Establishing clear and measurable business analyst performance metrics and KPIs is no easy task. The business analyst role is interdependent on contributions for other team members, and many of the best business analysts excel based on soft skills and contributions that are inherently more difficult to measure.

Why Measuring Business Analyst Performance is Important

High-performing business analysts are essential to the success of software and business improvement projects. Business analysts help everyone get clear on what the problem is and how to solve it. Their contribution to clear requirements helps everyone else be more efficient and successful, which ultimately impacts the performance of the entire project.

Meaningful performance metrics help ensure that business analysts keep their attention on what matters. Success as a business analyst is not about writing more requirements, holding more meetings, or, really, doing more of anything!

At the end of the day, business analysts add value by bringing clarity to project outcomes and getting the business to own the solution. Just because this seems difficult to measure, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t measure it to the best of our abilities.

KPIs for Business Analysts

When I think about high-level business analyst performance, the following questions come to mind:

1. Does the project deliver the anticipated value? Does the project meet the objectives of the business case?
2. Are the stakeholders aligned around the project concept? If you asked each of them individually about what is to be achieved, would you get the same or at least consistent answers?
3. Are the stakeholders satisfied that the scope being delivered is the best possible solution to the problem they are trying to solve?
4. Does the implementation team deliver on the requirements without a lot of wasted effort? Did they understand what needed to be accomplished?
5. Is the test team able to validate that the final application met all the requirements or do they come across areas of ambiguity that need to be addressed?
6. Are there big surprises at the end of the project? Do unexpected requirements come up? Every project will experience a bit of churn toward the end as you flesh out the final details, but missing a big piece of functionality or a critical business process is a sign that the business analysis effort was lacking.
7. Did the business analyst have a business analysis process and create a business analysis plan? How close was the actual work to their intended plan? What was the root cause of any variations?
8. Did the business analyst choose the most appropriate requirements documentation for the type of project and methodology in place?
9. Is the business happy? Do they find value in what was delivered? (A no answer can have many root causes, but a yes answer is typically the sign of good business analysis work.)

If having a business analysis process is a new concept, check out this video on our 8-step business analysis process framework.

>>Plan Your Next Step with a Free Workshop

While this is a lot of information, you might be wondering exactly what steps you can take. We offer a free Quick Start to Success workshop  that will help you figure out your next step.

Click here to learn more about how to start your BA career

Taking Project Considerations Into Account for Business Analyst Metrics

Another way to evaluate the performance of business analysts is to consider aspects of the project:

• How many stakeholders were involved? From how many different areas of the business? And at what level of the organization?
• How much communication was necessary? (Meetings, messages, emails, etc)
• How many deliverables (business processes, use cases, user stories, data models, etc) did the business analyst need to create?
• How many systems were impacted?
• How many technical stakeholders were involved?
• How up-to-date is the current state documentation? Does it even exist or did the BA need to create it to kickstart the project?
• How long did the business analysis effort take?
• How many defects were due to missed requirements?
• What was the end result or ROI of the project? What benefits were delivered or costs saved?

Again, you are looking to show that your business analysts lead teams to alignment and clarity as effectively as possible, given the complexity of the problem, solution, and stakeholders involved.

How to Measure the Performance of Business Analysts

One thing that makes measuring business analysis performance so challenging is the interrelationship between the business analysis effort and that of the team. If the business analyst does a great job preparing for meetings, invites the right stakeholders, and then they don’t attend or they come unprepared, should the business analyst performance be downgraded?

Most likely, your answer would be no! But many business analysts today are seen as bottlenecks who miss deadlines or deliver incomplete requirements, when the reality behind the measurement is that they are lacking stakeholder engagement on their projects.

A good business analyst will be proactive and strategic, they will gain buy-in from stakeholders, and smooth the path to engagement throughout the project. But in some situations, their hands are tied and they are unable to break-through certain areas of resistance.

To compensate this, any measurements need to be considered in context. Did the business analyst manage what they could? Did they go above and beyond to gain buy-in and engagement? Did they elevate risks? Did they ask probing questions? Was their communication clear and actionable?

This is what you are looking for in a great business analyst. So be sure your measurements aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet without context – you are likely to get exactly what you measure, which might not be the outcomes you actually want!

>>How to Learn the Foundational Business Analyst Skills

When you join The Business Analyst Blueprint® training program, you’ll gain real world experience in the industry-standard techniques and business analysis processes so you can upgrade your skills, bring a fresh perspective to your business analysis approach, and know exactly what to do on your software projects.

While I believe the answer is no – you can always create opportunities for yourself. I do realize that having an undergrad degree is required by many organizations, and if you have the degree your job prospects may be improved.

But let’s take a deeper look at this question and how to approach the options you have.

How My Undergraduate Degree Helped Me In Business Analysis

First, let me share a bit of personal background. I earned my bachelor’s degree from a liberal arts college, and I dual majored in Philosophy and English. While I learned a ton in college, and I never regret the 4 years I spent digesting and dissecting great works, I didn’t graduate with any real professional skills.

I managed to land a role as an associate editor at a publishing company, which was about as ideal of an opportunity on paper as you could expect with my degree. And yet, it was really a glorified administrative role and I was absolutely bored out of my mind.

I offered again and again and again to work on technical projects and finally got an opportunity about a year into my role – this brought me into quality assurance testing. You can find my story of transitioning from QA to BA here. I also leveraged the tuition reimbursement benefits in my company to start a master’s degree in Library and Information Science, which helped me build business domain knowledge and awareness.

Once I was in a business analysis position, I remember realizing how similar the work felt to my Introduction to Logic course. Dissecting requirements was very similar to dissecting philosophical texts. Looking for errors in thinking and logic was a lot like investing a problem domain and ensuring the requirements fit together cohesively to solve a business problem.

It’s not like I learned to be a business analyst studying philosophy, but the critical thinking and analytical skills certainly helped.

Hiring a Business Analyst Without a College Degree

Let’s fast forward several years – I’m building and managing a team of project managers, business analysts, and quality assurance professionals. I distinctly remember discovering one of the business analysts I hired did not have a college degree. It surprised me because I honestly never thought to ask the question, and I certainly had some pre-conceived assumptions that most professionals did have college degrees.

At the time, our VP of Technology also let me know he never went to college either.

For context, we were working at a small company, less than 500 people, and had a small tech team. I hired for experience and the ability to literally hit the ground running. We always had multiple active projects that were behind schedule and I didn’t have the capacity to train and mentor my team the way I would have loved to.

When I interviewed this business analyst, she presented herself as extremely capable, flexible, and proactive. And her work contributions lived up to, and even exceeded, my expectations.

So I not believe that a college degree is necessary to be a great business analyst.

Some Employers Require College Degrees for Professional Positions Like Business Analysis

However, the reality of our professional environment is that some employers do require a college degree to be hired for a professional position like business analysis. This means, that you may be unfairly screened out before you even get a chance to present your experience and qualifications.

If you don’t have a college degree, it’s even more important to:

• Identify your transferable business analysis skills.
• Focus on your contributions and accomplishments from your work history.
• Highlight the professional business analysis training, as well as training in related skill sets.
• Be prepared to speak to your specific work experience in a job interview, whether it’s from a role with the BA job title or in a related role doing business analysis work.
• Build business analysis experience by approaching your current role or volunteer work, no matter your title or role, with a business analysis mindset.
• Focus on positions that leverage any specialized skill sets you have, particularly in a specific business domain or business application.
• And don’t overlook opportunities to grow into business analysis. Here are 13 Jobs That Can Lead to a Business Analyst Job (with the path to get there).

If your goal is to start a business analyst career, I, personally, would find it difficult to advise you to stop applying to roles and go back to school for 4 years to pursue a bachelor’s degree, and then circle back to your BA career ambitions. But you will need to embrace that you will face more roadblocks and some employment opportunities will not be open to you. Instead, focus on the opportunities that are open to you, and the employers who hire based on experience and aptitude versus academic credentials.

We Can Help With Practical, Real-World Training

When it comes to starting a business analyst career, nothing is more important than real-world professional experience. Our online business analyst training programs are structured to support you as you learn business analysis skills and apply them in the real-world (even outside formal business analysis roles), so you can build the experience and work history employers are looking for when they hire business analysts.

>Click here to learn more about our business analysis training opportunities

Download the FREE Business Analyst Skills Assessment

Another great resource to help you get started is the BA Skills Assessment.

In this FREE assessment, you will:

• Discover the essential skills to succeed as a BA.
• Gain clarity on your strengths and transferable skills.
• Define an action plan to expand your business analyst skill set.

>> Download the Assessment <<

Learn How to Start Building BA Experience Straight Away

This is a great video to watch and learn how to start expanding your business analysis experience, so you can qualify for a wider range of business analysis positions.

However, having a set of goals is critical to taking ownership of your career and making the most of your work.

In this video, Laura dives into the essence of professional development goals for business analysts. You’ll discover how these goals are not just milestones, but catalysts that propel your career forward.

Discover exactly where you stand as a business analyst by taking our FREE BA Skills Assessment. In this free assessment, you will:

• Discover the essential skills to succeed as a business analyst.
• Gain clarity on your strengths and transferable skills.
• Define an action plan to expand your business analyst skill set.

>> Click here to take the FREE BA Skills Assessment <<

Performance Goal #1 – Broaden Your Skills by Using New Techniques

Your experience broadens as you use more techniques. Even if you are working on projects in the same domain, working with the same stakeholders, and using the same methodology, new techniques can help explore the requirements in a new way. And over time, you’ll expand your business analysis skill set.

Consider the following specific goals for your performance plan:

• Use a new elicitation technique to discover or validate the requirements.
• Experiment with a new visual model to clarify a complex concept.
• Consider a new type of requirements document to address a currently unmet need, such as a business process model, scope statement, or use case.
• Earn a business analyst certification.

Participants in The Business Analyst Blueprint® program learn and apply techniques in business process analysis, use cases and wireframes, data modeling, as well as the end-to-end business analysis process.

Download the FREE Business Analyst Skills Assessment

In this FREE assessment, you will:

• Discover the essential skills to succeed as a BA.
• Gain clarity on your strengths and transferable skills.
• Define an action plan to expand your business analyst skill set.

>> Download the Assessment <<

While you can broaden your BA skill set even while working in a consistent BA role, changing things up just about forces you to use or improve your skills. So let’s look at a few ways to change things up.

Performance Goal #2 – Work in a New Domain

Your business analysis skills become more valuable as you learn to work with new stakeholders and gain a broader exposure to new domains. Doing the same type of work, but in a new context, takes your skills to the next level.

For one of your performance goals, look for an assignment in a new business unit, department, or business domain.

Performance Goal #3 – Work in a New Methodology

Working on different types of projects exposes us to new methodologies and types of requirements specifications. It also challenges you to discover the core business analysis principles that are relevant, regardless of what type of project work you are working on.

As a professional development goal, ask to be assigned to project work on a team that uses a different project methodology or tool set to broaden your experience.

Performance Goal #4 – Improve Your Business Analysis Process

With exposure to different projects, stakeholders, domains, and methodologies, you learn what works well and what doesn’t work so well. Often your business analysis process stays the same, even while your work changes and matures. Look for ways to incorporate what you’ve learned into your organization’s BA process so other BAs can benefit from your insights.

Goals in this area could include updating a template, documenting an as is process, or creating a tip sheet.

Not sure how to improve your business analysis process? Here’s a video walking you through the 8-step business analysis process framework we teach at Bridging the Gap.

Performance Goal #5 – Strengthen Stakeholder Relationships

When we have stronger rapport with our stakeholders, it’s easier to get more work done.  Yet, if we’ve worked in the same organization for awhile, it’s easy to become complacent and rely on existing relationships to get work done.

Set a goal to strengthen your relationship with a stakeholder, improve a troublesome relationship you’ve let linger this year, or form a new relationship with a stakeholder assigned to upcoming projects. Often simple techniques, such as engaging stakeholders more effectively, can make significant improvements in relationships.

Performance Goal #6 – Mentor Other BAs

Your ability to lead others will help you move into more senior BA roles. Become a mentor to a newly hired business analyst, a professional that’s interested in business analysis, or another member of your department.

You don’t have to be the expert in all areas of business analysis to mentor someone in an area of business analysis. For example:

• If you have a technical background, but your fellow BAs are from the business side, offer to perform a technical review of a requirements document or answer questions about technical terminology.
• If you are from the business side, share your subject matter expertise with a fellow BA who comes from outside your domain and offer to provide process overviews as they get up-to-speed on a new project.
• If you learn a new BA technique or are really good at a particular kind of visual model, offer to share your knowledge and conduct a peer review for other BAs in your department.

As you share what you know, you’ll be building your reputation as a leader and a team player, which can lead to positive outcomes for your BA career. You might also consider sharing your knowledge in a more formal way, so let’s talk about that next.

Performance Goal #7 – Share Your Business Analysis Knowledge

Sharing your knowledge will not only demonstrate your leadership skills but could eventually lead to a larger role for you within your BA team.

Consider starting a ‘lunch and learn’ with your fellow BAs. This doesn’t have to require a lot of time if you use available resources to structure these sessions. For example, one of our readers hosted monthly meetings to discuss these 53 tips for discovering all the requirements  and share best practices.

Performance Goal #8 – Take on Non-Business Analyst Responsibilities

If you’d eventually like to move out of business analysis or up into a BA leadership role, it’s important to diversify your work experience and build skills that are not formally part of the business analysis toolkit. You can do this by looking for new responsibilities outside your current work, or taking on hybrid business analyst roles.

Ripe options include project management, technical architecture, business process analysis, or product ownership.

Performance Goal #9 – Take On More Senior Business Analyst Responsibilities

On the other hand, if you’d like to stay within business analysis for the foreseeable future, consider looking at how you can take on new senior business analyst responsibilities. Pay the most attention to areas where you can increase the value BAs add to projects or solve current issues that are holding your organization back.

Performance Goal #10 – Get Involved

The business analysis profession is a thriving and open community that welcomes professionals from all kinds of career backgrounds, industries, and career levels. It’s never too early to get involved. Check for a local IIBA Chapter meeting to attend (most allow non-members to attend for a nominal fee) or get involved virtually.

3 Rules of Thumb When Setting Performance Goals

1. Be sure your performance goals align with the mode your organization is in, so that achieving your goals also adds more value to your organization.
2. Instead of looking at performance goals as things to do that are above and beyond work as normal, look at how you can transform the work you are doing anyway into a professional development opportunity.
3. Focus on performance goals that actually get you where you want to go. In this next video on Hybrid Roles, you’ll learn how to expand your role in meaningful ways, while also letting go of responsibilities that no longer are serving you and your career.

Download the FREE Business Analyst Skills Assessment

In this FREE assessment, you will:

• Discover the essential skills to succeed as a BA.
• Gain clarity on your strengths and transferable skills.
• Define an action plan to expand your business analyst skill set.

>> Download the Assessment <<

Being a great business analyst goes beyond foundational skills. It’s about being resourceful, utilizing the right tools at the right time, and creating alignment and clarity through active stakeholder engagement.

Watch our new video 7 Secrets of Good Business Analysts now:

>>Click here for the free download <<

In my experience as a business analyst, a manager of business analysts, and now a trainer of business analysts, there are certain qualities that really set high performing business analysts apart, and these qualities make them highly coveted by managers and pave the way towards more career opportunities as well.  Stay tuned and I will share exactly what those are.

Hi, I’m Laura Brandenburg with Bridging the Gap where we help you start, succeed, and excel in your business analyst career with weekly videos on business analysis, tips and techniques.

#1 – Good Business Analysts Have a Strong Foundational Business Analysis Skill Set

Tip number one is that good business analysts have a strong foundational business analysis skill set. They are strong communicators, problem solvers. They are able to think critically. They can create requirement specifications, analyze requirements, and create visual models. They can facilitate elicitation sessions and use the necessary business analysis tools.

That is the foundation, and then you must do a little bit more.

#2 – Good Business Analysts are Resourceful

Tip number two is that good business analysts are resourceful. They know how to find the answers to questions and don’t wait for the answers to come to them. They find alternative paths through the organization and involve the right people at the right time. Good business analysts rarely get stopped for long and can often work through challenging situations to come through to a solution.

#3 – Good Business Analysts Grow their Toolbox of Skills

Tip number three is that good business analysts grow their toolbox of skills. They are not content to do the same thing, the same way, every time. For a long time, I applied use cases in every requirement situation. Gaining confidence to apply a wider variety of techniques really increased my marketability and made me more effective. Good business analysts know the outcome that they are trying to create and select the right tool for the right job instead of just relying on a really small set of go-to tools and making it work somehow in every situation.

If you are short on tools, don’t worry. I recorded a video on the five types of requirements documentation that business analysts create. If you haven’t seen that video yet, make sure to watch it after finishing this one by clicking below.

#4 – Good Business Analysts Create Alignment and Ownership Around the Solution

That brings us to tip number four, which is great business analysts create alignment and ownership around the solution. It’s really easy to be the one who just like writes the requirements down and does what the stakeholders ask for. As a new business analyst, you might be in a role where that’s what you are expected to do, or where even that’s the biggest contribution you can make at first. But a high performing business analyst is able to resolve conflicts and ensure that when that solution is delivered, the business truly owns it and is prepared to use it effectively.

This starts by understanding the business process or the underlying problem to be solved that can lead you in the right direction. Creating clarity, which we’re going to talk about next, is a very first step.

New to business process analysis? Here’s a video on this incredibly important business analyst technique:

#5 – Good Business Analysts Create Clarity

Tip number five is that business analysts create clarity. Business analysts bring a unique blend of critically important soft or power skills along with technical analytical skills and together those two balancing skill sets help the business analyst create true clarity. Clarity does not mean that you simply get sign-off on the spec. A good business analyst doesn’t rely on artificial sign offs and hundred page documents. They use analysis techniques to drill into the details and ask relevant questions. They get buy-in, not just sign-off, during the verification and validation process. They get into appropriate details to ensure that true clarity emerges.

#6 – Good Business Analysts Actively Engage Stakeholders

That leads us to tip number six, where good business analysts actively engage stakeholders.

High performing business analysts engage stakeholders in the entire discovery, analysis, and validation process.

• They use active listening techniques to ensure stakeholders feel heard.
• They set clear expectations as a way to build trust.
• They consistently follow through on their commitments and don’t make promises that they can’t keep.
• They honor confidentiality agreements, never talk behind anyone’s back, and are generally seen as above office gossip.

We’ve got a bunch more tips like these in our  free guide called “10 Tips to Improving Stakeholder Engagement.” 

#7 – Good Business Analysts Have a Strong Dash of Project Management

Number seven. Final. Good business analysts have a strong dash of project management. That might sound like a bit of heresy, so let me explain.

