A very good question, and one that has a different answer for every person you ask. For us it's about the "what" and not the "how", so it's about understanding and communicating what an organisation does and what it wants to do, whether that is about systems/applications or business processes or data or any combination of these.

One of our core principles is flexibility, so we can work under whatever methodology our clients have in place. Our business analysts in general have experience of working under various methodologies or frameworks such as Prince 2, RUP, SCRUM as well as client bespoke approaches.

As with the methodologies question above, our core principle of flexibility means we work with whatever tools are preferred. The range of "tools" available is wide and costs vary significantly so we can't hand on heart guarantee to have experience of the tools you use. However we can confidently say that we are proficient in the Microsoft tools (Word, Excel, Visio, Access) and the Atlassian suite (Confluence and JIRA) and have experience of learning new tools very quickly

Both! However, we'll be honest and say that if you are in the agile space you may want to consider what you are looking for in a business analyst as the "traditional" business analyst role in our opinion is not easy to embed into the prevalent agile frameworks such as SCRUM. Beware of taking on the business analyst to act as the "Proxy Product Owner" or a pure user story author.

If you use an agency as a preferred supplier then we are happy to use this arrangement provided we can discuss terms with your agency.