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| Re: Real world examples of BA career Progression needed (tell us about your experiences) |
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Idevanoff,
Thanks for listing these, however I am already aware of each and everyone one of these proposed career moves. I've read about them endlessly and to me they sound like something a BA Apologist would come up with (this is not aimed at you, just my general thoughts about how these so called career moves are pitched to any current BA). I've been aware of titles and roles such as Lead BA/Product Manager/Software Architect etc for over 5 years now but have yet to find any BA actually move into this role. What is your own personal position at the moment?
Regarding the role of a Business Architect - I too find this role very very interesting. Not too long ago (last year) I actually interviewed (3 phases) for just this role in a very large government organization, only to be turned down last minute for shady/as yet unknown reasons that were never properly explained. To me, this role is a natural evolution of a BA and I know of only one person who has successfully moved into this position (considered both a senior level role, high risk, high paying, good exposure etc). I search the job sites in this region pretty diligently and in 3 years have only found 2 adverts for this role. It is in a rare and often rarely understood role, though I have read extensively about it (plus the BABOK 1.6 has an entire section about Business Architecture which is pretty enlightening).
My purpose of initiating is this discussion however is not to be briefed on the possibilities of what a BA can evolve into, which I believe are at best theoretical extrapolations of the maturity of this role, but ACTUAL, REAL examples of people who have progressed into something bigger, better, more meaningful and challenging. |
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| Re: Real world examples of BA career Progression needed (tell us about your experiences) |
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| fizz wrote
Idevanoff,
Thanks for listing these, however I am already aware of each and everyone one of these proposed career moves. I've read about them endlessly and to me they sound like something a BA Apologist would come up with (this is not aimed at you, just my general thoughts about how these so called career moves are pitched to any current BA). I've been aware of titles and roles such as Lead BA/Product Manager/Software Architect etc for over 5 years now but have yet to find any BA actually move into this role. What is your own personal position at the moment?
Regarding the role of a Business Architect - I too find this role very very interesting. Not too long ago (last year) I actually interviewed (3 phases) for just this role in a very large government organization, only to be turned down last minute for shady/as yet unknown reasons that were never properly explained. To me, this role is a natural evolution of a BA and I know of only one person who has successfully moved into this position (considered both a senior level role, high risk, high paying, good exposure etc). I search the job sites in this region pretty diligently and in 3 years have only found 2 adverts for this role. It is in a rare and often rarely understood role, though I have read extensively about it (plus the BABOK 1.6 has an entire section about Business Architecture which is pretty enlightening).
My purpose of initiating is this discussion however is not to be briefed on the possibilities of what a BA can evolve into, which I believe are at best theoretical extrapolations of the maturity of this role, but ACTUAL, REAL examples of people who have progressed into something bigger, better, more meaningful and challenging.
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At Seilevel we specialize in gathering requirements for Fortune 1000 companies. Im not sure that project manager or software architect are a good fit as a career path. Software architects need to have the technical background and project managers dont have the same creativity.
Our career path is as follows, Requirements Analyst (1-2 years experience), Product Manager (2-5 years), Senior Product Manager, Requirements Architect
People who have worked for us have gone on to work as product managers for companies like google and amazon. They typically make on the order of 120K+. Our salary range is from around 40K-140K. Product manager is by far the best fit. We dont call our people business analysts because of the limited career path that the job title has. For internal IT projects we use IT product manager. Their job is to ensure end user adoption and end user satisfaction.
Requirements analyst - can execute specific requirements tasks like mapping requirements to process flows, looking for inconsistencies or gaps, perform manual traceability etc. Does not work directly with clients
Product Manager - can take specific features and determine how they need to work, works with subject matter experts 1 on 1, works with individual contributors
Senior product manager - can take an entire product and ensure that the features are consistent with the vision. Can work with large facilitation sessions. Works with senior managers and some directors, can cut scope based on the business objectives. Ensures end user adoption and end user satisfaction with a whole product.
Requirements Architect - can elicit business objectives from VP level executives, can ensure that business stakeholders agree to only the scope that meets the business objectives, can elicit corporate strategy from executives and use that to drive software portfolios and high level projects. Can implement requirements processes to a large organization.
either our product manager or senior product manager levels map to product managers at other companies. Our requirements architects would be director level and above executives at other companies.
Being able to understand the entire scope of work and relate it to business objectives is what creates the most value. We have a lot of posts on our blog about this area if you arent sure what I mean.
http://requirements.seilevel.com/blog/category/business-objectives |
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| Re: Real world examples of BA career Progression needed (tell us about your experiences) |
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I just recently moved around in my BA career, so here are some concrete examples (and my 2 cents):
I started in an IT rotational program at a major Pharma (one of those where I worked different jobs for 6-9 months, then move to another). At the end of the program, I moved into a mixed BA role (it was actually in the RAD group - so I was partime BA, parttime developer, parttime PM). Over time I lost interest in development & I have a general distaste for the whip-cracking work of PM, so took up BA full time on large efforts. At the start this was an IT BA role, gathering requirements for IT systems etc., but I slowly pushed it towards more business process improvement work (went for my Six Sigma Green Belt). Reason: IT was moving towards outsource work, and if I didn't move to a position that was closer to the "core" business, I would be out of a job too.
