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Three Audacious Goals for Business Analysts in 2013

Jarett Hailes — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:07:00 GMT

As we start a new year many of us will take the time to reflect on our accomplishments from 2012 and plan our goals for 2013. We can set small or large goals. goals that will be accomplished quickly or could take several years. For 2013, I think Business Analysts should look to go beyond our traditional boundaries and set audacious goals.

Merriam-Webster defines audacious as “intrepidly daring” and “marked by originality”. As the business analysis profession and Business Analyst community continue to mature, more organizations are seeing the value that professionally-executed business analysis can bring. Business Analysts have an opportunity to help organizational leaders achieve their vision for the future. Here are three audacious goals for 2013 to help Business Analysts capitalize on this opportunity.

1. Move Beyond Information Technology Solutions

Most Business Analysts are focused on the development of IT solutions to meet business needs. The ‘IT Business Analyst’ has been hailed as key cog in the overall IT delivery framework for organizations.

While information technology is one crucial supporting function every organization needs, it is not the only area where Business Analysts can deliver value. Technology is only effective if there people who know how to use it and processes that will ensure the overall business is able to perform tasks in an efficient and effective manner. Business Analysts need to ensure that all three of these aspects work together by identifying and assessing requirements for all components, not just the technology-related pieces.

Business Analysts can challenge the perception that their work solely fits into IT by demonstrating their ability to consider the process and people components during their prescribed activities. Go beyond writing system specifications and point out potential challenges that people will have with a complicated screen layout, or identify regulatory or policy issues that will impact certain functional requirements. Such actions will allow clients to see the need for a more holistic approach to solution development and can improve the high failure rates seen by projects that are ostensibly driven by IT. Even if you are working in a systems support role, you have the opportunity to present a more complete picture about proposed modifications that will allow everyone to realize how an application should be changed to meet the organization’s needs.

2. Master and Leverage Complementary Disciplines

As a Business Analyst you already rely on competencies and knowledge from other disciplines. Most business analysis knowledge areas use notions from areas such as systems analysis, project management and facilitation.

There are several disciplines that provide wonderful skills and techniques that Business Analysts can use to help accomplish their daily tasks more effectively. If you take the time to learn and master one or more of these disciplines, your value to your organization can increase exponentially. Not only do you improve your career options but you become a better Business Analyst by being able to deal with a greater breadth of problems.

Some of the disciplines that are worth mastering as a Business Analyst are:

· Change Management: understanding how people deal with change and how to help navigate organizations through change is a crucial set of skills in today’s environment. Business Analysts can leverage change management practices throughout their activities, most noticeably in stakeholder analysis, requirements management, requirements analysis and enterprise analysis.

· Mediation/Conflict Resolution: with change comes the possibility of interpersonal conflicts. People can disagree for a variety of rational and irrational reasons. Business Analysts are often at the forefront of such conflict while they attempt to define and manage requirements. Understanding how to assess a conflict’s root cause and having techniques to defuse volatile situations are crucial to help gain consensus and keep a project moving forward.

· Performance Measurement: Business Analysts can play an important role in reviewing existing solutions or working on the business case for change. Being able to define and implement relevant measures to evaluate individual solutions or an overall organization are key tools that are needed to help keep companies moving forward. Knowing how to leverage methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma make doing these tasks that much easier.

3. Use Your Skills to Give Back

Many Business Analysts already volunteer their time to causes they believe in, but it may not be in a capacity that leverages their professional skills. Business Analysts can get a lot out of using their skills to give back to others, while at the same time helping their community. Not only is there the satisfaction of helping those in need, but an opportunity to learn how to take the experiences from such efforts and apply them in their organizations of employment. There are opportunities to help organizations who need Business Analysts as well as helping our fellow Business Analysts improve.

Here are some ideas on how to give back:

· Find a local non-profit or charity who could benefit from some business analysis but don’t have the in-house expertise or financial resources to perform the analysis.

· If you like to volunteer in developing countries, speak with the organization you work with to see if you can help them improve their operations or help them with a specific project that requires business analysis. We already have “Doctors without borders” and “Engineers without borders” – why not “Business Analysts without borders”?

· Pay it forward: mentor a less experienced Business Analyst so they can share their knowledge and expertise in the future with others.

· Start a community of practice with other BAs either inside or outside your organization to help improve everyone’s collective maturity and share ideas on how to perform BA activities better.