Good BAs are not project managers, but they understand with perfect clarity why they are not project managers. That being said, good business analysts know how to manage within business analysis.

• They are proactive and dependency aware.
• They manage themselves to commitments and deadlines.
• They get stakeholders involved at the right times in the right ways to keep everything moving.

This means they have a business analysis process and approach and are strategic and proactive when it comes to how they manage the business analysis aspect of the project.

More than all of this, good business analysts have a strong eye for scope. While it can be fun to figure out what we might pack in if everything but the kitchen sink happens to fit into the car, high performing business analysts realize that the implementation constraints nearly always get in the way of achieving the full vision in the first time out. They keep a close eye on value and feasibility and they guide their stakeholders towards a set of requirements that can actually get implemented.

Being a great business analyst goes beyond just the foundational skills.

It’s about being resourceful, utilizing the right tools at the right time, creating alignment and clarity through active stakeholder engagement. Additionally, a touch of project management expertise is vital for maintaining project scope and momentum.

To gain more insights on building stronger relationships and actively engaging your stakeholders on your projects, don’t forget to download our free resource, “10 Tips to Engaging Stakeholders.”

Finally, having a business analysis framework is another vital tool for empowering yourself to be more strategic and proactive in your project approach.

Join me in this next video where we’ll dive into the BA process framework and unlock the secrets to successful project execution.

While it’s important that a business analyst has a conceptual technical understanding as it helps you analyze the problem to be solved and communicate with technical stakeholders, you don’t need to be able to write code or run database queries.

In this video, I share the technical skills you do need to know and how they will help you position yourself more strongly in the job market and hold up your side of the conversation with developers.

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

Today we’re here to answer a question from Monica. She asked, “What are the top three to five technical skills a business analyst with a business background needs to have?” Specifically, she asked this around wanting to be able to make sure she could have good conversations with the technical people on her project teams.

Here’s the thing about technical skills in BA jobs – you’ve heard me say it before and you’re going to hear me say it again – you see them as job requirements a lot of times in business analyst roles. And a lot of times those requirements are extremely misleading.

You can, of course, to become more technically minded as a business analyst, learn how to write code. You could go take an introduction to programming and a sequel course and learn a bunch of technical skills that you may never, ever want to use in your career. You could do that. Or you could learn some requirements models that allow you to have those very productive communications and conversations with technical professionals and understand more about how the technology is structured and give you insight into what questions to ask than the technical skills, themselves, actually do.

What I’m going to talk about here, in terms of technical skills, are three requirements models or three types of requirements models that you might want to look at if you feel that you’re not “technical” enough to be a business analyst. I will finish with one closing bonus skill that might catch you by surprise.

Let’s talk about these three models.

Technical Skill 1: Use Cases for Functional Requirements

The first is use cases. Use cases are a textual description of how a business user or a user of a software application interacts with a software system. They force you to get really specific about what function or feature that system needs to have in order to meet the business needs. Underlying that feature is often a piece of code that a developer has created, customized, or integrated to make that function work.

But what you need to be able to specify as a business analyst is what that software needs to do, and the condition under which it needs to do it. A use case is the perfect model to get familiar with that business user system interaction. It’s much more detailed than a typical business process model, and it’s much more specific. You get into those specific technical requirements even though you don’t know how to write the code that underlies it.

Technical Skill 2: Wireframes for Visual Requirements

The second requirements model that can be helpful in expressing technical requirements like this is wireframes. Wireframes are visual descriptions, or visual renderings, of a user interface screen. Essentially, when I go to a software application as a user, what does it look like to me?

Not, specifically, what are the colors, what are the buttons, and how are they; circle or square? That is important at a certain point of a project, but a wireframe can be much less specific than that. It can use general buttons and not be specific on colors. Use grayscale. You’re trying to show this is what the user interface screen might look like to a potential user.

Again, you’re getting to that level of detail of what that software system needs to be able to do and look like, again, without having to write the code behind it. There are a lot of tools today that people, like me, who don’t have coding backgrounds, are able to use that just drag and drop those features into a wireframing tool so you can create them without having to know how to code.

Technical Skill 3: Data Models for Data Requirements

The third set of models are data models, such as entity relationship diagrams, system context diagrams, data flow diagrams, data dictionaries. There are a bunch of different models included in the data modeling area.

Essentially, all those models allow you to understand how the database is structured, how information is stored, what information needs to be stored. So, if you’re looking at a business process and there are different fields on a form coming in through some sort of an input:

• How is that information stored in your software system?
• What are the rules that need to be applied when that information is stored?
• How do the different pieces of information that come in through different business processes, how do those relate together?

Different data models allow you to look at that information model in different ways. This is how you, essentially, learn how to model a relational database or express data requirements without knowing SQL.

A not very well-kept secret is that I’ve never learned how to write SQL. I did learn how to do a little bit of coding in a very proprietary database language that was very specific at the very beginning of my career, but I’ve never learned SQL. I’ve never used that skill to move forward as a business analyst. I’ve done a lot of work with data requirements and data modeling and helped a lot of teams figure out what those data requirements and databases should look like by using some of the core data modeling skills.

And One Bonus Technical Skill…Asking Questions

I promised you one bonus.  Our three models are use cases, wireframes, and data models. What’s that bonus skill? The bonus skill is something that you’re probably already good at if you’re a business analyst, and that’s the ability to ask questions.

When it comes to technical questions, it’s like the ability to ask that question that you really feel like you should know. You should know the answer to this and you don’t. It’s asking questions about how things are organized, what are the capabilities of the technology, what are things that you might not think of. You’re using that so you can understand the possibilities of the technology and how the system is designed without knowing how to do it yourself.

In my experience, you could spend a lot of time learning how to build these systems and write code. That could have a measurable impact on your career. Or, you could spend time learning these core skills that you’re going to use forever in your life-long career as a business analyst.

They’re going to give you a more advanced level of understanding of the potentials of technology than you would get from learning how to line-by-line create the code because they’re going to enable you to work in any sort of situation as opposed to just the coding language that maybe you learned. There are dozens of coding languages out there, dozens of different technical environments. So, you’re never going to become the expert on all of them unless you want to be the expert and the doer of that kind of thing. If you’re a business analyst, I’m assuming you probably don’t.

Again, use cases, wireframes, data models, and having the courage to ask questions and get the answers to those questions so that you really have a good technical understanding in your environment. Those, to me, are the skills that you need to succeed as a business analyst with a business background in today’s technical environment. They will take you far as a business analyst without getting you lost in the weeds of learning specific technical coding skills.

>>How to learn these key technical business analyst skills

When you join The Business Analyst Blueprint® training program, you’ll learn all 12 of the industry-standard techniques and the business analysis process framework – to build your confidence in the best practices of business analysis.

>> Click here for more information about The Blueprint <<

Of course not! Business analysts add a tremendous amount of value to projects. This video takes a look at the specific ways business analysis increases the return on investment.

(If you are a business analyst, this would be a good post to share with your manager or project team too.)

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

I’m Laura Brandenburg, from Bridging the Gap. We help business analysts start their careers.

Today, I want to talk about how you, as a business analyst, are adding value to your organization. We’re going to use the concept of return on investment. We’re going to break down, specifically, how business analysis and business analysts create a better return on investment when they’re assigned to critical projects in their organization. Let’s dive right in.

Quick Introduction to ROI (Return on Investment)

First, return on investment. What does that mean? The acronym for that is ROI. It’s the weight or the value of the return on a project, or what benefit the organization receives vs. the investment that the organization makes in that project.

If an organization invests in software development team to build or customize or implement a new software solution in all the business stakeholder time that goes into figuring out what that system should do, that’s the investment. The time, the money, the energy that gets invested in creating that solution.

The return is the benefit that organization receives from that solution once it’s in place in the business. It could be more efficient turnaround time, more customers, more revenue, more efficiency, relieving staff that can be re-used on other projects, or being able to eliminate exterior staffing or redundant staffing. Lots of ways to measure the return on that project.

Business analysts, we impact both sides of that equation. We help streamline the investment – minimize the investment in the project actually is – and, also, maximize the return. Maximize the value we’re getting out of that process. That probably sounds counter-intuitive at first. I want to dig into the specific ways that business analysts do this and give you a few examples as well.

Business Analysts Add Value Through Reducing Project Costs

Let’s talk about how business analysts reduce the investment, or the cost, of a project. This probably does feel counterintuitive if you’re thinking…you’re a hiring manager and you’re like, “Well, should I add a business analyst to my team? Isn’t that an additional cost? Aren’t I expanding how much this project is going to cost? Why don’t we just get starting coding, because that’s what we really need? We need that code, or we need that configured system into our business user’s hands. Why don’t we just skip the analysis and go right to coding?”

Well, we know it doesn’t always work that way, but some specific ways that business analysts help reduce costs, even though, of course, their salary is a line item on your budget for the project, is that they’re going to reduce re-work. So, when you just start coding and start figuring things out, and then you put that into the hands of a business user, they’re going to be like, “Oh, no. I didn’t really want this. I wanted that.”

All of a sudden, something that maybe seemed simple, gets complex as like stakeholder requests come in, defects come in, change requests come in, and you have this re-work where you’re going back and revisiting the same code, the same implementation again, again, and again. That is, obviously, you know, your costs go from here to here. You add some analysis up front to figure out what is needed, and that re-work time should go down.

The other place that business analysts have an effect on project costs is in the reduction of what I like to call requirements churn, or the time it takes for the business community to figure out what it is they actually want.

A lot of times, that isn’t like a line item cost on a budget. But if you think about a requirements meeting, especially one that might have high-level stakeholders in the room, there’s a definite cost to that meeting. If you’re having duplicate meetings again, and again, and again to discuss essentially the same issue and never getting to a solution, that’s an expense that your organization is taking on that’s bloating the impact, or cost, of what needs to be invested to figure out those requirements.

Good business analysis is going to help present solutions, create a logical decision-making process, remind people that we went down that road before, we don’t need to go down that rabbit hole again, and plug those communication gaps, and help facilitate communication across departments, across different levels of the organization.

Yes, that process takes time. It’s not like you put a business analyst in and, snap, they come up with the requirements. But it’s going to take less time and less churn than if you didn’t have somebody who was in charge facilitating that part of the process.

Finally, when it comes to the investment side of the equation, the other way that business analysts can help is helping find more cost-effective solutions. When you dial into what problem are we solving – you’ll hear me say that again and again – what problem are we solving? Why is this project being implemented in the first place? Sometimes creative solutions just pop up.

They don’t even have to be big technology solutions. Maybe there are tools that you can use that you already have. Maybe there’s a business process change that can get you a certain amount of the way there. That’s where we can take what maybe was a big investment and reduce that by half and still get that same return. It doesn’t always happen. But if it is possible, your business analyst is going to help you find it.

This topic of saving time through improved communication and effective requirements processes was a big theme in this live panel discussion on How Business Analysts Add Value – you can watch the entire video here below.

Business Analysts Add Value through Increasing the Potential Return, or Benefits

Let’s talk about the other side of the equation and how business analysts help you increase the potential return, or what the benefits are from that project. Remember, we’ve made an investment in a solution, and now it’s out in the business. How does that actually have more benefit?

The first thing is we talked about how a business analyst is always going to go try to find the problem to be solved. Not try; will find the problem to be solved. As part of that, we often discover new business benefits. While we’re looking at this part, is there something here that we can do as well?

I remember early on in my career meeting with an end user who was showing me how they were copying and pasting documents into this field. They had to edit it, too, because it wasn’t copying right. It ended up being a simple change to enable the workflow and save them tons of time. As a business analyst, I could see there was a possibility of as we were touching the system to add on a piece that would save them a lot of time in their workflow.

Until I saw their work environment, I would have never known that. It would have never made it into the requirements for that project if we hadn’t analyzed their current business process and understood how their work flowed. There were lots of ways we could have solved that problem. It ended up being a small technology tweak that added a lot of value. That’s an example of discovering new business needs that can be easily included in the investment that’s already being made to deliver even more value to the business.

Another way that business analysts support that increase of value is through prioritization. Typically, it would be like we want all the things, the list of all these requirements and let’s just say it’s 100 things. We hand that to our development team. They start going through them in order. Maybe they group them by technical component or area of the system and implement them that way.

When you do that, and you say all these things are required, maybe the first 10 things aren’t the most important things. Maybe they’re not the most valuable. Maybe we start working on an area of the system, and three of those things are really important and another five of them are just nice-to-haves that complicate the system more than it needs to be and don’t deliver the value that needs to be.

Relentless focus on that prioritization in making sure the most important requirements get dealt with first in the project that we know what the most important ones are, which ones are going to add the most value, and then make sure those are clearly communicated as part of building the solution.

Another way that business analysts increase that return is the way that they facilitate this communication with the business community. I have this story I love to share where I walked into a contract as a consultant and they had implemented a document management system. There were business users printing the document twice. The goal of that system was to reduce paper and make the process more efficient. After the system, they were printing and writing, and uploading and writing, and uploading and printing. Multiple steps, additional steps, in order to use the system that IT said they needed to use in a way that was going to work with what they understood their business process to be.

As a business analyst, we don’t stop when the solution is built. We stop when the business has accepted that solution and understands what their updated business process is going to be. That’s where the real business value gets realized. (Before I forget, be sure to download our free business process template which incorporates a host of best practices on process modeling.)

One final way that we help increase the return is providing a framework where IT can scale. If you’re a small organization, or with a smaller team, you can communicate well, and you can have a tight-knit team where everybody knows what each other does and who to ask what questions.

As you start scaling your capabilities and scaling your team and growing your organization, that informal kind of “everybody knows each other” communication tends not to scale. And you need somebody in the middle of engaging the new business stakeholders, helping educate the new business stakeholders, figuring out who knows what in technology to facilitate that as well.

Think of your business analyst as a role that’s going to help that IT team scale to deliver even more value to the business and help your business scale as well.

How Will You Expand Your Value?

Those are my immediate takeaways on how business analysts add value on projects. It’s just scratching the surface. There’s a lot more that we could cover here. I’m going to challenge you, if you’re a business analyst listening in, think about it.

Are you adding value in all of these ways in your organization? If not, where could you be adjusting how you approach your work to add more value? This is what’s going to increase your reputation, get you on the interesting projects, be the person that everybody wants to work with because they know when they work with you, they’re going to have a value-added resource on their team.

If you’re a hiring manager or a technology leader, or a business leader who’s wondering if you should start a business analyst team, think about where you’re experiencing some of the pain points that we just talked about and who in your organization could start doing these activities, essentially stepping in to this business analyst role, and creating a more predictable project lifecycle and development process. It’s going to help your projects be more successful, and it’s also going to help people on those projects be happier because they know that they’re contributing to a successful project as well.

Those are my tips for you. Leave a comment below. Let me know how you add value as a business analyst or anything you’re going to change as a result of listening to today’s video.

Again, I’m Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the Gap.

>>Download Your Free Business Process Template

One way to expand your value right away is by analyzing a business process. Get started analyzing a business process today, with our complimentary business process template.

• Help business users from multiple departments clarify their actual step-by-step workflow;
• Avoid wasting money on software solutions that don’t solve the right business problems;
• And even helping new business analysts figure out what questions to ask when starting on a new project or domain.

Business process analysis is often the very first technique used by business analysts when we start learning a new domain or analyze the scope of a project.

Click here to download your free business process template today

I used to check email at 11 PM and wake up thinking about my meetings for the day, the questions I had, and tricky project challenges. It was like my mind would never shut off, thinking about my BA work.

And to be honest, that made me really frustrated, especially when I was working for executives and boards that I didn’t feel like respected me or care much about doing good in the world.

But you know what, this was not healthy for me, nor did it make me a better business analyst to be so anxious and “on” all the time. A lot of the personal growth I’ve experienced has come because I’ve been able to manage my emotional investments in healthy ways.

In today’s video, I share 4 strategies for managing your emotional investment in your work. If you’ve ever felt anxious, frustrated, or like it’s all not worth it, be sure to check it out.

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

Today I want to talk to you about anxiety and emotional investment as a business analyst and how this could affect our productivity, our lives, and how it can take away from the fulfilling enjoyable work that we come to business analysis for.

We just finished the launch of the Data Modeling for Business Analysts course. I’m sure if you’ve been a part of the community, you noticed what we were doing and saw that we launched a new program. That kind of work, to me, is always so tough emotionally to put a new creation out to the world, to run a big launch, to get visible about what we do at Bridging the Gap. I just kind of wonder who’s going to buy? Is anybody going to react well to what I have to offer? It’s a time of emotional investment, and I’ve learned a lot of ways to manage that, and they’ve been critical to my personal growth as a human being, as a business owner, and as a business analyst.

It kind of brought me back to that time when, as a business analyst, I would get so invested in what my work was, the outcome of the project, and all the nuances and issues that were coming up and who thought what about everything. I would get so caught up in a lot of those details and it would result in unhealthy activities. Things like working until 11:00 at night and getting up in the morning and having all kinds of ideas floating through my head about my project and never really feeling like I got to rest.

So, I wanted to share with you some of the strategies that you can use – four specific things – to be productive and manage your emotional investment in your projects.

Let’s jump in with the four different things.

#1 – Find some time to turn off work

First, is just finding some time to turn off work. This can be hard.

• It might be instead of turning it off at 11:00, you turn it off at 9:00. Baby steps.
• It might be maybe you can go to 6:00.
• Maybe, if 6:00 is not a great time because you have a family and from 6:00 – 8:00 is family time, or should be family time.

Not too long ago, I talked to somebody who said, “My laptop is always on. It’s at the dinner table with me while I’m trying to talk to my kids and my husband.” So, maybe it’s creating a space from 6:00 – 8:00 at night that is no laptops allowed, and then checking in later, if that works for you.

Whatever it is. It’s finding a space where you detach and it’s okay and safe not to work. Super, super important.

Once you get that done, I would challenge you to go to a step further and find that 24-hour period over the weekend where you’re also detaching and not working. It’s important just to have that emotional space to do the things you want to do and not be thinking about work. I guarantee you will show up for work more energized, more productive, your ideas will be better, the way that you can handle challenges will be better.

When you do this, at first, you might have to replace it with something else. I like to do a lot of my personal development in the evenings. That’s when I read books; I take courses. I also like to have some fun activities, too. I like to do puzzles. It’s a great way to keep your mind busy, but still not be doing work. Find a habit or a fun activity, like doing puzzles or crafts so that you’re engaged in some way. But, again, a little bit detached from work.

That’s the first thing, find that space.

#2 – Practice self-care

The second thing to be thinking about is practicing some self-care. When I was in a corporate environment, as things got busier and my responsibilities got bigger, I went from being good about working out every day and eating good foods to, slowly, the workouts became less and less and I was going out to lunch or having people bring me lunch. I didn’t even have time to go out to lunch.

