Questions to evaluate the technical competency of a business analyst type position

Question

I am looking for a few solid phone screen friendly questions with proven success to evaluate the technical competency of a candidate for a BA type position. I require this candidate, who will function between development team and business side/customer, to understand the technical side of things adequately to push back as appropriate on both business/client and technical/developer to achieve the right end goal for the customer.

I hesitate to use any truly developer-centric or code questions, since this person does not need to code (history of coding is not a bad thing), but they must understand technology and the technical challenges at an architectural level (in this case for a very large scale enterprise web application).

Answer 1

You could ask for how they would handle gathering requirements and establishing expectations in the past. How well do they know the various gotchas that can happen? How well do they have an attention to detail to understand what is being asked and why that feature is requested? What kinds of projects did they do previously? The keys as I'd see it boil down to communication at both high and low levels as while there may be discussions at the architectural level there can also be those questions from the business side of, "Why will this take 2 weeks? I'm just asking for a freakin' button dude!" that require some diplomacy as not everyone will be happy to hear how long something may take to develop.