· Work with your local IIBA chapter to put on an event that will help the BA community grow.

What are your professional goals for 2013? Do you have any audacious goals?

10 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Starting Out As A BA

Howard Podeswa — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 05:32:00 GMT

I am no longer a Webinar virgin. Thanks to the good folks at the IIBA, this week I had my first Webinar experience as an interviewee as part of the IIBA’s ‘ABC’ (Authors, Books and Conversations) series. The host, Julian Sammy, was brilliant in being able to pick out the questions that would be the most difficult for me to answer. (I hear that’s what makes him a great BA, too.) Of course, afterwards, I was regretting not being able to do a ‘do-over’ – until I remembered that I could – sort of – thanks to my MA blog.

Julian’s toughest questions were about the 3-way connection I saw between psychology, business analysis and art; I’ll leave that for later. But there was a BA question that I didn’t have a ready answer for, “What are the most important things you wish you had known when you were starting out as a BA?” Maybe it’s because it’s been so long since I have been in that position. But the memories have begun to come back.

So, for Julian - and anyone else who might be interested: here, then, after some thought, is what I wished someone had told me when I was starting out:
1. See every BA engagement as an opportunity to learn about other people - and not just to learn about another system: I thought my success or failure as a BA would be all about my analysis skills. I have since found out it hinges more on my ability to connect with people from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures.

2. Turn off the inner monologue while listening to other people. (See #1 above).

3. Find out, from day 1, who will have ultimate signing authority – then meet that person as soon as possible: I’ve had bad shocks early in my career when I found out that the one person I really needed to convince was the one person I didn’t know about - until it was too late. I now do everything in my power to bring that person into the process ASAP.

4. Don’t go off for too long on your own: In my earlier days, I would do a big round of interviews and then go off for a long period to produce a big ‘tome’ of documentation. I found out soon enough that it’s too much for stakeholders to absorb at once and it’s too easy to propagate mistakes – like too much or the wrong kind of documentation. Now I provide feedback frequently to stakeholders.

5. The only way to get a good user interface is through many iterations of prototyping and user testing – because most people don’t know what they want till they see it. The focus of the BA in this case is to find out what the flow of the interface should be from the user’s perspective (the ‘Basic Flow’ – in use-case parlance), as well as the alternative scenarios that need to be addressed, while the designer works to realize these flows in the prototypes.

6. Test assumptions as early as possible in order to mitigate risk – especially if this is something you (or your organization) is doing for the first time: I’ve personally worked on 2 major projects where untested assumptions about new technology resulted in long delays and lots of rework once they were found to be untrue - and I have direct knowledge of many more projects that have suffered the same fate. By testing assumptions early I am now able to reduce the impact of unexpected problems.

7. Budget your time wisely: In the early days, I blew too much analysis time on small parts of the business area. I am much more careful now in planning and budgeting my time. I’ve learned to work top-down; in the beginning, I concentrate on the big picture and work my down into the weeds as the project progresses.

8. There is almost always a hidden agenda: For any non-trivial project, there is bound to be some aspect of office politics that can make or break the project. In many cases I have ended up being an unwitting pawn in someone else’s power play. In one case, for example, there were warring departments, each of which had already made up its mind about the preferred solution; the hidden agenda of the project champion who brought me onboard was to get an ‘unbiased expert’ to recommend his preference.

9. Don’t solutionize the requirements: The requirements as written, should make sense regardless of the technology solution. Otherwise, they will not be reusable should the preferred solution change – leading to lost time and effort.

10. The clients already know the answer: This is the secret lesson of consulting that I learned at the hands of a colleague (Brian Lyons) – and I’ve found it to be true more often than not. In many cases (such as process improvement projects), the clients know what’s wrong and what they need to do about it - and are really looking to the BA to confirm what they already know, or to help them formulate their thoughts. Yet another reason why it’s more important to listen than to talk.

And what about that question about psychology, business analysis and art (all of which are interests of mine)? The flippant answer is to say that these interests co-exist but they don’t necessarily connect. By maybe they do. I have an endless curiosity about people and how they live their lives – and it is a curiosity that the BA profession has helped me satisfy. As well, I have always been interested in the structure of thought – a theme that underlies both cognitive psychology as well as structural analysis. My art similarly has two recurring themes - often concerned either with the psychology of an interaction (see this series based on my experiences in South Africa) or with the way the mind organizes information (see this link for work based on organizing visual bytes of information).