Before I knew it, I wasn’t even drinking water or taking time to go to the bathroom. It was crazy. It was this slippery slope of not taking care of me. I can tell you that as a corporate manager, I was not always the best role model for my employees. If you are a leader in your space, this is a place where you can step up and lead, visibly, within your work environment as well.

So, how could you do that? Start by drinking the water. If you don’t have to go to the bathroom, it’s probably because you’re not drinking enough water. Drink the water, take some space to go for a walk, even if it’s just for 10-15 minutes. Get outside during your workday. Bring healthy nutritious snacks to work.

Think about how you can take care of you because somebody who takes care of themselves is better able to help others. I guarantee you, if you’re not taking care of yourself, you’re missing things. You’re missing connections, you’re showing up to meetings frazzled. I know when I have to go to the bathroom, I’m not listening very well. I’m not showing up as my best self. That is happening to you too. You’re not helping anyone by being a martyr. Find some ways to take care of you.

That brings us to step 3.

#3 – Cultivate awareness for what triggers you

When you start taking care of yourself, you’re probably going to be able to be more aware of what’s triggering you. What’s happening? When you go out on that walk and you’re like, “Gosh, I was really fired up in that meeting. I was really upset about how that stakeholder challenged the requirements.” Or the way that they were connecting with each other, not connecting with each other, that somebody showed up 15 minutes late to my meeting again and that really irks me. You’ll be able to generate that awareness of the places in your work that trigger you emotionally.

It’s so important to say, “Oh, there it is showing up again,” and start to see those patterns. What are the things that bother you and why are they bothering you? Allow that space to cultivate that awareness for yourself. You don’t, necessarily, have to do anything about it, just stopping enough to notice is going to go a long way to help you deal with it more productively and come up with some alternate solutions.

Just cultivating that awareness. Like, “Oh, I’m kind of upset about this. I wonder why?” You have to be curious about your own being and think about your work in a different way. Once you do that, you can then focus on what can you control in those situations. You can’t control if somebody chooses to show up late. You can’t control a lot of what happens at work. What you can control is the quality of your work, the expectations you set with others, the boundaries you set for yourself, and your reaction. That’s what you can control.

#4 – Focus on what you can control

In some of these situations, there is something that you could do to change. If I sent a reminder the day before, or the hour before, maybe people would be more likely to show up. If I structured my meetings in a different way, maybe people would be more likely to show up. That is just one issue because that comes up a lot for BAs. It can be any challenging issue that triggers you and causes those emotions. Just looking at that, focusing on what can you control, you can set a boundary.

There are times that I, again, on the meeting front, have said,

“If certain people aren’t here by five minutes after or 10 minutes after, I’m canceling the meeting. We’re all walking out. We’re going to do something else.”

Or maybe we’ll refocus the agenda on something that the group that’s there can handle, and then it becomes a very visible delay in our project because I’ve set that boundary about how I’m going to be treated as a business analyst and how our meetings are going to run, and how we’re going to respect the time of the people who show up in meetings.

Think about, then, what boundaries you could set, what can you control that’s going to generate a different outcome in the future. But, again, you can’t control much. You can’t control what other people do, you can’t control how they treat you, you can’t control their reactions when you do set a boundary, you can’t control what they think, how they feel. There’s so much that’s just out of your control and you can let it go.

It’s safe to let it go and to focus on what you can control. When you do that, these problems, sometimes, just start to solve themselves. You start to show up as a better more proactive awesome BA who’s shining as a leader, and who people want to work with because you’re happier emotionally and you’re more fully available to everyone else on your team.

When you start to put these pieces in place, magical things start to happen. I’ve seen it in my own personal growth. I’ve seen it in the people that are doing well in the profession, both in corporate and those who own their own businesses. I want to see it for you as well.

This has been one of our longer videos. It’s a touchy topic. There’s a lot to cover here. I could talk about this for hours. And if you have questions about this, please leave a comment below. I would love to have a conversation about this one.

Just to recap, though, the four things are practicing self-care, having times that you totally detach from work – that was #1, self-care at work was #2, cultivating awareness – just paying attention to what triggers you emotionally is step 3, and focusing on what you can control is step 4.

I hope these help you manage that emotional investment you have in your work.

While senior business analyst roles vary widely from one organization to another, in this post, we’ll talk about the 6 areas in which we see senior business analysts taking on increased responsibility.

Before I forget, I want to be sure you know about my Quick Start to Success as a Business Analyst training (it’s free) that’s designed to help you, the mid-career professional, kick-start your business analysis career. This training provides an introduction to what a business analyst does and a deeper dive into what skills you need to be successful as a business analyst.

>> Click here to get the Quick Start to Success Business Analyst Workshop <<

Now, onto the responsibilities of a Senior Business Analyst.

#1 – Senior Business Analysts Tackle More Complex Projects

Typically a senior business analyst takes on complex, high-profile projects. While you’ll likely find yourself leveraging the same foundational business analysis skills, the responsibilities are greater because of the nature of the projects themselves.

Project complexity can take many forms. Multiple, integrated systems create complexity because new requirements need to be traced through the inter-related systems. Multiple stakeholders across several departments create complexity because of the number of perspectives that need to be blended into the final solution. Team make-up can also create complexity because when you blend resources from multiple organizations to implement a project, communication becomes more complex.

#2 – Senior Business Analysts Own Strategic Analysis Responsibilities

A second, but much debated, aspect of becoming a senior-level business analyst is the incorporation of strategic analysis activities into the role.  Most BA roles include strategic analysis at some level. If you ask “why” or define the business need within the context of a specific project, you are doing strategic analysis.

As a senior-level responsibility, strategic analysis can also take the form of planning and scoping several inter-related initiatives and helping senior-level business stakeholders make informed decisions about which initiatives to tackle and how to tackle them, or project portfolio management.

#3 – Senior Business Analysts Understand the Business Process

While some business analyst roles are purely focused around business changes, many of us are “IT Business Analysts” and deal mostly with software changes. If this is the case in your situation, digging deeper into the business and business process changes can provide an avenue to take on more senior-level tasks.

As you learn about the business processes and how people throughout the organization use the software you support, you’ll build better relationships with business stakeholders. Through these discussions, you can create an opportunity for yourself to become a partner in the business change.

Here’s a video on exactly how to analyze a business process.

#4 – New Business Domains Are No Problem for a Senior Business Analyst

Many business analysts thrive during their initial years in the profession because they are experts in the system or business domain. They know everything there is to know about the possibilities of the project. When this is the case, your position of strength comes from your systems knowledge and your BA competencies are not fully stretched to the max.

Senior-level business analysts can often tackle projects across multiple domains and handle new business domains with the same level of confidence as familiar ones. The ability to work across domains and industries is a critical step in the business analyst career path.

#5 – Senior Business Analysts Lead the BA Effort

A business analyst lead is often a senior business analyst working on projects of large enough scope that they demand the efforts of multiple business analysts. In addition to performing many business analyst activities, a lead will coordinate and oversee the work of other BAs as it relates to a specific project.

Part of leading multiple business analysts also means mentoring the junior and mid-level business analysts in your organization. As a senior-level BA, you will be viewed as an expert on the process and best practices for conducting requirements practices in your organization.

#6 – Senior Business Analysts Can Be Consultants for Internal  Stakeholders

An internal business analyst consultant offers technology or process consulting services to a line of business.  Mark Jenkins as BA Manager at Websense enabled his analysts to take on consultant responsibilities. Each BA has a certain amount of their time dedicated to helping a set of business stakeholders diagnose problems and understand needs. They are responsible for maintaining a deep awareness of how a business operation works and helping the stakeholders explore technology possibilities to more effectively execute on their roles.

Here are some other examples:

• Stephanie Belhomme, a Salesforce Business Analyst Contractor, learned how to provide more strategic value to her clients.
• Andrea Wilson became the go-to business analyst, and operates as an internal business analyst consultant for her government agency.
• Dave Gallant became a better agile business analyst to create better user stories, by leveraging analysis tools.

>> Get Your Quick Start to Success as a Business Analyst

At Bridging the Gap, we help mid-career professionals build the foundational business analyst skills they need to thrive in a variety of business analyst roles.

If business analysis is a career that you want to pursue, the absolute best next thing to do is to join my free Quick Start to Success workshop. You’ll learn how to avoid the most common pitfalls faced by new business analysts and the step-by-step business analysis process to create predictable, consistent project success.

>> Click here to register for the free workshop today <<

Build Your Business Analyst Career Path

If you are thinking about a senior business analyst role, then you are going to want to watch this video on building a business analyst career path next.

Either way, it’s up to you to decide what your desired career path looks like, and take the steps required to make it happen. 

Business analyst careers don’t just happen. Most often they are the result of focused efforts. In this article, we’ll discuss what the BA career ladder looks like (so you can decide what “next” looks like for you), how to discover what your next step should be, and how to take action to move toward your career goals. 

The Business Analyst Success Path Helps You Find Your Next Step

One way to help see the opportunities – or clarify your next step – is through the Business Analyst Success Path. 

It’s a framework to help you create your own career path. 

• Explorer BA – You have discovered the profession of business analysis and are considering this as a career path. You haven’t yet made a clear decision to pursue a business analyst career. 
• Intentional BA – You have decided that yes, you want to be a business analyst. You start  discovering your transferable business analyst skills  and learning the  core foundational business analyst skills, and consciously  expanding your business analyst experience  by applying those skills on the job. You seek out your first official business analyst job opportunity. 
• Official BA – You are in a formal business analyst role, which may or may not have the  business analyst job title. The role gives you more leverage in terms of applying your business analyst skills and the security of being “seen” as a business analyst. 
• Proven BA – You have successfully implemented a few projects and gotten consistent results. You trust in your effectiveness as a business analyst and have leveraged a wide variety of  business analyst techniques, as well as been involved in the majority of the steps of the  business analysis process framework. You have experience to speak to in interviews, but your experience at this point may be limited to one domain or type of project. You can expand your confidence and career through  lateral career moves. 
• BA Super Hero – You get from Proven to Super Hero by working in new domains and types of projects. As you do this, you stretch your skills and rely more on your BA skills, and less on your subject matter or technical expertise. One great thing about being a Super Hero is that they have a lot of security. Everyone wants them on their projects. A common challenge is that because you are the go-to person, everyone wants you on their project, which can lead to overwhelm. 
• BA Champion – While the Super Hero is individually successful, the BA Champion is able to help others be successful. This can be through a variety of different roles, including BA leadership, mentoring, teaching, coaching, and management. At this stage, you may also be looking at setting up BA practices and improving how BA happens in your organization. 

Many Business Analyst Career Paths Involve Hybrid or Specialized Roles

One thing I want to note is that many business analysts are in hybrid roles, which means that they are doing business analysis + another role, like testing or project management. It’s also incredibly common to see business analyst roles requiring specialized skill sets, such as an area of expertise in an  industry domain like insurance or finance, business application like Salesforce or  ServiceNow, or specific methodology like  agile business analysis. 

While the core business analysis skills are always foundational to your success, these different varieties of business analyst roles also require specialized or additional skill sets. (To get a good understanding of those core skills, be sure to check out our absolutely free workshop –  Quick Start to Success as a Business Analyst.) 

Deciding to specialize has a big impact on your business analyst career path, as your career trajectory will be connected to the value of your specialization. But, again, your foundational business analyst skills will always enable you to succeed in different types of business analyst roles. 

There are many career paths into, within, and beyond business analysis. One common mistake I see business analysts make is to get stuck looking at external circumstances and chasing the latest trends without understanding what they actually want out of their careers. 

What Should Your Business Analyst Career Path Be?

The challenging part about building a business analyst career path is that there is no one path “up” for business analysts. Today’s analysts are often blazing career development trails that future business analysts might choose to follow. 

If there is no clear path, which way do you head? 

• First things first, focus on the  core business analyst skills  required for new and intermediate business analysts and solidify yourself as a solid contributor in the role. We can help you with this in The Business Analyst Blueprint® training program.
• Then determine where you are on The Business Analyst Success Path, and decide if the next stage on the success path defines where you want to go in your career. 
• Get clear on what you want out of your career. What’s important to you in terms of your salary, role, types of projects, work setting, etc? Go deep and explore all the opportunities available to you, in particular the many  senior-level business analyst roles. 
• Take action. Do one thing that moves your career forward today and sets you up for more success tomorrow. With that one action, you’ll learn a lot and be even better prepared for more actions in the future.  

>> Find Your Next Step – Join the Free Quick Start Workshop 

When you join our free workshop, Quick Start to Success as a Business Analyst, you’ll explore the exciting opportunities available to you as a business analyst and bust through the most common myths that hold so many back from success. You’ll discover more about The Business Analyst Success path, how to leverage the business analysis process framework to move your career forward, and address a variety of other common business analyst career questions.

Click here to receive the free workshop

I had scheduled an impromptu open coaching session with instructor Disha Trivedi on Working From Home as a Business Analyst on March 17, 2020, to help those unexpectedly finding themselves in remote business analyst jobs. I had scheduled this before I learned my own kids wouldn’t be in school that day and my world was about to turn upside down. It took all I had to follow through on my commitment to deliver that session.

Even though my business is online, my team works remotely, and I work from home anyway, it felt like everything had changed. My kids were home full time. We lost our support network. And my customers needed me more than ever.

Then there were external pressures to do more, be more, and help everyone. Remember that?

In those initial weeks, I focused on 4 key areas of my life:

• Taking care of myself: body, mind, and spirit.
• Taking care of my family, and creating a positive home life.
• Connecting with my team members to ensure they were doing OK.
• Taking care of my existing customers – those in the active session of The Business Analyst Blueprint®  certification program.

And that was all I had at first. I also chose one behind-the-scenes project that I could complete on my own time, in those precious work moments when I had focus. This project was designed to be big enough to keep me off the news, without being so big that it put me into overwhelm. That was completely redoing our Quick Start to Success Workshop – which is completely free, by the way.

Then in late April, I finally felt caught up. I finally felt taken care of. And I started to think I had something more to give. (There’s a lesson here…we all need to take care of ourselves before we can take care of others.)

I also felt the call to lead. The call to shift the stories we were hearing in the news. The call to find the silver lining in a tragic human experience. The call to help us all step forward, move forward, and lean into the situation at hand.

And that’s how this COVID response video series for business analysts was born. I started by asking you what you needed most. And as I expected, the answers were all over the map. Yes, we are all going through the same storm, but we are not in the same boat.

Over the last month, I’ve answered as many questions as I can in this video series, and done my best to re-frame the challenges of this time into opportunities. It’s been a lot and I’ve published more frequently than normal. It’s natural you might have missed a few of the videos…or not seen any of them. Heck, we’re going through a pandemic – time is very likely at a premium for you right now too. Never fear– I’ve got you covered with links to all the videos here below.

Part 1: What this Pandemic Shut Down Means for You and Your Business Analyst Career – this is the first video, recorded impromptu at the beach with my daughters, making the most of a bit of clarity and quiet time. What I really wanted to share in this video is that even though there are so many hardships, there are also so many new opportunities. This video set the tone for the series and invited input to help me serve you.

Part 2: The BA Essentials to be Focusing on Right Now – We look at why organizations need business analysts now more than ever, what are the essential skills to be focusing on, and I summarize the key challenges you told me you were facing.

Part 3: How to Focus When You Are Working from Home – Sharing 3 concrete strategies for staying focused on “heads down” work, and also why the events of the pandemic might be making it so hard to focus right now, and what you can learn from this experience.

Part 4: What Real Job Security Looks Like Right Now – What felt so certain a few months ago might feel anything but today, and this is a huge opportunity to see where the truth of our security lies.

Part 5: 3 Tips for Effective Remote Meetings – In particular, for business analysis eliciting requirements and conducting collaborative requirements sessions virtually.

Part 6: How to Articulate Your Transferable Business Analysis Skills Across Industries – Since so many are being laid off and furloughed, we look at how to change industries, sectors, or domains, especially if the bulk of your experience is in an area brought down by the pandemic.

Part 7: I Survived the Layoffs…Now What? – If you have survived a layoff, or even if you are dealing with increased organizational pressures to deliver more with less to survive these challenging times, you might find yourself grateful for the paycheck. But also overworked, overwhelmed, and probably feeling a bit guilty as well – to have a job when so many others don’t.

What’s Next?

I’m on the lookout for topics that need to be addressed, and we’re getting ready to re-open both our The Business Analyst Blueprint®  certification program. These programs open for limited windows of time each year, and they are the best ways to work with me personally to achieve your business analyst career goals.

They are online programs that have always been online. This means they were designed from the ground up to work within the constraints of any shelter-in-place orders your local area might have in place.

And one thing I know for sure…is that it’s in times like these that we need to reach out for support more than ever. We need to lean into our communities, lean into our skills, and continue to invest in ourselves. Because security does not come from outside circumstances. No one can give you security but you. Security comes from how we think, the actions we take, and our own commitment to ourselves.

I’ve been so grateful to be able to gift this series to the community, and I’m excited to help those of you who are ready to take the next step with me.

Let’s do this together!

In the meantime, please leave me a comment below. What was your biggest takeaway from the series? Which video did you feel called to share with your colleagues? 

If you have survived a layoff, or even if you are dealing with increased organizational pressures to deliver more with less to survive these challenging times, you might find yourself grateful for the paycheck.

But also overworked, overwhelmed, and probably feeling a bit guilty as well – to have a job when so many others don’t.

That’s what this video is all about.

To learn more about the essential business analysis skills, be sure to check out our Quick Start to Success workshop – it’s absolutely free today.

>> Click here to sign up for the workshop <<

This is actually a huge opportunity to see the truth of where our security lies, and that’s what today’s video is about.

To learn more about the BA role and what the business analysis process looks like, be sure to check out our Quick Start to Success workshop – it’s absolutely free today.

>> Click here to sign up for the workshop <<

To learn more about the BA role and what the business analysis process looks like, be sure to check out our Quick Start to Success workshop – it’s absolutely free today.

>> Click here to sign up for the workshop <<

In this video, I share the key business analysis essentials you need to be focusing on right now, and I also take a look at some of the challenges being faced in our community.

