech analyst would do a great job. After all, we’re all analysts.
And what do we use as our main tool? Our brain, of course. Ok, the next one. UML. We’ll discuss it in later articles, but right now you can get info on UML here.
There’s only one more thing. Do not mix up web analyst from an analysis point of view and what is named – wrongfully, in my opinion – a web analyst as in web analytics. About that you can find some info here.
You might also like to take a look at some related links:
http://hurolinan.com/index.php/2005/10/05/web-analyst-skill-set/
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-a-web-analyst-do.htm