So maybe there is some connecting thread to it after all.

- Howard Podeswa

When the Client Isn't the Customer

Jarett Hailes — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:09:00 GMT

Usually when a Business Analyst is working on a project the client (which I’ll define as the party or stakeholder who receives the benefit of the Analyst’s services) and the customer (the party who is paying for the Analyst to render the services) are one in the same, at least from an overall organizational perspective (i.e. the client and customer belong to the same organization). However, there are times when the client and customer are completely separate entities.

This sort of situation can arise in many environments. For instance, the customer may be an association who wants a new software solution that will be used by its members. Other times an entity may be required by law or regulation to provide certain services to other organizations and a project is struck to create a new solution to address these needs. Regardless of the circumstances, having a separate client from the customer can put the Business Analyst in compromising situations, typically due to divergent needs between the customer and the client.

Typically when a Business Analyst faces a situation where various project stakeholders have differing goals, agendas, capabilities or level of engagement in a project, the project’s structure can usually help resolve differences that can’t be worked out through other means. Within most project structures there will be a project sponsor or steering committee that is responsible for final decisions if consensus cannot be met. However, in a multi-organization project the project’s structure may have little to no representation from the client base. This may not be too surprising, particularly if the project was struck based on primarily internal consultations.

Often the Business Analyst is an advocate for those who will use the end result of the project. To become an advocate one needs to empathize with the client base or else it is difficult to communicate the client’s needs to the other project stakeholders. Once the Business Analyst understands the client’s needs they can often want to see those needs become fulfilled by the project.

However, the customer may not have the desire, resources or mandate to meet these needs. If the customer for whatever reason doesn’t believe that some or all of the client’s requirements need to be met and the project structure does not lend itself to providing the client a voice at the decision table, the Business Analyst may find themselves having a hard time accepting the customer’s position.

When the client and customer are not the same entity the Business Analyst ends up in a type of agency problem; they’ve become an agent for the client whose interests do not align for the principal (the customer). The Business Analyst was tasked with eliciting requirements for the client; if the customer in the end chooses to neglect some of these requirements it can be frustrating or disappointing to see the client’s needs going unmet.

Ultimately the Business Analyst will be faced with a choice to decide how far they will go in representing the client’s needs. Since the customer has the ultimate authority on the project the Business Analyst must determine what level of conflict is healthy to ensure that the client’s needs are being met to the best of the customer’s ability given the overall project environment. Obviously the Business Analyst should work within the bounds of professionalism, but there is a question at what point the Business Analyst should acquiesce to the customer’s expectations.

I don’t believe there is a simple solution or answer to this dilemma, and each Business Analyst will need to decide for themselves where the boundary lies if they encounter this situation. Have you ever been in a situation where your role as a Business Analyst put you in conflict with the project sponsors or Steering Committee? How did you deal with the situation?

Jarett Hailes
Larimar Consulting Inc.
http://www.larimarconsulting.com

Spring Cleaning Your Personal Backlog

Jarett Hailes — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 04:44:00 GMT

As spring begins to plant its roots in the Northern Hemisphere, many people will begin an annual spring cleaning of their home. All the clutter that has accumulated over the past 3, 6, 9, or even 12 months since the last cleaning is collected, assessed and then dealt with (either by moving stuff to a better location, actually using the thing, or throwing it away/selling it).

Like our homes, most of us have a bunch of ‘to do’s’ that build up over time. Whether you are someone who meticulously manages all the tasks that you must do or you are someone who will try and keep all their ongoing duties solely in your head, chances are that you have a list of things that you have wanted or needed to do but have never quite found the time to get around to. I like to call the list of outstanding tasks that someone has to do (whatever their context; personal or work-related) a personal backlog.

While there’s nothing wrong with not crossing off all your tasks (after all, who really has time to do everything they need or want to?); over time you can develop a level of ‘accountability debt’ to yourself. Most active and high-achieving people strive to get as much done as possible, and when they can’t complete everything that everyone has asked of them they usually take it personally, either at a conscious or unconscious level. This could be manifested as internal guilt, frustration, stress or other negative emotions.