After 8 years at this company I wanted that next step. In agreement with another post here, that next step was Strategy. I was able to take a seat as a Strategist for a start up company. It lined up well with BA skills for a few reasons (and why you should raise this at an interview):
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I was good at building detailed snapshots of how the company (or department) was working today
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I was able to fish out the issues, wasted efforts, duplicate functions, etc. > and translate them to hard & soft cost to the company
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I was able to propose solutions > and not just an IT system here or there, I put more faith in process changes (& some practical wisdom) to make things work better. More often than not, just talking to people got them to think about how they do things - and they started to improve them before we made any recommendations
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The element that locked my path to Strategy was just making sure I was plugged in to "bigger" things - i.e the company strategy, industry trends, technology trends, etc.
I actually enjoyed the Strategy work (my position title was Strategic Analyst). I see that as my career path and value the experience, but unfortunately the start up wasn't (hasn't) been able to secure long term funding (and yes, I proposed ways how, but getting people that are constantly focused on the day to day tactics to focus instead focus on taking steps for the long term is another skill set.) Some of those things are happening now, but unfortunatley its taking longer than I can financial wait for.
Perhaps timing on my move ahead was early, but it's someplace I intend to go back to. In the meantime, however, I recently went back into Business Analysis as a consultant for another Pharma (I'm Lead BA for two projects). The salary as a consultant is OK (~110K), but the work is contract based, so you always need to keep one eye looking ahead. One feature I enjoy about it is that I can honestly not care about all the issues I find, as it's not my company. I can raise them and propose solutions without then being expected to execute on them. There is also a Strategy component to it that I get to exercise... and hopefully roll into a Strategy position.
One last thought, recently I've been getting a bit of egging on by my clients to take a PM role on the projects I just proposed recommendations for. So, in a way, you're right - PM seems to be another common direction. However, as another poster mentioned, I find it a completely different skill set that I don't care much for. This seems more like a case to me that they have my contracted for x many more months & would just like to fold the resource without having to bring in more.
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| Re: Real world examples of BA career Progression needed (tell us about your experiences) |
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Some great discussions and elaborate stories here. My thoughts about each:
Achen, I realise you are in one of those enviable companies that not just understands completely what a BA does but also has proper career paths for people in this position. A lot of that perhaps has to do with the nature of the core business of your organization (as you say, specializing in gathering requirements). Most of us however are not this fortunate and work for large private firms, publicly traded enterprises, forture 500 companies, family run businesses, government departments etc and therefore are perceieved as supporting the business and not running it. This is akin to a person with financial knowledge or expertise working in a bank as opposed to working in an enterprise where the former will offer him many more career opportunities.
I agree though with your comments about PM and Software Architects, especially the latter, which requires a more indepth technical experience (being a software developer on very large scale project development for eg). However, I still feel the Business Architect role is a natural evolution for a BA given the core similarities of the roles and their intended objectives (focusing on the business, not necessarily the solutions). It is very similar to the role of a Requirements Architect that you describe at your organization.
One question however - you mention that one of the roles that you offer is that of a IT Product Manager. Might I ask, is this "Product" tile of the role related to one of your own products (not that I could find any on your website) or being a requirements analyst with expertise on a third party/tier one product such as Oracle/SAP/JDE etc?
Jewen, thanks for pitching in with your thoughts. My role of a BA for the longest time (4 years at a global MNC) was similar to your role at the pharma. I too had been a mix of BA, PM and adhoc developer (or Data Analyst mostly) but started to get more and more involved later in my career with processes. I too realised that not being aligned to the core business of the organization that you worked for meant that if things got messy (i.e. the threat of outsource became real, which was something always hanging over our heads like an ax) I would have little value to add if I was not adept at knowing the companies business processes from a technology point of view. This helped gain great exposure of visible company initiatives, for e.g. when a new subsidiary was started, I would be part of the core team to understand how the processes of the new subsidiary would be different from ours (as Regional HO) and what changes to the core ERP would need to be executed. I also underwent a Green Belt training, which has no doubt been immensely beneficial thus far. For the longest time I contemplated leaving the shackles of being an "IT guy" and moving ahead as a Black Belt, but alas, the opportunity never presented itself.
Finally, the strategy analyst role that you talk about seems fairly interesting, though elusive in this part of the world, where these roles are usually given to Financial Business Analysts and not IT ones because of the need to look at a lot of financial data. Having said that, I especially like the comment you've made in point no 3, it is so true. Just by engaging we are sometimes able to provide a solution, though it is difficult to define this as a true success because it is so intangible. |
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| Re: Real world examples of BA career Progression needed (tell us about your experiences) |
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These are some great stories! I have recently begun interviewing BAs who have advanced their careers to learn more about the challenges and possibilities. You can see the results of that here: http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/category/interview/
If anyone would like to share their success story with me, please just send me an email and we'll set up a time to talk. I'd welcome to share the keys to your success with other BAs so we can all learn from each other. You'll get a free copy of my upcoming Promotable Business Analyst eBook too :-)
Best,
Laura |
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