I think that your initiative has great potential to improve the BA work in your organization. About your question, which I’ll split into two parts:

How to keep the momentum and interest of BAs? One approach you may try is to find a few “champions” who already have familiarity with wikis and forums, and ask them to start posting and commenting on each other’s content to “seed” the knowledge base. You might also want to create a newsletter highlighting the new content, asking for contributions, etc. The most resistant BAs will start to see “what they are missing”, both in terms of learning opportunities and exposure (a BA who is describing lessons learned in a complex project, or asking interesting questions that start a valuable exchange of ideas, will definitely develop a good reputation, and this can generate intrinsic motivation for the others to ask and answer questions so their skills can be recognized too).

How to justify to the PMs and stakeholders the value of allowing BAs spending time contributing to the “broader community”? I have a feeling that it will be much less difficult than you think (believe me, I had to convince senior manager of the benefits of things with much less tangible value than that, and did it successfully, using the techniques I describe in this other article: http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/sell-your-initiatives-to-your-boss/).

The key is to spend some time trying to understand their framework. What’s really important for the PMs and stakeholders? How can you connect what they care about with your initiative? (In many cases I found out that I needed to focus on a benefit that wasn’t even the most important, but was the one that resonated most with a particular audience). As you move forward, you could also create a newsletter to send to them sharing not only the progress in terms of BA collaboration, but also stories that illustrate the results (e.g., how a BA got help for a problem caused by a design constraint that was preventing a requirement from being implemented. By asking for help and getting a response from another BA who had run into the same problem in a different project, he quickly found a solution. You can estimate the number of hours of work looking for a solution that were avoided, and list all the other benefits that the knowledge sharing provided).

“I am hoping that we can get BA’s to blog their progress through a project so that not only can others see and comment on each others approach, it also helps with the communication between different projects.”

Keep in mind that this may be easier in the beginning to ask BAs to share the lessons learned “after the action”. Many may feel self-conscious exposing the challenges they are experiencing, afraid that this will make them look bad. Once a project is successfully completed, they will feel more comfortable sharing its highs and lows, which will allow others to learn from the experience as well.

As the BAs get used to and comfortable with the platform, and start to experience the benefits of the knowledge sharing, it should become easier and easier to convince people to blog about their progress, share advice, and increasing the collaboration between different projects. Good luck!

I am currently working on a initiative to improve the BA practices. It took 6 months of suggestions to get management on board and then another 6 to get enough time away from projects to actually put together the “starting point”. One of the first things that we had to do was to consolidate the information in the organisation, because we realised that 5 different departments had different templates and expectations that they expected a group of BA’s to conform to. We defined a recommended approach, some principals and refered to the BABOK knowledge areas, but we are trying to encourage “critical thinking” rather than sticking to a prescriptive process.

A few weeks ago we were ready to get everyone involved, so we asked BA’s from all streams of the business to nominate themselves as the “go to people” so that we could provide face to face time to other BA’s who are unsure of where they fit and to help them with the issues they are facing. We have also deployed a portal so that people could go to the one place to find templates, post questions and find information (the portal has wiki, forum and repository capabilities) and I am hoping that we can get BA’s to blog their progress through a project so that not only can others see and comment on each others approach, it also helps with the communication between different projects.

Now the biggest hurdle is trying to keep the momentum and interest of the BA’s whilst trying to justify to the PM’s and stakeholders the value of allowing the BA’s to participate in the broader “community”.

Any comments would be welcome 🙂

Cheers,

Adriana