A few key points:

• Organizations need business analysts now more than ever.
• It might not seem this way – your employer might be asking you to do something that doesn’t look like BA work on the surface, but your business analyst skills are still needed.
• While we are all in this together, and we’re going to get through this together. Each of our individual experiences is different. The challenges raised by our community reflected this.
• Challenges that we’ll be addressing in the upcoming video series include working from home, managing your time/energy, and looking for new job opportunities.
• Many challenges like how to switch to a business analyst role, how to add value right now, and what skills will be relevant coming out of the COVID-19 world are addressed in the Quick Start to Success workshop.
• On the skills, 80-90% of the skills that are ESSENTIAL to being successful as a business analyst will be the same foundational skills. And we cover what those are in this free workshop.
• It’s so critically important to our collective mindset right now to understand the above point. Yes, this is an uncertain time. And yes the context in which we work might be changing. But the foundational BA skills you need to succeed are the same. Again, we cover those in the Quick Start to Success workshop.
• When we lose our bearings in our foundations, the uncertainty creates fear. Then instead of leaning into the challenges to create opportunities, we retract.
• Now is the time to lean into your BA skillset.

What to do next:

• Sign up for the free Quick Start to Success workshop.
• Leave a comment below to let us know what BA skill you’ve applied to add value to your organization right now. This is how we can come together as a profession and lift each other up.
• Share this video with your friends, colleagues, and professional contacts. You never know who needs to hear this message right now, and we are all in this together.

We build our profession one business analyst at a time, and success starts with you.

I’m going to be recording a new video series over the next few weeks to help you turn challenges into opportunities. Please leave me a comment below letting me know what challenges are coming up for you right now. And then share this video with a friend or colleague who needs to hear this message.

This can bring up a lot of fear and uncertainty in an already uncertain time.

I, along with Disha Trivedi, a senior business analyst and Bridging the Gap instructor who has worked from home for the last few years, hosted a complimentary coaching session. You can catch the replay below – and be sure to scan down for a summary of tips and resources.

Working From Home – Challenge or Opportunity?

While working from home is a new challenge for many of us, in every challenge lies an opportunity. We have to be willing to step away from the fear, worry, doubt and open ourselves up to the opportunities all around us.

For example, this situation could shift the needle a bit and help organizations embrace the effectiveness of remote work so it becomes more standard practice.

As BAs, we have a great opportunity here to step up as leaders. To show how we can work effectively remotely. To be the glue that teams absolutely need to stick together in this challenging time.

Business analysis as a practice is more important than ever. Our businesses will be making significant changes over the coming weeks and months to respond to these events. The businesses that adjust will survive – and some will even thrive. How can we help our organizations capitalize on opportunities?

Finally, cultivate a sense of gratitude. So many have jobs where working from home is impossible, and are either suffering financially or risking exposure for themselves and their families. We have an incredible privilege to be given the opportunity to continue with “business as usual” from the safety of our homes.

Working from Home – Set Yourself Up for Success

Your Workspace

Your physical work space will help you focus and be productive.

• Separate desk space.
• Monitor and docking station.
• Comfortable chair.
• Headset for conference calls/video sessions.

While in long-term work-from-home situations, it would be natural to expect organizations to cover the additional costs of working from home, it’s important to give our employers some grace right now as events unfold and they figure out how to best support their employers through these new challenges.

Work Hours & Breaks

Decide in advance what hours you will work and when you will take breaks. Since you’ll be at home, consider what will serve you and your productivity best. Are there opportunities to start early and take a longer mid-day break for a workout, shower, and lunch?

Support

What support do you need from your family? Your team?

Connectivity

Is your connectivity adequate for screen sharing and video conferencing? If you do not have high-speed internet, now is a great time to see if you can upgrade. Your employer may cover this expense.

VPN connections can slow down connectivity. Explore what you can do (within company policies) outside the VPN.

Have your Outlook web access link handy, so you can access email even if the VPN goes down, and a list of important phone numbers so you can reach out for support with any connectivity issues.

A hot spot on your phone is also a great back-up.

Priorities

Ask and confirm your organization’s priorities. Likely a lot has shifted. So check in now about this. And again later in the week, and then next week. Things are moving so fast, and organizations are trying to respond the best they can. Checking in to ensure that you are working on what’s most important is key.

Our Project Prioritization Organizer template toolkit will help you identify, sort, and create buy-in on organizational priorities.

Also incorporate your personal priorities for the day, and realize that your priorities may shift from day to day.

What if your kids are at home?

While working from home while caring for your children will impact your work time (there is no way around it), we’ve found these strategies help us stay focused and productive.

• Collaborate with your partner to be clear is who in charge at various times. We like to make day-to-day decisions based on the times we have calls.
• Set your kids up with activities (like new craft projects) while you do less focused activities (like catching up on email).
• Allow yourself grace when it comes to technology/shows. The normal standards might need to bend a little.
• Incorporate kids into activities they can be part of – like workouts and meal prep. Involve older kids in chores.
• And be OK with the fact that your kids might show up on a video conference or interrupt you in a meeting. Everyone is working home with kiddos. Expect your employer to show some compassion to the situation.

Working From Home: Practical Virtual Communication Strategies

Be proactive

This situation is new to everyone. Reach out over waiting to be reached out too. Teammates, management, stakeholders. Aim for 1-1 connections too.

Set expectations for meetings

Are people expected to share video? Then be clear about that in your meeting request.

At the beginning of the meeting, go over the meeting agenda and let them know what to expect and how you want them to engage.

To increase engagement, plan in aspects of the meeting where you individually call on each person for their input – let them know in advance you’ll do this.

Identify the specific questions you have to cover in your meeting, and use these to keep the meeting flowing and gain more valuable input.

Our Requirements Discovery Checklist Pack can help you identify more questions to ask and ensure a more complete view of the requirements.

Use visuals and demos

Prepare visuals that you can share in meetings. Not sure what visual models to create? Here are 22 Visual Models Used By Business Analysts.

Ideally, you’ll share your visual models using screen sharing technology, but visuals can also be sent out via email in advance if connectivity is a problem.

Some screen sharing and collaboration tools:

• WebEx
• GoToMeeting
• Zoom
• Skype
• FreeConferenceCall

For collaborative visuals:

• Microsoft Whiteboard
• Microsoft OneNote (screen share, and then use the draw functions)
• Visio (with screen sharing)
• Zoom whiteboard function

Our Visual Model Sample Pack is an excellent resource of additional visual models to be incorporating into your discovery, analysis, and validation processes.

Active listening

Reading body language is much harder virtually, even if you are on video. Active listening reflects back what you’ve understood. Asking each person to contribute something, even if just to verbally say “no additional comments” gives you a confirmation of where people are at on a topic.

Regular communication

Communicate more regularly than normal Be thinking about daily status reports and daily check-ins with key team members. Some participants are doing daily stand-ups to stay connected and informed. Some teams keep chat open during the day and share personal updates as well. One person reported her CFO set-up a text chat group so people could keep up with each other.

Our Email Communication Templates are designed to help you increase your effectiveness and handle common BA work scenarios.

Here are some of the chat tools participants mentioned using:

• MS Team
• Skype for Business
• Google Hangout
• RocketChat
• Jabber
• WhatsApp
• Slack

Here are 10 Ways to Communicate More Effectively as a Business Analyst.

Working From Home: Protecting Your Mindset

Mindset is so important. Stress increases cortisol in your body and weakens immunity. If you want to protect your health, yes eat your vegetables and take your vitamins, get fresh air and sunshine. But also protect your mindset.

Take a few minutes right now – yes, RIGHT NOW – and take a few deep breaths. Feel the weight of your body on your chair or your feet on the floor. Feel how supported you are. Allow your weight to sink down into the floor or chair.

Now take a few conscious breaths in and out through the nose. Breathing in and out through your nose signals safety to your brain. This is a free exercise you can do anytime to help reduce yourself and increase your sense of safety.

Let’s look at some additional mindset strategies.

Focus on what you can control

You can control how you show up, the structures you create, what you learn. You can’t control how others show up. You can’t control the decisions your organization makes. You can control the government or what your neighbors do, but you can choose how you respond and react.

Focus on the VALUE you create

Focus on the value you create as a business analyst, not the hours you put in. There is this concept we talk about in Circle of Success called “Einstein Time,” where time literally shows up for you. Allow this to happen. It may show up in the form of a colleague sending you exactly what you need to get started, a bit of input that leapfrogs you ahead on a task, a template that gets you 50% there, or a stressful task getting erased from your to-do list.

When we release the stress about time and work from the belief that there is more than enough time for everything, often what we must get done has a way of flowing seamlessly.

You don’t have to believe me, just give the belief a try and see what happens. Post your results to celebrate!

Limit negative news

This is essential. Be informed – yes. But once you are informed the news is just one big cycle on repeat, so listen once if you have to and then turn it off. The news creates a pattern of scarcity in your mind that tears you down.

Embrace a leadership role

An attitude of service helps us overcome scarcity thinking, and keeps us in an abundance mindset. Everyone here has something to give. People are craving positive examples now more than ever.

Your organization needs you to step up.

Invest Your Time Intentionally

Invest your time consciously. If you are home alone, what book could you read, online training course could you take, or closet declutter? Connect with your partner in a deeper way? Time with your children can also be an incredible investment. This flips your mindset around from kids “taking away” from work time.

Also, be sure to re-purpose your commute time in a way that serves your best and highest good.

Bonus points – consider a meditation practice.

Working From Home – You’ve Got This

Just remember…in every challenge, there is an opportunity. You are a problem-solving agent of change and your organization needs you now more than ever. When we keep ourselves focused on results, embrace the challenge, and give our best selves, you, your organization, and the business analysis profession will emerge stronger than ever.

If your colleagues or contacts could benefit from this resource, please share this link with them. We are better together.

Resources to Help You More Effectively Work From Home

In the live session, I was asked to share more templates and techniques that are relevant when working from home. We offer 5 collections of Business Analyst Templates at Bridging the Gap, and all of them are relevant for remote business analysis work.

• The Business Analyst Template Toolkit will help you save time with simple, streamlined documents that help you gain essential buy-in on projects.
• The Email Communication Template will help you more effectively set expectations, get information, request input, and manage issues with copy-and-paste templates you can use for email or tweak for chat or phone communications.
• The Visual Model Sample Pack will help you more easily incorporate more visuals into your requirements process, which is a more effective way to gain buy-in when requirements gathering remotely.
• The Requirements Discovery Checklist Pack will help you identify new questions to ask, and keep the conversation flowing in virtual meetings.
• The Project Prioritization Organizer will help you gain buy-in on clear organizational priorities, which have likely shifted as your organization figures out how to respond to new challenges and opportunities in our current environment.

What’s more, you can save and get all 5 template toolkits at a discount, with our Bridging the Gap Template Bundle.

Here are 2 quick questions that will help you get more clarity about what your next step looks like.

Here’s a quick way to flip the reasons why you think you can’t achieve your dream and bake them right into your goal – so you consciously build a life you really, truly want.

The post A simple flip to help you achieve your dreams first appeared on Bridging the Gap.]]> https://www.bridging-the-gap.com/building-confidence/ Wed, 27 Mar 2019 09:00:15 +0000 http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/?p=10379 Confidence is a belief – it is a belief in yourself and your ability to achieve a specific result in your life and your career. In my work helping business analysts, I see a lot […]

Penny has graciously allowed me to share the recording and full transcript of our interview. 

Or, for those who like to read instead of listen, here’s the full text of the interview: 

Penny: Welcome to day three of the Business Analysis Summit 2019. I’m Penny Pullan of Making Projects Work, Ltd, your host for these calls in the BA summit. If you’d like to see who all the speakers are and their topics, then do have a look at basummit.com. 

Today, I’m absolutely delighted to have Laura Brandenburg on the line for an interview! She’s talking on the subject of Innovation and Learning: Leveraging the Real World in Training to Create Success. Laura, who is a Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP®), is an internationally recognized leader. She’s known for helping mid-career professionals start their business analysis careers. She’s the creator of Bridging the Gap, and also the best selling author of How to Start a Business Analyst Career. 

I’ve known Laura for a long time. In fact, this is the third BA summit that she’s spoken on! She spoke in the very, very first one in 2010, and then again in 2017, and both of those were very well received. Here’s a little bit about Laura: She has lots of experience in the business analysis profession. She has filled roles such as being a full-time business analyst, consultant, and hiring manager. She’s now spent a whole decade providing online business analyst training. 

The reason why I’ve asked Laura to speak at the summit, is of course because she’s very good, but I was particularly interested in the fact that she has created an innovative learning model, which involves online instruction, concrete real-world exercises that people do at work and individual instructor support. This helps new and transitioning professionals to really build their confidence, their competence, and their experience, thereby achieving their career goals more quickly. 

I met Laura again for dinner at the Building Business Capability Conference, which ran in Texas last year in November. I really enjoyed hearing about what she’s doing and how well it’s working for individuals. I asked her there and then to speak at this innovation-focused summit about her innovative learning model. Welcome, Laura! 

Laura: Well, thank you so much, Penny, with that warm introduction! I’m honored to be here, and I’m grateful to you for hosting the summit as a huge give-back to the community and enabling us to share resources with business analysts all around the world. In particular, I’m really grateful about this topic because the learning model at Bridging the Gap is really close to my heart. 

It’s been a work of passion and of purpose, and yet, it’s so different that it can be really misunderstood. So it’s going to be a fun time to just talk about it further and how BAs everywhere can apply the principles that we’ve developed and enhance their own careers, I think, more quickly and easily, as you highlighted. 

Penny: That sounds brilliant! Passion and purpose … Well, I think that’s what’s behind me running this summit. Why else would I be sending so many emails to so many people all around the world, getting all the tech stuff organized, and coming up with new speakers each time? It really is, for me, about passion and purpose. I think I sense the same thing in you with wanting to help people transition and using this innovative way of doing it. 

Laura, I know people are interested in developing themselves, and that’s probably especially true of people who make the effort to join the summit. I’m sure they’re looking forward to your answers, and also your ideas and thinking about how they can apply them to their own situation. I’m so pleased you could join us again. 

Laura: Yes, and I’m excited to be here. Thank you. 

Penny: Let’s get going. Where do we start? Could you give us a bit of an overview before we dive into the questions? 

Laura: For sure. One way to rope this into innovation specifically… I know digital transformation is a bit of a buzzword now in business analysis. When we’re going through a digital transformation, it’s tempting to put all of our offline processes as they are online – just take it and move it over. 

Penny: Arggghh! 

Laura: Yes! We know there’s an opportunity to completely rethink what you offer in an online or digital space because there are limitations of the online space compared to an offline in-person space, but there’s also opportunities, particularly in what you can do with time and duration and connection of people across the world. 

When I started developing learning at Bridging the Gap, I knew I wanted to be online. It was a learning model that was built to be online from the ground-up versus, “How do I take an offline model that is working and move it online?” Right? I think that’s a piece to think about as you’re thinking about innovation, like, “How are you building something and what is the purpose that you’re building it for?” 

Part of it is, to be honest, I personally wanted the flexibility to work from anywhere and to serve people around the world without being on a plane and traveling all over the world. It came from what I wanted personally, but also out of a desire to really help people do what I was seeing as the gap at that time, which was they have this skill, they have the training, but they didn’t have the experience. 

When you think about how to get started as a business analyst, there’s always this problem of, “How do I get the experience without the role and nobody will hire me into the role without the experience?” I’m trying to solve that problem for the people in the community. Would this be a good time to share a brief overview of our model and then we can dive into questions? 

Penny: Yes, please give us an overview. Then we’ll ask questions afterwards. 

Laura: I wanted to set the context of the goal of what I was trying to solve, like the problem. The model, that was created out of my own personal desire and this problem I saw in the profession, was a mix of on-demand course materials. This includes videos that you can watch any time, any place, and then specific assignments to apply what you’re learning on your own real-world projects. How do you apply that? Because so often when we’re thinking about learning and training, and a lot of the questions, we’ll dive into this more deeply, but it’s like it’s not really cemented in until you have done it yourself. 

Then the third piece of that is instructor access. You’ve done it yourself, but do you really have the confidence that you got it right? So having some sort of a review and audit process or opportunity to ask questions. We see the actual coaching and the adjustments that you need to make. So those are the three pieces that I feel like are critical in the model. The online environment allows us to do that in a really powerful way that is difficult in an in-person setting. 

Penny: Yes, it’s very different. I can see that some elements of those would be present in other offerings, on-demand course materials, perhaps? But then they’d be missing the instructor access if you’re using Linked-In Learning or whatever. You’ve got those three things, course materials on demand, the specific assignments people can use, and then instructors who are just wanting to see answers to standard case studies, but are flexible enough to be able to work with each individual’s own work situation. 

Laura: Sometimes it’s that mindset shift. People will think, “Well, I don’t have the opportunity to analyze the process. Can you just give me an example?” It’s in the challenge of finding the process that they actually get to step into that role of being a business analyst and of being it now, rather than waiting for it to come later. 

Penny: How interesting. Yes, it’s a mindset thing as much as anything else. 

Laura: Exactly. That the opportunity is here and it is here now, and I just need to shift my thinking to find it! 

Penny: Oh, I love that. Should we get going on these questions, then, that have come in? 

Laura: That sounds perfect. Yes. 

Penny: The first one comes from David in the UK. He says, “How did you get your start in business analysis?” 

Laura: I love sharing my story! Like so many, I fell into the business analyst role and I was just in the right place at the right time. I happened to be walking down the hall, and this woman said, “There’s a role opening up on our team, and it’s called Systems Analysis, and I really think you should apply.” 

For a while, I just thought I happened to be at the right hallway at the right time, which is ridiculous when you think about it, but at that time I was in a quality assurance role, and I had been doing some business analysis already, so I had created essentially a new area of testing that no one else was doing. I created a process around that, and part of that involved engaging editorial staff or what we would call now a Business Subject Matter Expert. They didn’t use that term. I didn’t know anything about User Acceptance Testing (UAT), but that’s what I was doing. 

I had been doing these slices of business analysis in that QA role. That was recognized and that’s why I was asked to apply for that position. Then in that position, I think I was really lucky to have that same person be my mentor. I started by drafting documents on her projects, and then I got my own project, and she reviewed some of my early work as well. Part of my getting my start was doing the role before I was in the role, and then having that network of support as I did that role as well. Yeah. 

Penny: Super! We’ve got a couple of questions from people who are interested in becoming professional business analysts. That question came from Aranprakash in India. There’s also Sarath from the USA who’s got 18 years of experience in a related area, but hasn’t worked in business analysis and is interested in pursuing and growing his career in business analysis. Also, Rae in the UK says, “What do you feel is good advice for a menial worker”, oh dear, “who wants to be a business analyst one day?” Perhaps take all of them together? 

Laura: That’s where looking for opportunities today to start applying business analysis skills. Right? I think we start and say, “I’m not a business analyst. How do I get to that role?” and think it’s this magical step that at some point it just happens all at once. For most people who are in the role today, it happened as a matter of degree, and it happened one bit at a time. 