As you feel bad about not being able to accomplish everything you start to make more and more mental reminders of all the things that you haven’t been able to do as if this action itself will help get more tasks completed. This action simply clutters up your brain, which has a finite amount of space for keeping track of things. As your personal backlog list continues to grow, you end up crowding out more pertinent or relevant information from your mind. This can lead to feelings of confusion or lack of focus on the tasks at hand that matter the most.

So, if you’re feeling like you have a million things on your mind, it’s time to perform a little spring cleaning. This activity will involve 4 steps as described below.

Collect

Write down everything you can think of that someone has asked you to do or that you’ve pledged to do. Nothing is too big or too trivial to be included in this list. This should span your work and personal lives; don’t forget about promising to clean Aunt Martha’s eaves troughs (you know she won’t). Include problems that you need to solve (for instance, figuring out how to make your sales estimates more accurate going forward or what to do about your son’s late nights) and that you may need some dedicated thinking time to properly ponder.

This may not be something you can do in one session, but allocate some dedicated distraction-free time to this effort. You will be surprised how many little items come bubbling back to the surface once you get on a roll.

If you already have one or more to do/task lists, this is a great place to start. For this activity you will want to consolidate all of your task lists into one big master list. You may be used to segregating certain aspects of your life and find it effective to manage them that way, but from a spring cleaning perspective you will need to look at everything holistically.

Don’t be surprised (or daunted) if this list grows into hundreds of items; instead take satisfaction that you now have a single point of reference for all your outstanding action items. You no longer need to carry these about in your brain’s short-term memory.

Break Down/Up

You will want to review your list for items that are not immediately actionable (that is, there is something that you would first need to do in order to accomplish the stated item). Those items should be moved to a second reference list and be linked in some way to the one item that is currently actionable on the main list.

This way your to do list becomes a series of ‘next action’ steps, not some nebulous list of end goals that may have dozens of steps that need to be performed in order to be accomplished. Having a list for achievable next steps will add value to this list when you’re looking for what you should do next or at a given moment.

Prioritize

Once you have your master list, it’s time to prioritize. The goal of this prioritization is to have a single ordered list from the highest priority item to the least priority item.

Some of you may want to categorize your items into work and life at this point. I personally find that my life is not so easily segregated (and I would suspect that with modern working practices most people’s are not either), so I would suggest you try and come up with a single prioritized list.

Similarly, you may have a desire to have ‘high/medium/low’ or similar buckets and then just place all your tasks into one of the priorities. While this may be a good starting point so you can manage prioritizing elements further, having buckets of items doesn’t help you actually get any of the tasks done later on. When you’re in working mode, you will want to quickly scan the top of the list and see which of the items are actionable at the moment. Having a list of 10-30 ‘high priority’ items doesn’t help you make a decision at that point, and can lead to feeling overwhelmed and helpless right at a time when you could be easily getting started to work on something.

If you need help getting started, associate due dates to the items that jump out at you off the page as stuff that has to be done by a certain time. This should help you figure out where some of the items fit on the list. Others may not have a set due date but still need to be placed higher up the list.

The end product doesn’t have to be perfectly prioritized; you shouldn’t spend more than a few seconds debating whether one item is above or below another. The goal is to have a general order of importance based on your current life situation that can be easily referred to going forward.

Prune

Once you’ve prioritized your list, start scanning the items from top to bottom. After each item ask yourself “do I really need to get this done?” Once you start running into a steady sequence of ‘no’ answers, start looking for a place to cut off the list and remove all the items below it. Then quickly scan the remainder of the items to see if there’s anything you actually do need to do and bring it back to the pruned list (or perhaps add a couple of items to your pruned list for ‘Sorry I can’t do this messages’).

You need to be honest with yourself and look at your available time, your other commitments and obligations and your personal energy levels and goals to figure out where the line should be drawn. But you do need to draw the line somewhere; I haven’t met anyone who is able to accomplish everything that they put down when they’ve done a brain dump.

Ongoing Maintenance

Once you’ve done this activity, you now have an actionable, up to date and realistic list that you can use going forward to take on your tasks and duties. If you use this opportunity to manage this list on an ongoing basis, you will likely find that your mind will be less cluttered and you will be able to easily find tasks that you can do in any given situation (e.g. those 10 minutes between your meetings) by keeping this list up-to-date and close at hand.

Spring cleaning can feel like a chore, but when you do it on your personal backlog the benefits of a clearer mind and the ability to focus easier without worrying about forgetting to do something can be a major energizer for the months ahead.

