Soft Skills

I measure the success of my 50+ year career in IT by the positive feedback I’ve received from colleagues, stakeholders, students, and readers. I started as a Cobol programmer, progressed to software analyst/designer, and for the last 30 years have performed the role of business analyst. Interspersed in those years I’ve shared what I’d learned through writing, teaching, presenting, and mentoring. This article discusses the top seven “Takeaway Points” from the over-30 BA resources I’ve produced related to requirements for information systems.

How do you ask the right question?  Would it surprise you to know that perhaps the best way of asking the right question is to keep your mouth shut and not ask anything at all?

That previous statement might require some explanation.  What I'm talking about here is the pause.  It is the space between your response to someone's question, response  or comment and the space before the next question you are asking or comment you are making.

Musical Chairs Reflection represents an alternative to traditional reflective practices. By incorporating movement, spontaneity, and structured dialogue, this activity disrupts routine interactions and fosters an environment where diverse perspectives and creative solutions can flourish. The activity can increase engagement, enhance collaboration, and provide actionable insights to foster continuous improvement in software teams. This method aligns with agile principles and supports a culture of continuous learning and growth. As teams continue to evolve, embracing innovative reflective practices will remain a key strategy for navigating uncertainty and fostering a growth mindset.

In this series’ first article, Beyond Tools and Processes: Strategies for Successful Software Development Teams, we introduced the concept of reflective practices. Reflection aims to facilitate learning from experience. The essence of reflection is to actively engage in a process to gain perspective on one’s own actions and experiences. The aim of this process is to analyze those experiences rather than merely living through them. By cultivating curiosity and a willingness to explore our actions and experiences, we unlock the potential for intentional learning, not only as individuals but also as a team or even an organization. This learning stems not from books or experts but directly from our own work and lived experiences, successes, and failures.

Fear is a powerful motivator. It often drives us to hold onto the familiar, resisting change, even when the change might bring progress. This fear—of the unknown, of disruption—feeds into status quo bias, a cognitive bias that compels individuals and organizations to stick with established systems, even when these systems are no longer effective. As business analysts, overcoming this bias is critical to fostering innovation and success in projects.

Psychological safety has been reported to result in increased knowledge sharing among software development team members. Studies found a positive correlation between social interaction, team psychological safety, and synergistic knowledge development. When team members feel safe and confident that the environment is free of blame and consequences, they are more inclined to share information. Synergistic knowledge development is observed when a group amalgamates the diverse perspectives of its individual members, thereby leveraging the collective knowledge of the group.

Psychological safety (PS) is the shared belief among team members that it is safe to take interpersonal risks in the workplace. PS is relevant to software development (SD) teams, particularly those using agile practices. Some practitioners even claim that “agile doesn’t work without psychological safety”. Effective collaboration, creativity, and collective problem solving are fundamental in everyday SD teams. PS fosters an atmosphere where team members feel free to share their views and opinions without fear of judgment or retaliation, thereby facilitating an environment conducive to effective collaboration. In a psychologically safe workplace, individuals are comfortable sharing their opinions, worries, or doubts, seeking support when required, and acknowledging errors without fear of being blamed or punished. In such an environment, teams and their members feel empowered to take ownership, innovate, take initiatives, and assume responsibility for their deliverables, resulting in better outcomes. The question, then, is how to achieve and sustain a psychologically safe workplace in the context of software development.

Regardless of the definition, decades of research show that team dynamics and qualities can sway project outcomes. Whether success is about productivity, efficiency, quality, or scope attainment, at the end of the day, it’s the team that would invest the effort to meet these expectations. Research on teamwork reveals that successful teams are psychologically safe, foster shared accountability for the outcomes of their endeavor, exercise reflective practices to facilitate continuous learning and improvement, and embrace diversity and inclusion, among other things. In this article series, we will learn how these team qualities foster a high performance environment and why they are relevant in the context of software development.

Imagine walking into a store and hearing your favorite song playing in the background. Instinctively, you feel more at ease, more inclined to browse, and perhaps even to buy something. This subtle influence on your behavior is no accident—it is an example of priming at work. Now, picture leveraging this same psychological phenomenon to enhance the effectiveness of business analysis. Welcome to the world of priming, where a well-placed word or image can shape perceptions, drive engagement, and ultimately lead to more successful projects.

In a world where most organizations tend to live “quarter to quarter”, it may be hard for a BA to depart from established reactive approaches to problem-solving. But for those who fight this short-term imperative and use pattern recognition to their advantage, the prize can be huge. Before long, you may realize that your primary contribution is no longer the delivery of standalone analysis outputs, but rather the kind of learning and transformational change that creates a large and lasting impact on business results.

 In today's agile and automation driven times, knowing relevant aspects of brain's mode of working will help. It will help with finding more optimal (and conscious) ways to improve creativity and adaptability in our work. In turn this will help in becoming more successful as a Business Analyst. Let's explore a few scenarios from a business analyst's job. Let's validate if the steps are re-used because they work the best (default mode). Or it is because they are actually suited for the situation.

In the world of Business Analysis, where interpersonal skills, communication skills, and analytical acumen are celebrated, there exists a silent yet enormous barrier that often goes unnoticed—the barrier of “Fear.”  To ascend from being a proficient business analyst to a truly exceptional one, it is important to confront and conquer the Top 10 Fears...

In complex environments, cognitive load (relating to tax complexity and multiple inputs that affect decision-making) can significantly hamper the quality and efficiency of project choices. High-performance business analysts can play an integral and important role to avoid this issue by advocating for the adoption of a decision-making compass to deliver insight to stakeholders about how well their objectives may be satisfied by potential alternative courses of action. The next time you’re embarking on a high-stakes project, make sure you have a decision-making compass ready to use, even if only informally defined. While there is no guarantee that applying it to project choices will completely eliminate the risk of mistakes, it will no doubt help move things in the right direction and maximize performance.

Manufacturing outburst in combination with automation makes us think sometimes that economy is changed too fast and we left behind. The recent COVID-19 pandemic crisis can be perceived as creative destruction emerged new models that can work. Cases of thriving during the time of chaos, where familiar ways of working stopped working, indicated that many regular people can thrive when a sense of purpose combined with financial perspective are present. Looking back into the experiences from lockdowns existential questions were risen and depicted through more quality measures than quantitative ones.