You can consciously start that wherever you’re at, by thinking about how to show up as a business analyst in your current work. When you think about how to become a professional business analyst, look at your current role. What are you doing today? What aspects are most like business analysis, and then start to apply some more formal skills or some industry standard practices to make that area more disciplined, structured and formal. 

When you feel like you’re not a business analyst… I know Sarath is a client engagement manager, so there’s of much of what you’re doing there that is: you’re connecting with stakeholders, I would imagine? You’re interviewing? All of those things are very similar to discovering, and eliciting requirements. Look at how to apply your BA practices there. Just start doing it now in the role you’re in. 

It’s a little more challenging when you feel like you’re in a “menial” job. But you can still have opportunities. You’re communicating with people. The very first thing I often recommend people do is just: how can you analyze a business process? What business process are you doing in your work, and could you put a process document together around it? Could you start suggesting improvements to your manager around it, or just making improvements in how you do that work? That’s how you start to get noticed and elevate yourself into this role. 

Penny: We’re going to head to Slovakia next, for the question from Zdena, whose question is, “What are the most effective ways to keep up to date with new BA practices?” 

Laura: I think you’re doing a great step by being at a conference like this. This is part of the reason Penny offers this great service! In the context of the learning model, I think you just need to look at … There’s one thing of being the information junkie. Like always reading all the articles, always being up to date on what’s going on. There’s another level to be filling your toolbox and to say, “I know about this new technique called an ERD”. (Not that that’s a new technique, but new-to-me technique.) “I just learned about that. How can I take that and actually apply it on a project?” 

Just looking at each project, each assignment, every opportunity, you have to experiment with something new. You’re always expanding the container that you’re in. You’re always pushing the boundaries on your role and becoming better, both in the work you do and the potential you have for other work. You don’t want to just learn about new processes, as part of truly being up to date. You want to be ready to apply them in your job right away, and so it’s up to you to really come up with those opportunities, to be applying them on your projects. 

Penny: Absolutely. Thank you for that. We’re heading to the UK for the next question. It’s Michelle who says, “My question for Laura is, how can we get BAs to shift that focus from training to learning? These days, business analysts are spoiled for choice with the learning opportunities and development resources available to us, but somehow we seem to think, if we’re not sitting in a classroom, it doesn’t count. What can we do to shift our mindset?” 

Laura: Yes, I love this question because this is really the core question to the innovation that we’re talking about here. I would really take it a step further from learning to doing. I think that’s the shift of how you convince others that it’s not just about being in a classroom, right? Because that’s what I took out of this question. 

Somebody doesn’t feel like it counts, if I wasn’t sitting in a classroom. What you want to do is actually be able to show that you actually did something as the result of your learning. This is why we do the real-world examples because you can be in a project in your work and actually have improved a process or tried a new technique and had a meaningful impact on that project right away, so before you even leave the training programme, you delivered ROI to your employer. 

When you shift that to that, then it’s not like it was a perceived value, because you sat there for eight hours. It was a perceived value because you actually got something done and it was an improvement over the work that you were doing before. It’s interesting because I was having a conversation with someone who does primarily in-person training and is shifting more to online, and she was talking about how, even in an in-person environment, there are a few people who are really engaged. There’s the majority of people who are going to take something away from a training programme. Then there’s that handful of people who sit in the back of the room are just there because they’re forced to be there. I think no matter what environment you have, there’s always that potential to just be in the state of, “I’m here for the training, but I’m really not learning.” That’s really a personal choice, and you can demonstrate that with your results. 

Penny: Wow! There’s a related question from Dorit in the UK. “I’m wondering if an increasing disconnect between training and application can lead to an attitude of learning to pass the exam rather than learning to gain and apply knowledge?” She’s really looking forward to the summit, she says. 

Laura: Yes, yes! I have a lot of respect for exam preparation and the resources because tackling the exams in our profession is not an inconsequential thing. Most of us haven’t taken tests for decades. Even if we were good test takers in school, test-taking is a skill, and if you haven’t done it in a while, you need that support to learn how to pass the exam. But there really is a disconnect between the learning you need to do to pass an exam and the application. 

I do think what you’re seeing … I would just validate that. It’s a different kind of training. Often, we’ll have people come in through a programme like ours to really feel confident in the skills to look at “How can you build your skills first? But what gap do I need to fill based on my ability to pass tests and handle an exam environment, and to assimilate this knowledge in an exam-ready way, and how do I fill that gap to be successful in the certification process?” So think about it, I think, in a couple different stages. 

Penny: The next question we’re going to go to is all the way from Mexico. Nallely asks, “Which BA perspective from BABOK is more useful in your career, e.g., agile, business intelligence, architecture etc.” There’s another related question from Vinay in Singapore. “What are the new skills that as a senior BA I should learn to progress to the next level?” 

Laura: Yes. This is an interesting question because all three of the skills that were in the first question are applicable from a senior BA perspective. They are ways that you would specialize and potentially advance your careers. 

Penny: I was just going to say agile, business intelligence and architecture as well. 

Laura: Right. In addition to potentially more of a leadership role, or more of a requirement management process-focused role, running a community of practice in addition to really being able to handle, say, higher level projects and more of an enterprise or strategy analysis role would become other areas to focus on as a senior BA. 

In terms of what’s actually more useful in your career … Like all of those specialties have really great potential career-wise, right? It’s not like you can choose one and you’re guaranteed success. It’s really what is most interesting to you. What is the one that inspires you that you want to learn more about, that you are maybe doing already and find enjoyable? Because the more you enjoy that and find it personally fulfilling, the easier it will be for you to advance within it. 

If you choose one of these, like, “Everybody says I’ve got to be …” I see this all the time. “Everybody says I need to learn health insurance or a specific tool,” and then you absolutely don’t like the work, it won’t work for you to move your career forward in that capacity! The variety we see in the BA profession, there’s so many opportunities, and it is very fragmented, and there are different threads, so choose the ones that you’re most excited about. Double check that it has applicability in your local area. I don’t think there’s really a wrong choice there as long as you enjoy it. 

Penny: Super. Arthi in the USA says, “What’s your word for aspiring BAs?” 

Laura: I love this question. I do call them aspiring business analysts, but what I would encourage you to think about is to just drop that word ‘aspiring’, because this is the mindset shift that we’ve talked about. If your desire is to become a business analyst, how can you choose to be a business analyst today? 

Sometimes it really does start with giving yourself that title and anchoring that in, in a specific way, choosing to show up as a business analyst in your work no matter what your title is, instead of choosing to wait for somebody else to give that title to you. I think you’ll find that title will come to you more quickly if you just say, “I’m not an aspiring BA. I’m a business analyst. I’m just waiting for the right opportunity to have that title.” Right? 

Penny: Brilliant! 

Laura: … and showing up in that space. 

Penny: We’ve had a question that came in at the last minute from John in the UK. He says, “Projects often use a ‘lessons learned’ activity to inform approaches to similar pieces of work. Business analysts should be included in that (although how much it’s shared across the BA team can be an issue). The real question is: Do you think real value can be gained from learning more about the wider business and the relationship between different areas so that they understand the context and the impact of any work that they’re doing?” John adds, “For what it’s worth, I think my standing as a BA is because people know I understand the wider business and can quickly flag up potential impacts and stakeholders.” 

Laura: Yes. I think there’s huge value there. There are two pieces of the question: understanding the wider business and applying lessons learned across projects. As we see people move forward in the profession and they move up, like one of the senior-level roles that people move into is that strategy enterprise level role that we talked about. They are talking about it at BBC, too. It’s not like one day you wake up and you’re in that role. It is an evolutionary process, and it starts by excelling in your basic business analyst role to start, and then getting assigned across different projects and always seeking to expand your knowledge and awareness across your organization. So it’s the same learning and same process we talked about to get into a business analyst role as it is to get from a business analyst role to a strategic role. It’s that constant evolutionary expansion. 

This question just lends itself to saying that as a business analyst, you’re always learning. You’re learning about the company, you’re learning about the skills. When something goes wrong on a project, you’re learning why it went wrong. You can share that with your team. Learning through training is important, and obviously, we do train. I love and support that, but it’s not like you have to be … Learning doesn’t only come through training. Learning comes through the mindset of always seeking to ask why, find out why, and incorporate what comes of that into your ongoing work and to share that within your team and your company as well. We are a learning profession, and that’s the mindset we have to have. 

Penny: Absolutely. 

Laura: Yeah. 

Penny: On that note, Laura, I think we’ve got to come to the end. We could carry on for hours, but we’re getting a to the end of our time. Thank you very much for taking part in the summit. I’m sure everyone listening in today and people replaying later will find it really invaluable. You’ve given us so much to think about, and there are some things we can start working on straight away. Could you tell us a little bit more about your services to BAs? You have so many different activities, books, and so on. Over to you. 

Laura: Well, thank you for that opportunity! It’s probably quite obvious now that I have a passion for training, right? We offer a variety of on-demand online training programs at Bridging the Gap. We cover core skills, like business process analysis, wireframes and data modeling as well as the essential BA process. All of those are skill-building courses, that also will earn you the credits you need for certification or re-certification. 

Then, twice a year, we run our live interactive sessions of The Business Analyst Blueprint®, and the next one is starting up in February. It’s a great opportunity if you want to check that out. 

Penny: I was just going to say, if people are interested in The Business Analyst Blueprint®, how can they get on the list to find out about it, because I knew you only release it at certain times of the year? 

Laura: Correct. When you go to Bridging the Gap and to go the training tab on Bridging the Gap, there’s a link there with The Business Analyst Blueprint®, and if it’s open for registration, you’ll get the full details. If not, we have an interest list, so you can always join to get on the interest list, and then we’ll let you know in the next session. 

Penny: Super. Thank you. We could carry on chatting for ages, but we can’t. Okay. I think that’s … but you haven’t mentioned your books, though, Laura! 

Laura: Right, right. My book is a great starting point. It’s available on Amazon and our website, pretty much anywhere eBooks are sold, as well as a print copy on Amazon. It’s called, How to Start a Business Analyst Career, and it’s really a guidebook. Then on our website, we also have just a free training. It’s a three-part video training called the Quick Start for Success as a Business Analyst. It talks more about what success looks like as a business analyst, what are the skills you’d need, how to create that career plan and get yourself set up for more success. 

Penny: Thank you very much, Laura. Thank you, too, for everyone listening right through to the end. If you’ve had to miss any sessions or you’d like to listen again another time, or you’d like to read the transcript, then you can upgrade to gain permanent access to all the sessions in the summit by getting your all-access pass to do so. Go to basummit.com/upgrade. Until next time, all the best. 

I finally had a chance to capture a few reflections on the experience, and some of the positive anchors I put in place to help keep my mindset positive during this difficult time. I am sharing them here with you, because I believe they will help you get to the next level in your business analyst career.

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

My name is Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the Gap, and we help mid-career professionals start business analyst careers. I have a personal story to share with you today that really has a lesson in it that’s relevant for how you approach your business analyst career, and your goals, in particular.

Back in September 2018, our family was significantly impacted by Hurricane Florence. We evacuated for nine days, and there were points in time, especially before we left, that it looked like a Category 4 hurricane.

It was going to have a direct hit on the area in which we live. Our house, our home. We just bought this last year, and we love it here. We love being on the ocean.

There are two things I did that seemed a little quirky from the outside but were very inspiring to people in my community. I want to share them with you and have you think about how you could apply them for your own goal.

Of course, we wanted to come back to our home, to our community, to everything being fine, but we knew we had to leave. When the hurricane comes, it’s coming, and it’s slow, and it’s painful.

The first thing I did, before we knew whether it was going to hit or not hit and where it was going to be, the weekend before – before there was a big run to the stores. I went to the stores to stock up on canned goods in case we were going to be here and be out of power for a while or potentially be out of power for a while, and water. Just get all of those essential supplies.

This was Sunday. I walked past the flowers, and I bought the flowers. It was a ridiculous thing because we ended up evacuating on Tuesday, and things were looking like we might evacuate or we might not. There was every reason not to spend five or ten dollars on flowers. “We might not even be here to enjoy them.” I bought the flowers. It lightened up our house. When they covered up our windows the next day, the flowers were a bright spot in our house, and it raises your vibration.

What is the beautiful thing you can bring into your life that sets the tone? Is it a vibrant top? This is one of my more vibrant tops. It’s perfect to be wearing today. Is it a piece of jewelry? Is it the flowers? Is it a stone? Is it painting your walls a color? A touchstone? Something that adds more beauty and joy to your life that just lifts you up. The way that that brought more color and joy to our lives just added this flavor. “This is a hard time, but we can celebrate the good, as well.” That’s the first touchstone I have for you.

The second one is as we left, I was packing up the wine cooler because we were still evacuating where we might lose power. We’ve got to have supplies, so I was packing up things like that. I consciously left a bottle of champagne in the wine cooler. “This is what we’re going to drink when we come home and get to celebrate returning to our house.” I posted about this on Facebook.

I posted it with two things. First, I posted a picture of our house and the champagne in the wine cooler and that I had anchored that in, and we left it. It’s an anchor to me. It’s something to visualize besides the pictures of the hurricane coming. “I’ve got that bottle of champagne in the wine cooler, and we’re going home to that.”

It also become this touchstone for everyone in my online community to believe in us because I had people asking me, “Laura, when do you get to go back and drink that bottle of champagne?” and my mom telling me, “Laura, these people are so excited, and they’re so into that bottle of champagne.” It became a touchstone for me. It also became a touchstone for a lot of people, but beyond me, and helping see me coming back to our home.

When we talk about career goals – because it’s the same process whether you’re trying to manifest coming home to your house or to achieving a goal in your personal or your business life. If you have a job title you want to have, start talking about yourself as, “Hey, I’m a business analyst, and this is what I do.” If you have a responsibility you want to hold, “Hey, I do this.” It’s about anchoring in where you want to be instead of where you are because where I was at that time was, “My house is going to fall down to the ground. I better take that champagne with me.”

That was the negative thought that spun through my head. The positive reframe, the choice I made was, “I’m going to leave it here because I’m coming back for it.” How can you take that flip? That flip of your current reality, that current negative thought, the, “Nobody’s going to hire me as a business analyst because…” and go, “No. They’re going to hire me as a business analyst.” Where could you anchor that in? Where could you put that touchstone in place so that you’re seeing it again and again and again. Then, how could you share it with other people so they start to see it for you and they start to believe in you?

There were times I needed people believing in me more than I believed in myself. I needed people seeing that space for me, so having that touchstone out there and having people see it for me and communicate with me and ask about it helped bring me back to that positive space I had cultivated in that random couple of moments as we were rushing out the door.

Those are our anchors. Those are how our touchstones can pull us forward and help us achieve the goal. I hope you take something. This is a little bit of Laura’s “woo woo” side, but take something from this. Something big that’s in your life, something that you really want, something that feels not-here-yet. How can you anchor it in? How can you feel like you’re already there?

What piece can you celebrate now? What anchor can you put? What bottle of champagne can go in your fridge with the tag on it, “For the day I get that XYZ job, or that XYZ responsibility, or host this new and improved stakeholder meeting, or speak up in a meeting in a way I didn’t think I could.”

Celebrating those when they happen and preparing to celebrate them in advance so that you’re telling yourself: they’re important to you. You’re sending a sign for others, too, that they’re important to you. That’s what creates new opportunities.

Again, I hope you have a takeaway. I’d love to hear how this lands with you. Go ahead and leave me a comment below of how you’re manifesting your goal.

My name is Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the Gap, and we mid-career professionals start business analyst careers.

Tell me where you are at in your career by leaving a comment below, and let me know what the challenge is and I’ll do my best to help you out!

(This is the kind of advice that is typically reserved for participants in our programs, so I encourage you to take advantage of it by leaving a comment here or throughout social media!)

And there’s more! To celebrate 10 years, we’re offering 10% off all of our on-demand courses and template toolkits starting now through October 31, 2018. Just use the coupon code BTG10 to receive 10% off.

And, we’re even doubling our savings for teams of 3+ course participants to 20% throughout October as well. Email us at info [at] bridging-the-gap [dot] com to request your custom quote for BA team training.

What is that one thing? Watch the video (or read the transcript) to find out!

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

I’m Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the Gap, and I see a lot of people get spun out about what’s happening in the profession, what’s happening in the industry, and what’s happening outside organizations in their careers.

Agile is coming, or this change is coming, or it’s a service delivery, or it’s this, or this, or this. There’s some new methodology, some new change, some new organizational initiative. These things happen every year in most organizations. There’s some new buzzword – digital transformation is a big one right now.

What does that mean for business analysts? There are way more opportunities to do business analysis. There’s no way to do digital transformation without business analysis. That’s exciting. That’s what it means. All of these changes, change needs business analysis, change means they need us now more than ever.

How do you let go of the noise and the spin out? What does my role look like as this change is happening? How do you deal with organizational change in a way that moves your career forward?

This is my thought on this. Your business analysis skills, the skills you build to do business analysis, solving the right problem, analyzing processes, improving processes, possibly even the software requirements, getting everyone on the same page about the software requirements, understanding how information flows for your business, and getting business and technology on the same page about decisions about software that eventually solve those business problems.

This is what you do. This is what you know how to do. This is your skill set. That skill set is valuable in multiple different roles. Not all of those roles have the job title of business analyst. A lot of them actually don’t. I would say the vast majority of people doing business analysis don’t have the business analyst job title.

I’ve never held the official job title of Business Analyst. In my career, I was a Systems Analyst, I was the Manager of Business Analysis, and then I was the Director of Enterprise Solutions. All of those roles, I was doing business analysis, but I never formally, officially, had the title.

This is true for a lot of people. This is true for many, many people. It’s going to continue to be true because the value of these skills is continuing to expand, and more and more roles need people who can communicate and analyze the way that business analysts do.

Focusing on your core skills, on what you do as a business analyst is only going to make more opportunities, make you more valuable, and open up an expanded set of opportunities for you.

How do you go from the spin of everything’s changing, to what does my role look like, to all of these opportunities? How do you triangulate what does that mean for you in your career?

It starts with a really important question: What is it that you want?

What do you want? What do you want to be doing? How do want your workday to flow? Do you want to be going to meetings with lots of stakeholders, or do you want to meet with just a few?

Do you want to be working on technology and understanding how everything’s put together, or do you want to elicit that information and understand just enough to be productive when it comes to writing software requirements and analyzing and communicating about the software requirements?

Do you want to be knee-deep in the business process and helping the business stakeholders make change? Do you want to be more on the technical side? What do you want? Do you want to be looking at a higher level across all the projects in the organization hearing out what is most important? Where is the business case? What projects have the most value in helping the organizations make decisions about what to invest in and what not to invest in? That’s enterprise level, strategic level business analysis and a lot of people are expanding into those careers.

What is it that you want? That’s where you start.