Art and IT: Two Solitudes?

Howard Podeswa — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:01:00 GMT

In these ‘tough economic times’ everything seems to be measured in dollar value and if that kind of value isn’t readily discernable, we often assume there is no other value either – or none that matters. It’s behind personal financial expert Suze Orman’s diatribe against teachers (who, according to Suze, can’t possibly have any self-respect if they’re willing to work for so little money), and behind a general devaluation of arts and culture - other than those aspects that have a proven monetary value. I think we’re missing something that the artists and scientists of the Renaissance period understood well, when an artist, poet, architect and scientist were not necessarily different individuals.

These thoughts came to mind as I was showing a copy of the new edition of my book, UML for the IT Business Analyst to a friend who is an artist. I pointed out the new painting on the cover, and he recognized it right away from a previous exhibition. But there the interest ended. Unsurprisingly, he had no idea what the diagrams inside meant - but he could not even entertain the idea that he might be able to understand them. It got me wondering why it so unusual for somebody who works in the arts today to have an aptitude or interest in ‘computers’ (by which I really mean software design and analysis, as opposed to, say, being able to use applications like Photoshop, which almost every visual artist knows how to use).

As in the arts – so in business: eyes roll when the subject turns to IT (Information Technology). Some people are just not that into it; but sometimes it’s just that they are intimidated by it - convinced from the outset that they’ll never get it. It’s a protection mechanism. (Either way, it’s something BAs need to be aware of. One practical implication, for example, is that the documentation that is presented to non-technical audiences should not lean too heavily on analysis diagrams: their association with IT is enough to damn them for many readers.)

In any case, I don’t mean to rag on my artist friends. The ‘2 solitudes’ argument cuts both ways. Few of my friends in the IT world are interested in art either: they don’t go to art shows, don’t buy art (posters don’t count); don’t look at paintings or ‘art’ photographs. The reasons, I think, are pretty much the same as for the artists who don’t do IT: not interested, or convinced they’d never get it. For the second group - those who are simply intimidated by art but want to know more, it helps to have a guide.

At the moment (and for the next week), I have a show of paintings up in a gallery. I’ve been taking people on ‘guided tours’ of the show – each time focusing on a different piece.

This blog is a virtual version of that – focusing on one of the paintings in the current show, ‘Colossus’.

The title refers to another painting by the same – ‘The Colossus”, attributed to Francesco Goya, a Spanish painter who painted it in the early 1800’s. Goya lived in a time of great upheaval and war – and this is reflected in his work. In the original painting, the Colossus is a giant man who towers in the sky above the human turbulence below.

My painting is not an attempt to redo the Goya; it’s more of a riff on it. In my version, the Colossus of the Goya has been replaced by … well, me. But I’m standing on solid ground, not striding across the sky. And I’m wearing Sorel winter boots. (Because this is Canada.) This is one of the first paintings I started while working on the show, but I finished it last. It’s a summing up of all that I’d done in series. Its subject is war and people on the move, the migrations we hear about every day in the news and the endless migrations that have preceded them. The people in the painting come from: a photograph, a painting of a village by the French artist, Eugene Boudin, and one or two Black paintings by Goya – a mixing of pasts and the present and timeless wanderings.

This remixing of disparate sources is something that art - the process of making it and looking at it - excels at: the ability to see, as in this case, that there is a way to make a connection between a contemporary photograph, an early French Impressionist painting and some very sombre Spanish depictions of the human condition in times of war.

Whereas science and technology are largely about following disciplined, repeatable processes to arrive at a result, art encourages the mind to wander between ideas and see unexpected relationships. It's a skill the Business Analyst needs to develop when looking, for example, for a common thread behind a slew of customer complaints or when coming up with a novel approach to solve a problem.

There's a bleed, in other words, between the ways of thinking promoted by art and those promoted by science. Which is why I think it's a good idea to explore both, as opposed to staying within one silo ... not that there's anything wrong with that.

And a couple more art links:

Howard Podeswa

P.S. After much work, the new edition of UML for the IT BA is now being printed. Many thanks to all those in the ModernAnalyst community who contributed their thoughts via this blog. While I wasn’t able to thank you all individually in the book, there is a big shout-out to the group in the book’s acknowledgements and, in particular, to Adrian Marchis, for establishing and supporting this vibrant community.