After being out of work for 1 year. I have finally accepted a BA job. Although it is a contract to hire job, I want to start off on a good note and continue to evolve. During my out of work time, I have not been able to keep abreast of the ever-changing BA world as my resources began to become very scarce and limited. To say the least. Now, this is an exciting time for me as I will be working in the IT space supporting cross-functional teams on a system I have lack of knowledge and experience. So I will be supporting by gathering/collecting requirements, user acceptance testing, and process mapping, but not limited too. I have been told that it is “super” fast-paced and things always changing in an entrepreneurial type environment. This scares me a little as I feel this is going to challenge my strong organizational and time management skills. I have been researching the system that I will be supporting and watching a bunch of YouTube videos and I have also took your domain questions from one of your articles and answered some of them based from my research thus far. I plan to answer the remaining questions once I have started the job and understanding the landscape. I start the job in the next few weeks and trying to figure out the best approach to starting this new job. Especially since there will not be any training, the information possibly vague, and wondering what the support looks like.

Could you offer any advice to help me start on the right foot please? What would be the first thing you would do when starting a new BA position?

Thank you in advance for your feedback.

Here are our go-to resources on finding a business analyst job. http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/the-business-analyst-job-search-process-5-steps-to-getting-hired/

Hi Maria,

This is a very powerful question. It sounds like the core challenge is unrealistic deadlines. Here is an article on dealing with this challenge: http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/requirements-deadlines/

Hi Terrance, Here’s an article on 22 visual models, and I cover both context diagrams and business processes.

http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/22-visual-models-used-by-business-analysts/