When you have that crystal clear vision of what you want to be doing, it might not be crystal clear, it might be a foggy idea now that you can start to direct yourself towards. But you have a concept of where you want to go. Then you can start organizing your opportunities in that direction.

Organizational changes happen. What does this mean for my role and what new skills could I add? Where can I add even more value? Where can I expand my role to move towards the things that I know I want to be doing? Where can I detract from my role so that I’m letting go of the things that are no longer all that interesting to me?

Organizational change is the opportunity to do that kind of shifting in your own career and make more opportunities happen.

I have a simple exercise to be thinking about. You want to do this now and not wait for organizational change to happen. You can do this now, today. What are the least favorite three things you have to do? They may be the biggest part of your workday, or it might just be something once a month you have to do and it’s just a big pain in the butt and you don’t want to do it.

What are those three things? What are the three things that you could be doing instead? Or, what are the three most favorite parts of your job today, and how can you release those things that you are no longer enjoying to create more space to enhance the things that you love the most and to do more of that work, and then, maybe, start doing that work at a higher level and expanding those capabilities?

This is how career momentum happens. This is how you set yourself up for future promotions and moving into more senior level roles and more strategic roles. As you start letting go of the things that you are getting beyond in your career and that you are no longer enjoying, and you make room to do more of the work you love where you’re going to show up with more energy and more passion, more excitement. You’re going to naturally evolve your skill set.

You can start it today. You don’t have to wait for organizational change to happen. If you start it today, you’ll be ready for organizational change to make this happen for you.

I’d love to hear what are the three things that you are jazzed up about, and what are the three things you’re going to let go of because they’re not enjoyable to you anymore.

Where do you want to be in your business analyst career? What do you want when you think about your career six months from now, a year from now, three years from now, five years from now? What do you want to be doing? What impact does that have for you?

This is where we start when we get centered in what we want and all that spin of what my organization is doing, and what’s happening over here with this industry trend. It starts to just fall into place in a much more centered way because we are starting from what we want. We see opportunities in those changes instead of threats.

That’s a huge mindset shift that I think we need to start making as individuals in business analysis careers so we can add more value to your organizations, and we can have that internal confidence and respect that we deserve as a business analyst.

Again, I’m Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the Gap. We help mid-career professionals start business analyst careers.

Leave a comment below. What do you want out of your business analyst career? What are you choosing to let go of, and what do you want to do more of?

Thanks for watching.

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

Are you looking for a way to achieve instantly more success in your business analyst career? You think that’s got to be complicated and simple and something you plan out for years or months or weeks? Or do you think you could actually take an action today that would have an immediate positive effect? I think you can, and I’m going to share it with you in this video.

Here’s the deal. We over-think things as analysts, and we make things way bigger than they need to be. I have a very simple tip that’s going to help you achieve more success right away.

I want you to take a mental inventory of everything you’re doing week to week, day to day, maybe over the next month. Take a minute.

Look at the trajectory of all those things that you have on your radar. Meetings you go to, the documents you create, the techniques you’re going to be using. Just circle through some of that in your head.

What pops up for you as the ones that create the most value? Where are you driving positive change and helping your organization create better business outcomes? What documentation are you creating just in case? Or you’re not clear why you’re doing it anymore.

What meetings are you showing up to because you’ve always been showing up to them? You’ve realized, “You know what? I’ve moved on from this.” Somebody that we just consulted with, she realized she’d moved from quality assurance to business analysis, but we’re still getting drawn back into that testing role, even though it wasn’t hers to do anymore.

Where are you not adding as much value as you could be? I want you to just take a minute right now to strike that off the list. It’s going away. You are taking something off your plate that’s no longer adding value. It’s not creating positive change, it’s not creating a better business outcome.

It could be extra documentation, it could be a meeting that you don’t need. It’s something. There is something in your work today, I know it, that doesn’t need to be there, so take it off.

Now, what do you replace it with? If you’re overworked, it could literally be, “I need that hour of free time every week. I’m going to go home at 4 o’clock or 5 o’clock or whatever my quitting time is. I’m going to come back refreshed and better energized for the next work day.” Perfectly fine.

But a lot of times, you want to take that time and repurpose it towards something that adds more value. If you are, today, maybe creating a bunch of documentation but you always feel like, “I don’t understand how this all fits together,” maybe you’re going to do a process flow diagram.

Let’s take that hour and actually map this out visually instead of taking several hours writing it out. “Let’s do a wireframe. I’ve never done a wireframe before. Let’s just go do that.” Again, map something out visually instead of spending copious hours detailing it out in text. Draw some ideas.

Maybe you sit behind the computer screen. Oh, this is one I forgot to mention. The endless tweaking in Visio that we like to do, like getting those lines straight, or Balsamic, if you use those. Making those wireframes perfect instead of doing the down and dirty 15-20 minutes of work that’s going to get you the biggest tool for the conversation.

Instead of sitting behind the computer and perfecting some aspect of the visual part of the documentation that’s not actually clarifying things, get that tool out in front of a stakeholder earlier. Walk through it with them, co-create with them on a whiteboard. Get the communication and the collaboration going. Lots more value quickly than all the endless tweaking in Visio or another tool.

Those are some ideas for you. I want you to leave a comment below. What’s the one task or one thing that you’re going to strike off your list? Like, “I’m done with it!” And what’s the one thing you’re going to add in that will create more value for your business, for your organization, for your project, and for you and your career? This is how you instantly achieve more success as a business analyst.

You don’t have to just do this once. You can do it again and again and again. You might add it to your weekly routine, your weekly checklist, your daily checklist. “What can I take off my to-do list today so that I can add something of more value?” You at least want to be thinking about it weekly.

That’s my quick career tip for you for today. I love to hear, again, what are you letting go of, and what are you replacing it with, how is that going to have a bigger impact for you and your organization? Then how can you do this again and again and again to achieve more transformative results in your career?

I’m Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the Gap. We help make career professionals start business analyst careers. Keep taking action, keep making positive change. The world needs you adding more value to your organization. Thank you.

I have been in a BA role for over 8-years and recently changed organizations and I am finding that I am not currently up to date on technology and skills. How can I catch up without overwhelming myself?

Switching business analyst jobs is a huge opportunity, and it also can represent a time of significant professional growth.

In this video, you’ll learn why new jobs in new organizations can feel so overwhelming, how to reframe the challenge of “catching up,” and what skills to invest in to regain your confidence and sense of success.

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

Hello. I’m Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the Gap, and we help mid-career professionals start business analyst careers.

Today, I want to talk to you about a question and answer that question that came in from one of our recent webinars. This person said,

“I’ve been in a BA role for over eight years, and I recently changed organizations. I’m finding that I’m not currently up to date on technology and skills. How can I catch up without overwhelming myself?”

This is a really important question. When you start a new organization, it’s a huge opportunity for expansion and growth in your career. It’s also a huge opportunity for overwhelm because what happens when we are in a position, especially in the same organization for eight years or for even just a few years, is we get familiar with how business analysis works in that organization.

It’s easy to get comfortable with the familiar

We’re familiar with the stakeholders, we’re familiar with the technology, we’re familiar with the systems and the business rules, and even the nuances in terminology. Like, when Joe in accounting says, ‘This’ he means ‘This,’ but when Susie in marketing says, ‘This,’ she means, ‘This.’

We have already internalized the variances in terminology; we understand the business of our domain; we understand the technology systems and how they work.

A lot of our confidence and our sense of success is based more on this expertise we have with the stakeholders and the systems and the domain, and we kind of lose track of the core foundational skills of what it takes to be a business analyst. Those don’t feel much like the core to our success.

In a new organization, everything is different and you lose the benefit of your expertise

Then we start a new job, and everything is different. The stakeholders are new, the systems might be new, the business domain. Even if we’re in the same industry, there are always slightly different variations to how those stakeholders speak, how they show up in meetings, what their conflicts are, and what their agendas are.

We are learning everything about the business from scratch, and it can feel overwhelming, and like we’re drinking from a fire hose. That’s a common analogy that’s used by new and experienced business analysts alike for what it’s like when you’re starting a new business analyst job. It feels like you’re drinking from this fire hose of information. That’s where the overwhelm is coming from.

As we’re in that position, doubt and fear can start to creep in. “Can I really do this? I felt so confident in my past job. Why did I leave? Can I go back? Do I really know what I’m doing? Am I really as strong and confident as I thought I was in that past position?”

That doubt and fear, it’s really based on, “Now I’m not the expert. Now I have to ask the questions. How do I do this?” I want to reframe, for this person, this concept of catching up because it’s not probably what’s the root issue here.

NOT being the expert is a very natural place for a business analyst

When you say, “I’m behind on my technology and my skills, and I need to catch up without overwhelm,” what you’re really saying is, “I’m in a new situation now, and I’m no longer the expert.” This is a natural place for business analysts to find themselves in.

As you grow and expand your career, you want it to start to feel second nature so that going in to a meeting and being the least knowledgeable person about the business process, about the technology, about the domain, that’s a natural place to be, instead of the uncomfortable place.

You’re still drinking from a fire hose. You still don’t know as much as anybody else knows about the business domain, but it’s a natural place that you can show up in confidence.

In a new organization core business analyst skills give you confidence

What does it take to show up in confidence in that situation? It takes your core business analyst skills.

• It’s knowing how to analyze a business process.
• It’s knowing how to ask questions to discover what the current state process is, what the problem is we’re solving.
• It’s knowing how to clarify terminology and pick up on nuances of, “Joe said, ‘This,’ and, Susie said, ‘This.’ Is that the same thing?” instead of already knowing that it is the same thing and doing that mental work to reconcile the terminology, which you can do when you’re the expert.

You can’t do it when you’re not yet the expert. It’s about getting everyone on the same page about software requirements, using techniques like use cases and wireframes that help you identify what the software needs to do, now how the software needs to do it.

If you were the expert in the technology before, you probably knew all the things that the software could do, and you knew how to build that, whatever it is you were updating in your project. You could go with more of a technical spec instead of a more functional software requirement driven spec of what you need the system to do.

This means showing up and asking questions of your technology stakeholders, as well, to understand the capabilities of the systems that you have in place as it relates to your projects. That’s how you do it without having to learn everything at once. You’re not going to be the expert in everything at once.

Just to reiterate, it’s also about asking the questions and using the analysis skills that you have, business process modeling, data modeling, software requirements modeling, all of the modeling skills and techniques that you’ve probably used, naturally, in your last job.

Perhaps you need to freshen up and get some core foundation in those again. That’s what we help you do at Bridging the Gap. Using all those skills to analyze the problem, understand the requirements, and ask the right questions, and they’re going to help you do the intellectual work of figuring out what the questions are even when you’re not the expert.

It gets easier from here, even as you move from one new organization to another!

The last thing I want to say about this is that the first shift that you make, the first shift from one organization to another is the hardest. The second shift is a little bit easier, and it gets easier and easier from there.

It’s not easier because you’re no longer drinking from a fire hose. It’s not easier because you’re the expert in every domain. That’s impossible. You’re never going to be the expert in every domain. It gets easier because you’re comfortable showing up in situations where you don’t know what the business process is.

You’re comfortable asking the questions, you’re comfortable clarifying terminology, you’re comfortable standing on the foundation of your business analysis skills and knowing that you add value by asking those questions and doing that analysis, and not by being the expert.

It’s a powerful place to be in your career. It opens up a lot of opportunities for you to grow and expand and take your career to the next level.

That’s my tip for how to get out of the overwhelm of a new job when you feel like you’re drinking from a fire hose and maybe like you’re a little bit behind. You’re really not. You’re just not the expert anymore. You’ve got to rely on those core business analysis skills.

If you’d like to see where you stack up in terms of having those skills, there should be a link below this video that will invite you to download the Business Analyst Skills Assessment. This will allow you to walk through the level of each of the core skills that we talked about here, as well as some of the other skills that are important to be successful as a business analyst, and rank yourself and assess yourself on how you stand against those skills.

So go ahead, take a look at that, download that assessment, figure out where you’re at, and that will give you some ideas for where you might need to strengthen your core business analyst skills so you can succeed in multiple business domains as a business analyst.

Again, happy to have you here. My name is Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the Gap, and we help you start your business analyst career.

>> Download Your BA Skills Assessment

When you download our Business Analyst Skills Assessment, you’ll figure out exactly where you stand as a business analyst and know what core business analyst skills to invest in improving.

Click here to download the skills assessment

As an online provider of training to business analysts, one of the most frequently asked questions we receive is how to gain funding for training. While many of our participants invest in their own training, we have many that receive funding from their employers.

In today’s video, I share some strategies to gain funding for training.

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

The best business analysts consistently update and upgrade their skills, to add even more value to their organization and achieve better business outcomes.

I’m Laura Brandenburg of Bridging the Gap. As a provider of online training to business analysts, one of the most frequently asked questions we receive is how to gain funding for training. While many of our participants invest in their own training, on their own behalf, we have many who receive funding from their employers and even some entire business analyst teams go through our training programs together.

Today I want to share with you what we’ve seen work, and some of the keys to getting internal approval for training.

Step 1: Be Confident in Your Value

First, be confident in your own value as a business analyst. Understand the value you add, and also where there are opportunities for you to expand your skill set to deliver even more value.

You have to start here – with an internal sense of confidence, and an ability to create positive success for your organization. Employers will invest in those who are already creating success, because they know you will leverage that training investment to generate even more value.

On this topic – get clear on how business analysis enables more project success in your organization. Or, if it’s lacking, be clear on what value you could be adding. What problems pop up on projects now? And how could business analysis solve them? What problems does your manager care about?

For example, many projects face challenges with changing requirements late in the development cycle, and that causes project teams to run over budget and miss deadlines. Good business analysis and solid requirements practices enable clearer communication between stakeholders, and that minimizes unnecessary requirements changes late in the project.

So be clear on that value and how you communicate that value to your employer. Something we do again and again on an ongoing basis as business analysts.

Step 2: Gather Information about Your Organizations Funding Process

Second, gather information about your organization’s process for funding training. Sometimes it can be as simple as completing a form to make a request. Every year thousands of corporate training dollars go unused because no one asks to use them. You literally don’t know what’s available until you ask. And you don’t know what the process is until you ask. So ask and get really clear on that process.

Step 3: Understand Your Manager’s Goals

Now, provided there is money, understand your manager’s goals for that money. Is it ear-marked for specific projects and programs at the end of the year? Is there a specific outcome they want to see? Is there a timeline for that?

Often as we reach year-end, managers are motivated to use the rest of this year’s budgets so they don’t lose that money for the following year. Be aware of those budgets, what they are earmarked for, and also what excess budget you might be able to get access to later in the year if it doesn’t get used earlier in the year.

Always be prepared to make a second request later in the year, even if it was denied earlier.

Step 4: Evaluate the Training Program

Next, evaluate the program you are considering. How does it meet your manager’s goals? How will it help you personally deliver more value to your organization? Does it fit within the budget you have? Build a business case for the value you and the organization will receive from that training investment.

Super important – it’s something we do as business analysts on our projects, so we also need to do it for training. Make this a no-brainer decision for your manager. They should see an immediate ROI.

For example, participants in The Business Analyst Blueprint® certification program actually do their project work throughout the 4-month program, and so they are adding value right away as they go through the course by improving a business process, clarifying software requirements, and communicating more clearly about the business domain – all modules of The Blueprint that you learn about and are able to take immediately with you to your organization.

Step 5: Have a Conversation with Your Manager

Have a conversation with your manager about the training you are considering, and how you see it helping you personally, as well as adding value to the organization. Be sure to touch on any specific pain points your manager has expressed to you, or goals they have.

Make this a win for them. Make it that no-brainer decision. And, of course, have any details ready-at-hand to discuss the training in detail in case they have questions.

If budget is a concern, you may consider providing a couple of different options at different price points. For example, we (used to) offer individual modules of The Business Analyst Blueprint® separately. And then the full, intensive program packages multiple courses together with live instruction at a discount over investing in each course individually.

So that’s part of how you make the business case too; there’s a discount for investing in this larger program and for getting additional support.

Step 6: Submit Your Formal Request

With an understanding of your organization’s process and your manager’s goals, you’ll want to submit your formal request. Follow your organization’s processes. This could be an email, or there could be a form to fill out.

In a larger organization, you might have an actual website that you go to request training, or checkboxes for various approvals. So you also want to factor in any time that you need to request and receive information from your training provider, and make sure you have time to do that. At Bridging the Gap, we can provide details and documentation that does tend to help facilitate that approval process.

Step 7: Follow-Up

Once you submit your formal request, you’re not done. You want to make sure you follow up until you receive that formal approval and know that your registration has gone through. Most training providers require payment in advance of the course start date, and so you will want to stay on top of your request so you don’t miss out on your opportunity.

If you are working with us for a live training class like The Business Analyst Blueprint® certification program, stay in touch about the steps you are going through and when you expect approval and funding to actually come through.

Often we can work with you and your unique situation because we really love to see people be able to join us for a live program. And because there is a start date, that’s a reason to be starting up front – earlier rather than later. You might give yourself a month or even two months ahead of a course start date to start the funding process in your organization.

If No Funding for Training…

What if there are no funds for training? You’ll want to get specific details on when funding is made available, how those budgets are prepared, and what you can do to get your share of the funding in future fiscal years. So now you’re thinking of planning in advance for say 6 or 12 months from now so you can have these investments later in your career lifecycle.

Also, realize there is always money somewhere. There may be portions of other budgets that can be reallocated to training. Perhaps your manager has funding earmarked to bring in a consultant for a specific project. Would they be able to save those costs by you having this training? So think about where there might be money in other areas that you can tap into.

If your manager says no or not now, ask for more information and a reason why. Do they want you to find a different opportunity? Is there a doubt they have? Is there a specific time you should come back and ask again?

Consider Investing in Yourself

And if you feel adamant that this training will help your career growth, it may be the time to make the investment in yourself. Consider the long-term impact on your personal growth and salary potential. Don’t use your employer’s unwillingness to invest in you right now as a reason or an excuse to stay stagnant in your career.

This complacency can have a disastrous impact on your career. Should there be an unexpected change in your company and you find yourself out in the job market without the skills you need to be successful, it can be a long road to get back on track.

Be Ready for Common Objections

Now let’s look at some of the common objections managers have to investing in training. We’re doing this not to energize them, but so that you can be prepared to speak to them. What might your manager say that causes a “no” that you can turn into a “yes”?

Often you’ll hear, “But it’s a busy time for projects.” This is where it’s up to you to make a commitment to keep up with your project work. Our programs are flexible at Bridging the Gap, and actually will help you do even better on the projects you are working on anyway.

This also saves you money, or your organization money over an in-person class, as there are no additional travel costs to consider. Those are things you can speak to and talk about with your manager if you are considering online programs, especially those like ours at Bridging the Gap.

Or perhaps you hear that they are saving money for specific tool training, or a specific technical skill. This means they are not seeing the value of business analysis, and the core skills you’d learn when it comes to elicitation or requirements gathering or business process improvement.

Articulate how you’d use one of the techniques on the projects you are assigned now. For example, for a typical implementation of a cloud computing system, you would have new creative ways to analyze and improve the business process, so the tool works as expected for the stakeholders.

So instead of learning details of that tool, you’re actually learning how to help make sure that tool actually improves the process.

And in something like The Business Analyst Blueprint® certification program, you’d even learn the data modeling and mapping techniques, which helps ensure the business data transfers smoothly from one system to another. So again, core skills that would help with the implementation of a tool like that.

Another thing you might hear is, “You are already doing great work. We don’t need you to learn anything new.” This means they are not seeing the potential for you to do even more work or higher-level work, and the value this would have for the organization.

Revisit the questions around pain points and opportunities, and consider how you can better frame the training you want to support those. And how you can start adding value now, so they see you adding more value now as a headstart into getting that approval for training.

Many times, objections like these are great conversations to have. They give you great insight not just into the funding available but how you can develop your career in the organization. Go in with an open mind, be willing to learn, and use your business analysis skills to LISTEN! That’s one of the key skills we have as business analysts.

What Strategies Have You Used to Receive Funding For Training?

What strategies have you found to help you receive corporate training or funding for training? Leave a comment below to help out others in the community. We build our profession one business analyst at a time. Success starts with you.

Again, I’m Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the Gap. We provide best-in-class online training for business analysts. We’d love to see you in a future program. And if there is anything we can do to help you receive funding for one of our training programs, please be in touch.

I also share how certifications really can help you with your inner game, when you approach them with the right mindset.

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

This is Laura Brandenburg, the creator of Bridging the Gap.  Today, I wanted to talk about inner game stuff.  I’m going to read from “The Science of Getting Rich” by Wallace Wattles. The book was given to me by my mentor, Amira Alvarez. There was a piece in here when I read this book, I was like, my community – we need to hear this!  I felt I would be doing you a disservice if I did not immediately take that and get that out to you.  So, here we go.

 “The man who is certain to advance is the one who is too big for his place and who has a clear concept of what he wants to be, who knows that he can become what he wants to be, and who is determined to be what he wants to be. Do not try to fill more than your present place with a view to pleasing your employer. Do it with the idea of advancing yourself.

Hold it in such a way that every person who comes into contact with you, whether foreman, fellow workmen, or social acquaintance, will feel the power of purpose radiating from you so that everyone will get the sense of advancement and increase from you. People will be attracted to you and if there is no possibility for advancement in your present job, you will very soon see an opportunity to take another job.”

At Bridging the Gap, we help people get started in business analysis careers. This getting started, this advancing in a career role, this going from where you are now to doing business analysis in a bigger and better way, or doing it for the first time, this is about what that first part was of advancing, of being too big for your current place.

If you’re feeling frustrated by some of the work that you’re doing today, what you’re really feeling is too big for your current place.

This is a sign that it’s time for you to grow.

It’s a time for you to grow. How do you do that?

A lot of times we wait for an organization to come to us and say, “Can you do something else? Can you do this special thing?” What is important from what’s in here is that we hold it in such a way that every person who comes in contact with you will feel that purpose radiating from you.

This is why, if you want to get started as a business analyst, learn all the techniques. Absorb that learning.

See yourself as a business analyst right now.

Start to radiate that from the inside out. Then people will start to see that and will start to see you as a business analyst as well.

That last part is really important. Some of you are in organizations where it kind of feels like the cards are stacked against you. There’s not a lot of growth, not a lot of opportunity, or it’s just an icky environment for whatever reason.

And, so, trusting that if there’s not a possibility or an opportunity that unfolds in your current role, that same work, that same way of filling more than your space and radiating out that sense of purpose is going to help you find an opportunity in another organization.

Some of the practical ways we see people do that is by volunteering and taking extra responsibilities above and beyond their current job role by not working within the profession and meeting other business analysts. The kind of things that put you in contact with people, that, because you’re radiating that new sense of purpose, have that opportunity to see that in you and help you take that next step, and create those tentacles and things that will create that new reality for you on the outside, like you see yourself on the inside.

I just wanted to share that with you. I think it’s an important part of our inner game. As we think about how do we move forward in our careers? How do we always be taking that next step and advancing our careers and, of course, getting the salary, and the responsibilities, and the authority, and the reputation, and all the good stuff that comes with that.

How Certifications Support Your Inner Game

In our profession, we see a lot of people go for certifications to get this external view of, “That person’s really credentialed,” or “That person must know what they’re doing. They’ve got their CBAP®. They’ve got their PBA. They’ve got their PMP.” Whatever that is.

I have my CBAP®. I’m not against certifications, but I don’t think they have that effect that we really want them to have. So, they can have this false sense of, “Oh, now I have my CBAP®, now what?” People aren’t magically knocking on my door offering me tons of business analyst opportunities.

The interesting thing is the people who take that application process to the CBAP® super seriously, like super seriously, and allow it to not just be an academic process, but to be a process of, “Look at all this stuff that I’ve done in business analysis.”

If you’re not familiar with the application process, you go through this entire book for the CBAP®, the BABOK^® Guide version 3. It’s quite thick – a few hundred pages. You need to, as part of the application, show how your experience lines up with what’s in that book.

When you do that, and not just an academic, “Somebody said I could kind of fudge it this way,” but an actual appreciation of your business analyst skills. That gives you that presence of, “look at how awesome I am.”

It feels like my current place and my present place.

It gives you that sense of purpose that allows you to radiate out that energy and that confidence because now you’re like, “I’ve actually done a lot of what’s in that book. Ha, look at that.” And, so, the confidence comes as a result of that. The confidence comes as a result of realizing the value of your skills and believing it on the inside.

Then, the CBAP®, once you take the exam and finish your application and prepare for it, the preparation process also feeds into that. Now, you’re learning it on a completely nuanced level and applying what you’ve learned.

The best way that I’ve seen people apply for the CBAP®, and what I did, was take every little piece in that book (I did version 2), and how does that relate to my own personal experience, and how can I internalize what that book is telling me about business analysis through the filter of my own experience so that it locks stuff in. What I’m doing when I do that is appreciating the value of my own skills and my own experience and cementing, for myself, how much I know about business analysis.

Then you go through all that, and then you get the letters behind your name, but then you can own them too, because it means something to you and you’ve experienced that transformation along the way, that confidence that it comes from just knowing your skills.

Inner game work is super important in career advancement. We teach a lot of the outer game stuff in our training. How do you do business analysis? What do these terms mean? How do you put together requirements models? All of that is important, but the inner game stuff is what allows you to take that learning and make sure it creates new career opportunities for you in your work environment.

Just wanted to share this message with you. Thank you for being part of Bridging the Gap. Have a great week. We help you start your business analysis career, inner and outer game.

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

I’m Laura Brandenburg with Bridging the Gap, and this video is all about what to do when you’re frustrated with your career opportunities because your organization needs YOU.

Let’s talk about why organizations need business analysis.

Organizations Need Business Analysis

Business analysts create positive change. They make our organizations more effective, and they help us add value to our customers. We solve business problems. Every organization is concerned about their bottom line, adding value, keeping customers on board, making their companies more efficient.

This is what we do as business analysts. We do this through creative active problem-solving. We make sure that everybody understands the problem to be solved and isn’t trying to solve a non-issue or a symptom of the true problem.

We analyze. We figure things out. What does that real solution look like? We collaborate with all kinds of people across the organization to make that happen, both business stakeholders and technology stakeholders, to make sure everyone is onboard with that solution and understands what that problem is why we’re solving it.

Part of this is just communicate, communicate, communicate. We cannot communicate enough, and this is part of what accelerates our skillset, when we’re able to combine the analysis that we do, the way we solve a problem with that collaboration and that communication. All these skills together, make us what I like to call “problem-solving engines of change.”

How Business Analysis Solves Problems

Here is what happens. Being a problem-solving engine of change isn’t always easy. It’s not like somebody comes to you and be like, “Will you be my problem-solving engine of change?” It requires us to step up. It requires us to do work in a new way, especially if you’re not in a business analyst career today. It requires you to start doing this and start solving these problems and getting involved and making the change happen.

Resistance is Normal

Along the path, you’re going to face resistance because change is hard. It’s hard for you. You’re going to have that internal resistance of, “What am I doing?” You’re going to have resistance from your stakeholders. Maybe it’s not even resistance against you. Maybe it’s resistance against the change itself.

And, so, learning to separate that, “What’s resistance to how I’m doing my job?” And what’s resistance to the job, the work, the change, and the problem itself, can be a useful tool to navigate some of these. Let’s talk about some quick tips for getting started and stepping up.

Some Tips for Getting Started

One of the ways is just to focus on quick wins. Quick wins allow you to get credibility quickly. It allows you to make a positive impact quickly. You might be seeing this huge project. What small slice of it can you take that would be a win? Not a win, always, for you. You want it to be a win for you because you’re involved in the project, but what is the piece that people care about? The piece that the people that are in the decision-making realm who have the authority to drive the change, what is urgent and important for them? Get involved in that piece and help see that piece through. That’s going to open up more doors for you. Focus on those quick wins.

Here is another thing. It might sound a like a bit of heresy, but don’t always talk about business analysis. People don’t really care that you’re going to create a use case, or you’re going to analyze their business process, or you’re going to do their data modeling. Oh my gosh, that sounds so scary and icky. Like, “Oh, I’m going to model your data for you.” Like no, don’t do that.

They want you to solve their problem. They want you to be a part of the positive change. They want to get the right people involved. Talk about that part and don’t feel like…your stakeholders don’t have to be bought in to the terms and technologies, and techniques of business analysis to get bought in to the process of business analysis. Just focus on talking about the work that you’re doing in the terms that they care about, and go from there.

Step Around the Roadblocks

Finally, there are some roadblocks that you could face. I’m going to go through a few of those and some strategies that you could take to work around them.

First, you don’t have authority as a business analyst, especially, as someone who’s looking to get into business analysis. You don’t have to have authority to get started. You just start from where you are, and you make change up. Expand your container of the role that you’re filling inch by inch, by inch. And your authority comes with that.

You might not have a training budget. You might feel like you need to learn new skills. Go to your local chapter meetings. Start a peer learning network. Invest in your own development because you know you’re worth it.

You might have management or stakeholder apathy. People might not really care in your organization. This is a tricky one because you can’t always make them care. You can’t force somebody to care about something that they don’t care about. You can, when you focus on quick wins and letting go of the business analysis, you can (business analysis terms, not the actual skills), you can circumvent that non-caring. But if they’re truly apathetic, maybe it’s your time to go into a different organization, or a different situation, a different part of your organization where you do find people that care, that have that passion, and that are trying to solve problems. Those are where the opportunities are going to come for you.

Your Organization Needs YOU

The final message I want to leave you with is your organization needs you. If your organization doesn’t, there are organizations in the world that need you. The business analysis profession is growing by leaps and bounds. There are hundreds of thousands of new business analysis job openings projected in the coming years. This is a skill set. People need you and it starts with you stepping up. It starts with you doing that bit of work. It starts with you taking action in a different way.

Just look at what problem can you help solve. How can you be that positive change agent in your organization? How can you take one step forward today that’s going to make a huge impact in your organization, and a huge impact in your career?

We’re so honored, at Bridging the Gap, to be part of this path for you. We have lots of resources that can help you out. We just want to inspire you to take that next step.

Again, my name is Laura Brandenburg, at Bridging the Gap, and we help you start your business analysis career.

>>Ready to Step Up? Download Your Free Business Process Template

Get started analyzing a business process today, with our complimentary business process template.

• Help business users from multiple departments clarify their actual step-by-step workflow;
• Avoid wasting money on software solutions that don’t solve the right business problems;
• And even helping new business analysts figure out what questions to ask when starting on a new project or domain.

Business process analysis is often the very first technique used by business analysts when we start learning a new domain or analyze the scope of a project. Your organization needs you doing more of this work today!

Click here to download your free business process template today

• Perhaps you took a career break to take care of children or aging parents, and are now going back into the paid workforce.
• Perhaps your role took a bad turn somewhere, or an unexpected layoff or downsizing forced you to take on a role that wasn’t really a business analyst role.
• Or perhaps your organization started shrinking instead of growing, leaving little room for interesting project work.

No matter what the reason, now feels like the time to restart and recharge your business analyst career. So, what do you do? That’s what this video is all about.

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

Today, I want to talk about how to get back on track if your career as a business analyst falters along the way or gets stuck somewhere. This can happen if you take a long break, maybe, to take care of children, or aging parents, or if somewhere along the way your career takes a bad turn and you end up in a role that wasn’t really what you started with. That could happen as well, if you get laid off, or if your organization starts shrinking instead of expanding. So, the opportunities to do new and interesting project work kind of starts to diminish.

No matter how you got here, we’re going to talk about how to get you unstuck and how to make sure your business analyst career is back on track and growing.

Let’s jump right in. I’m going to share five different steps that you can take to walk through this process of going from not feeling great about where you are in your business analyst career, to feeling like you’re a tried and true solid official business analyst.

Step 1 – Clear Out the Clutter

The first thing you want to do is just clear out the mental and emotional clutter of being stuck. It’s really easy to get frustrated with your past employers, maybe the projects, or other people you’ve worked with, or family members you had to show up for, or whatever it was that got you off track, to focus on that.

You need to have a little bit of compassion for yourself and for others. Forgiveness is a great tool to just clear that out and let it go. So, forgive yourself for whatever position you’re in now and be ready to move forward. Do some cleansing and let that old story go so that you can move on and create a new story.

Step 2 – Recommit and Re-Energize

From there, the second thing is to think about recommitting and re-energizing yourself in your business analyst career. Think about what is that brought you to this in the first place. Why did you love business analysis? What were you so excited about?

Maybe it was that first opportunity that was just something so new and exciting. I remember, for me, it was like QA was great, but I had gotten kind of stuck in that. It was the same over and over, and I had a new opportunity for a fresh start and a fresh role doing higher level responsibilities. That’s something, even today, I’ll pull back from. Why am I doing this? Oh, right, I remember how exciting that was and how exciting it still is.

One way to do that, if you haven’t already, take the business analyst litmus test. It’s in my book, How to Start a Business Analyst Career, right at the beginning because it’s so important. I’ve also recorded a video that has the litmus test, and I read through it for you. So, if you don’t want to buy the book, you can go and find that video and check that out as well.

Another way to do that, the litmus test, is just think about your most favorite job that you’ve ever had or your most favorite project, not even job. Because a job can have a lot of parts. Maybe you like some, and you didn’t like other parts. Think about the best project you ever worked on.

• What was that project like?
• What was your role?
• What were some of the criteria?
• What were the people like?
• What was the team like?
• What kind of things did you work on?
• What made that project unique and special?
• What made your contribution so amazing?

Use that as a touchstone as you start to think forward and plan out your career goals to bring that back. How can you bring that kind of project back into your career? That’s going to set you in the right direction. That’s that re-commitment, the re-energizing phase of getting back on track.

Step 3 – Make Bigger Contributions

The third thing is to start making bigger contributions. A lot of times we’ll wait until somebody will say, “Hey, Laura, can you go ahead and analyze this process?” or, “Can you solve this problem for us?” We’re waiting for somebody to tell us what to do and how we can be helpful.

They may not even know, especially if you’ve been frustrated for a while. They might not know that you have this extra thing that you could do, or this extra desire or way to contribute more effectively. Go out and start volunteering to do things that you wouldn’t normally do, maybe, aren’t part of your formal job description. It could be analyzing a process that is problematic.

Start by, even inside your own team or inside your day-to-day work. It could be facilitating a meeting of a small group of people to solve a problem. Whatever it is, just get started. Don’t make a big deal out of it. Don’t over think it. Just do something that’s bigger and better than what you’re doing currently. And make that step up to make that happen.

When you start to step up, good things tend to happen in your career, whether it’s in this opportunity or something else.

Step 4 – Refresh Your Skills

The fourth thing is it can be necessary, especially if you’ve had a long break, to update your business analyst skills, or refresh your skills. The wonderful thing about business analysis, in my opinion, is your skills are never really outdated. So, your communication skills, your ability to analyze requirements, that core competency, it doesn’t change. Once you’re a business analyst, you’re always a business analyst, and you’ve always got great skills, very transferable skills that you can apply in a business analyst role.

But you might feel a little rusty around them. You might not quite remember what it’s like to go through a big project again. Participating in some training, or watching videos like this, or reading a few books, that’s a way for you to hit “refresh,” you to feel more confident in what it’s going to take to be a business analyst. For you to kind of remember all the cool, fun things that you’ve done in the past, even if those things were 10, 15, 20 years ago – essentially your transferable business analyst skills. You’re bringing that back up and training can help you do that.

(By the way, if you are looking to fill your BA toolbox with the key skills to launch your business analyst career, be sure to check out The Business Analyst Blueprint® certification program.)

Step 5 – Connect with the BA Community

The fifth thing is to connect with others. Make sure that you’re finding ways to connect with other business analysts. Go to your local IIBA chapter meeting if you have one. If not, maybe it’s time to start one in your local community.

Virtually, you can do this online. Look for LinkedIn groups that you can contribute to. A lot of the major players in the online space all have LinkedIn Groups around business analysis where you can connect with other business analysts.

Connect with people, personally, have those conversations, comment on their posts, be part of the conversations so you feel dialed into and connected with the business analysis profession instead of feeling like you’ve got to go this alone. The business analysis profession is truly a giving, generous, very open community. And, so, if you feel like you’re in this alone, it’s because you haven’t been looking for those resources and haven’t been taking advantage of all that there is out there for you. Go out and start looking for it and participating where you can.

Another way to do this might be to hire a coach or a mentor who’s in the business analysis profession and how can give you that 1:1 support and accountability to go after your career goals and to set those milestones, and to be moving forward in your career.

What Will Your Next Step Be?

Those are five things to be thinking about if you feel stuck or you’re not quite sure how to get back on track with your business analyst role. So, my challenge to you, as I would love to hear, what step are you going to take this week?

Leave a comment below. This is a great way to get some accountability and build a little bit of that community. Start to connect with other people who are also leaving comments. Let us know what are you going to do this week to get back on track? What’s the one thing that you’re going to do? It doesn’t have to be huge, but it does have to be a concrete action step that takes you forward.

Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear what it is. Check back in with us when you do it and let us know what you’re going to do next.

>> Learn The Business Analyst Blueprint®

Looking for a complete roadmap to success as a business analyst? We cover all 3 levels of analysis skills, along with the key communication techniques you need to implement to make them successful in The Business Analyst Blueprint® training program.

When you join The Business Analyst Blueprint® training program, you’ll learn all 12 of the industry-standard techniques and the business analysis process framework – to build your confidence in the best practices of business analysis.

Click here to learn more about The Business Analyst Blueprint® training program

Today we get specific as I’m sharing 3 examples of some of our business analysts and to-be business analysts, and exactly how they applied business process modeling to change not only their organizations, but also the forward trajectory of their careers.

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

This is Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the Gap. One theme I love to talk about is how you create a ripple effect as a business analyst. What’s your ripple effect as a business analyst?

How to Transform Your Career with Business Process Modeling

Today, I want to go a little bit deeper and share three examples of ways that some of our course participants have used business process analysis and improvement activities to really transform their careers. They’ve had that ripple effect in their organizations and created drastic change for their organizations. But they also received a personal transformation, either in terms of more respect, or moving into the business analysis role for the first time.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about business process analysis for context, here’s a complete video tutorial on how to analyze a business process:

Archana Uses Business Process Modeling to Discover Requirements More Effectively

Let me jump right in here. Our first story is Archana.

Archana was a practicing business analyst when she started the business process course (this is now part of our flagship program – The Business Analyst Blueprint training program– as part of the online business analysis training we offer at Bridging the Gap).

But she had this frustration where she wasn’t getting all the requirements that she needed. She kind of communicated out to the stakeholders and was waiting for them to bring the requirements to her. She didn’t have a strategy for reaching out and getting the requirements from them.

When she took the course, she started doing the techniques right away in the projects that she was actively involved in as a BA, and it was like a switch flipped. She went from people not being super engaged with her work, maybe not responding to her emails, not showing up for her meetings, or just being kind of, “I don’t know all the answers to all these questions that you’re asking,” to having a strategy to reach out and find the questions to ask and walk them through a structured approach to giving her, essentially, what became the requirements.

Software Requirements May Almost Fall Out of the Business Process Model!

All your functional requirements in the software, they just kind of fall out of the business process. When you start to talk at that level, often, it’s so much easier for your stakeholders to give you the information you need and that you can then pull the requirements out of as a business analyst.

So, fast forward – within a year or two of participating in the course, Archana is thriving in her business analyst role. She’s been promoted to a Senior Business Analyst and is in charge of updating and improving the practice in her organization.

She went from, “I’m not sure if this is right for me. Things are going well. I’m not getting great feedback on my work,” to promoted as a Senior BA and seen as a leader and a trusted, respected leader within her organization.

First story. For those of you who are practicing BAs, if you’re not doing this kind of thing, that’s the kind of shift it could have for you.

Let’s talk next about Adam.

Adam Uses Business Process Modeling to Gain Confidence in His BA Skills

Adam was in customer service when he did the Business Process Analysis course. He wasn’t even a business analyst yet, but he took our course and he went to his manager and said,

“You know, I’d love to help you improve a process or analyze a process. Is there anything that is troublesome? Anything bothering you? Anywhere I could be of service?”

And his manager was like,

“Yes, we have all this stuff that’s supposed to show up at these trade shows and it’s always a mess and we don’t have the things that we need. We get there, and we’re scrambling. Let’s sit down and map this out.”

Adam led that session and walked through all the steps that we talk about in the free training that you can get to discover the process, analyze the process, and improve the process.

I got to interview Adam a while back and he talked to me about this business process modeling experience. One of the pieces I remember so clearly is he said,

“I really thought that I needed to have this list of questions to ask or I needed to be super prepared going into the first session. But I decided to trust you.”

Quick Tip: When Process Modeling, Clarify the Starting and Ending Point of the Process

One of the techniques we teach in the course is you are basically just like, here is the starting point in the process; here’s the ending point of the process. You map that out for your stakeholders. Not the stuff in between. Then you say, “You know, if we’re starting here and ending here, tell me what happens in between.”

Not every stakeholder is going to come in and start telling you everything, but probably 75% – 80% of them will at least give you something to go from. At least three steps that fit in between that start point and end point – something to start to analyze and ask questions around. It’s a great way when you don’t know what questions to ask, to just ask the question, “What happens in between the start point and this end point?”

It worked for Adam. I know that’s a quick tip that you can apply if you’re like, “Where do I start on a project?” Just, “Hey, here is the start point, end point, tell me what happens in between. Let’s draw it out together.”

Here’s a video on process mapping which gives you a great starting point for the types of techniques Adam was using.

And here’s a resource specifically on mapping the “As Is” business process, which is where Adam started with his analysis:

Wendy Uses Business Process Modeling to Improve a Software Configuration and Deployment Process

What I want to close with is Wendy’s story. Wendy was also not in business analysis when she took our course. She was a software developer. Wendy really wanted to become a business analyst.

I forgot to mention, Adam, about a year after that, also transitioned into his first business analyst role. The same is true for Wendy.

She went through our Bridging the Gap training course. She documented a process, actually, in her technology organization. We don’t think of technology as a business process. Technology and business – aren’t those two separate things? But she documented the process that her tech team went through to customize, release, and deploy updated software for a client. It was a process that software developers wanted to automate and management wanted to understand better. She went and said,

“I’d love to use some of the techniques that I’m learning about in this course to do this a little bit better, or to analyze it and bring some clarity to it.”

Presenting Your Process Model to Stakeholders Increases Your Visibility and Credibility

She ended up getting to present that business process in a manager-level meeting (so very high-level stakeholders), and talk to some of the improvements that they could make right away.

Here’s a video all about analyzing the “To Be” or Future State process, which is where you make improvements to what exists today:

Then she started getting invited to customer meetings. Then she started to talk more openly about her goals to become a business analyst.

A year or so later (and that seems to be the key here), you do these things and then a year or so later, this awesome stuff happens.

A year or so later, she was promoted into a business analyst role that was created specifically for her.

Those are three examples from the hundreds of participants we’ve had in this course. There have been so many business processes that we’ve seen come through. It’s just absolutely amazing the variety.

Here’s a Starting Point to Model a Business Process

If all of this seems like too much, don’t worry. You don’t have to start from scratch. We have a free business process template that you can download today and that will help you get business users from multiple departments on the same page and clarify their actual step-by-step workflow.

This download can even help new business analysts figure out what questions to ask when starting a new project or working in a new domain.

Click the image below to claim your free business process template.

There’s a lot more to mapping a business process, and I have another video that goes into this technique in more depth.

In reality, our ripple effect is huge.  You know when you throw a stone in a pond and there are ripples and ripples of water that flow out from that one stone falling into the water? That’s what a ripple effect looks like.

And your work creates a similar flow of value and transformation – much of it goes unnoticed, not just by your stakeholders but also by you. In this video, you’ll start to see more of your ripple effect, and learn some new ways to talk about your value too.

For those who like to read instead of watch, here’s the full text of the video:

Today, I want to talk to you about your ripple effect. One challenge I hear from business analysts and aspiring business analysts again, and again, and again is:

“I don’t know how to communicate my value. People just don’t appreciate me. They don’t appreciate what I do. They don’t appreciate what I have to offer. And they don’t value me as a business analyst.”

The reality is that your ripple effect is huge. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a ripple effect, if you think about throwing a stone into the pond, it plops, and then there are those ripples that come away from it. Your work as a business analyst has a ripple effect just like that.

Now, we can’t talk about your entire ripple effect. We’ll be here for hours. I want to talk about just one slice of it. That’s what happens when you engage in business analysis work to improve a business process.

Let’s talk about that.

Discovery Helps Stakeholders Be Heard

When you’re improving a process as a business analyst, it usually starts with the discovery process. You sit down with stakeholders and figure out what they’re doing today and hear about their challenges, and what’s wrong with the process, and all different kinds of things. It might be the first time that stakeholder, that end user, that person, actually feels heard. They might have been complaining about this problem for years. If you do your job right, they will feel like you’ve listened to them, you’ve understood what they’re saying, and maybe you’re going to do something to help. But you at least understand the problem.

Discovery, we’re not talking about the solutions, we’re just talking about what is the problem and how does it exist today. Just by going through that process, you have the ripple effect of helping someone feel heard, and that could shift how they communicate with their next co-worker, or how they show up when the next time they’re on the phone with a customer, or just how they choose to do their work day to day.

Then, of course, you’re discovering those problems, those things, those needling issues that nobody bothered to complain about because nobody was listening anyway. Those are opportunities for your business to improve and do better.

Analysis Leads to Layers and Layers of “Aha!” Moments

Then we roll into more of an analysis process. We put a lot of detail behind it and find all these gaps and understanding and put together documentation. Honestly, this is the part that frustrates the heck out of a lot of end users. They just don’t understand why this level of detail is necessary. But when you persevere, you have to sell them on the process a little bit. When you start to work with them and engage them in your structured thinking about the business process that they own and they do every day, a lot of times they’ll start to have some “Aha!” moments.

So that frustrating point of, “Oh my gosh, Joe in Accounting is always just giving me this work that’s not fully finished,” or “HR just does this and why don’t they know how to do their job?” All these frustrations, these little needling issues that people are probably complaining about at the water cooler or whatever, all of a sudden, it should start to make sense because when you map out the process from the beginning to the end, we see where those gaps in understanding are.

We see why somebody doesn’t receive information that we think they should magically have. We start to plug in our gaps and we also see how our work affects others.

Talking now about your ripple effect as a business analyst and helping your stakeholders cultivate that understanding; that understanding of why their work does what it does, and why other people do what they do. That can lead to much more informed expectations, much more harmonious relationships, work just flowing better in your organization, and people, overall, being a little bit happier in your organization.

Again, the next time they get on the phone with a customer, the next time they talk to that person, what kind of shift happens for them?  What kind of shift happens for them, maybe, when they go home from work and they’re not so frustrated about, what’s been happening and what that other person decided to do or didn’t decide to do. So, just look at that ripple effect again. Ripple, ripple, ripple, ripple, ripple, ripple.

Improvement Frees Up Energy for More Fulfilling Work

Okay, so let’s talk about improving the process. So often we start here. We’re like, “Oh, I achieved this ROI. We eliminated 10 steps or saved hours of work,” or all of these things. Improving a process definitely has a huge effect for your organization. It can save company resources from wasted effort, it can deliver more value to your customers which leads to more revenue. There are hard numbers and reasons that we do business process work.

It can also lead to more fulfilling work for people if there’s a step that gets automated or a redundant step that gets eliminated. There may be a lot of busy work that just kind of gets set aside and no longer becomes necessary once you look at, and improve, your process.

Think about those things and how this little slice that you did was improving a process. All of a sudden there are all of these little tentacles going around – I’m mixing metaphors there – but all of these ripple effects of the impact of that work that you had.

And YOU, what about YOU?

Now, I want to bring this around and think about you because you’ve been in the middle of, now, discovering, analyzing, and improving processes for your organization for your stakeholders. What effect does this work have on you?

Most of the people that I work with, when they start applying a more structured approach to how they do this kind of thing, they start to feel more fulfilled in their work too. Now, you get to help these people. You get to be doing work that feels intrinsically meaningful and has a lot of value.

When you use a process to do this and apply it with confidence, you’re going to earn that respect and trust from your stakeholders.  Instead of just blowing you off, not showing up to your meetings, or telling you, “Hey, I don’t know about requirements,” you have a way to go to them. You have more confidence. You have ways to ask those questions, and that leads to respect.

In my next video, I’m going to talk to you about some specific career changes that have come out of people starting this work. We’re going to talk both about new business analysts and people who are not yet business analysts and how that has worked for them.

The reason this is important is because, quite honestly, you are my ripple effect. We do offer business analysis training at Bridging the Gap. So, we help BAs do business analysis better. When you go out and make these changes in your career, I feel like you are my ripple effect. This is why I’m here. This is why I’m showing up. Thank you for being here.

Before we leave, I want to talk about one more thing. We have a free business analysis and improvement training available for you. It’s only for a limited time, so click the link below. Check it out. See if it’s available. If not, get on our email list so the next time we make a free training available, you’ll be sure to know about it.

This training is going to walk you through what a business process is, what techniques you use to analyze and improve a business process, and three phases that you go through – the detail, the discovery, the analysis, and the improvement – to really create positive change in your organizations. All covered in the free training.

Go ahead and grab it today.

We are getting ready to launch an updated and improved version of our Business Process Analysis and Improvement course.  We’re going to be running it as a live session.  We only do live sessions a few times a year.  If you go ahead and download the free training, you’ll be on the list to know about that as well.

Stay tuned for more details. I will be back soon. I’m so excited. We’ve got lots of fun things going on at Bridging the Gap. 

Right now, though, just take a minute and really ingrain your ripple effect. Think about the things we talked about, the impact that this has on you which, of course, probably impacts how you show up with your friends and family, how you feel about your work – all of that good stuff.

But, also, the effect that you’re having all around you in your organization; both those hard number results of saving money, generating more revenue, but also just the fulfillment people feel in their work and how they feel hurt and appreciated, and the “Aha!” moments that they get to have because you are doing business analysis.

Again, thank you so much for being here. You are my ripple effect.

Even though I had several years of experience as a business analyst, just a few as a quality assurance engineer, and none directly as a project manager, I found the business analysts to be the most difficult people on my team to manage.

It was easy to evaluate the work of my QA engineers. Was their test coverage complete? Did releases go live with findable issues that they failed to bring attention to?

And even though a lot of factors play into successful project management, I could look at metrics like on-time delivery, clear and actionable status updates, and the ability to manage a team of people to a desired end result.

But when it came to business analysts, I felt like the “right” qualities slipped through my hands like sand on a beach.

On the one hand, part of me believed that great business analysis required a little bit of magic, so I simply wanted to hire talented professionals and let them do their thing. (If you’ve ever felt like your manager gives you an incredible amount of independence and trust, maybe more than you feel you deserve, this is probably why.)

On the other hand, I was too close to the work, and I thrived on understanding the details. (If you’ve ever felt micro-managed as a business analyst, it could be because your manager needs to understand it all to make decisions. Getting out of this mindset requires a big personal growth curve.)

As I’ve matured as a business analyst, trainer, and leader, I see now that I was missing the opportunity to hold my BAs accountable to what was most important – gaining clarity and alignment around the vision and requirements for the project.

What’s more, since I’d been in their shoes, it was way too easy for me to make up excuses for why the requirements might get delayed or be unclear. I knew such and such stakeholder was difficult, or such and such system integration was complex, or such and such developer wasn’t being forthcoming with information.

As you grow in your business analyst role, and eventually seek to move into a team lead or management position, you’ll likely run up against these same thought patterns too. Getting on the growth curve into leadership is not natural for us as business analysts.

And if you are just getting started and wondering why your manager is doing something that seems completely counter-intuitive, it’s probably because they are on a rocky part of their development into BA leadership.

I vividly remember my first project. I’d be flying along, thinking that this whole new BA role was so fun and amazing. Then an unexpected issue would pop up. I’d feel like I was taking 5 steps back as we muddled through balancing business desires within technical constraints.

What I needed were some touchstones to gauge if I was really on the right track or not. Having gone through dozens of projects as a business analyst, I now have some touchstones that ease my concerns, even when it feels like everything is incredibly messy.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself week to week, which will help you feel more secure in whether or not you are doing this right, or whether it might be time to invest in some training or engage a mentor to help you out.

• Is my work moving the project forward in understanding? What are some of the concrete decisions we’ve been able to make based on the analysis I’ve done and the discussions I’ve facilitated?
• Am I receiving questions from my stakeholders, showing that they are really understanding the requirements and working from them? Silence is not golden! Silence often means you are out of the communication loop, which means your work is not being seen as essential.
• Do I see people taking action around the requirements? Action could be design, code, testing, or even research. Any sort of resulting action is a sign that you are on the right track and your work is having an impact.

Of course, even when you are moving forward and doing things right, issues will come up. No matter how well it’s done, business analysis does not happen in a perfectly linear way. Click the link below to read an article from our archive with quick tips for managing requirements issues:

http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/quick-tips-for-managing-requirements-issues/

As always, I wish you the absolute best success as a business analyst, and I look forward to helping you in any way that I can.

• Your business stakeholders answer your questions in clear and precise requirements language, making writing your good requirements a breeze.
• Your technical stakeholders show up to a requirements meeting seeking only to learn about what the business wants, and never once complains about how impossible the requirements will be to implement.
• Your project manager gives you copious amounts of time to discover the business needs and create a business analyst plan, before ever even mentioning that horrible thing we call a deadline.
• Your project sponsor avoids talking about solutions, and clearly shares exactly what their business objectives are.
• And, the best luck of all is when everyone shows up to a meeting right on time, having read the documentation ahead of time and fully prepared to discuss only the most legitimate concerns they have.

Who needs the luck of the Irish when you can experience the luck of a business analyst!

While it’s difficult to send you glitter (and you are probably grateful for this – seriously, we are still finding glitter all over the house), I can sprinkle a little love by helping you appreciate the work you get to do as a business analyst.

Here are 8 things (plus a bonus!) to love about a career in business analysis:

#1 – You get to make the world a better place. If you can solve even just a few problems and help a few people understand each other better, you’ll have done your good work for the day.

#2 – You get to help smart people communicate. There’s no doubt that you work with some awesome people. Yet, without your help, they still seem to talk past each other. As a business analyst, you get to jump right in and facilitate some amazing, collaborative working sessions.

#3 – You get to ask the tough questions. Seriously, you get paid to ask the difficult, challenging questions that no one else wants to ask to make sure that the project goes more smoothly and truly solves the underlying business problem.

#4 – You don’t have to be super techy. Sure, you like to understand how the latest and greatest systems work, but you don’t have to code them or even understand them in a super-detailed way. (You get to use analysis skills like use cases, wireframes, and data models instead.)

#5 – You get to learn. Business analysts never stop learning. New domains. New stakeholders. New techniques. New approaches. There is always something new and interesting to do around the next project corner.

#6 – There is no shelf-life on your skills. But at the same time, the business analyst skills you build like facilitating, problem solving, and leadership will serve you in your life-long career. The facilitation technique you learned as a junior BA can be just as applicable on your 100^th project as it was on your 1^st.

#7 – The salaries are rising. Consistently. The most recent salary survey (which is getting a little dated) showed average salaries upwards of $90K in the US for mid-to-senior level business analysts.

#8 – The role is on a rising tide. Every day, the business analyst job role is becoming more widely recognized, the opportunities are growing, and the role is expanding. Yet, as a profession, business analysis is still new enough that you’ll be starting when things are fresh.

BONUS #9 – You are creating a career safety net. Whatever shifts happen in the workforce, you are building skills and career experiences that future employers will always value.

There will always be needs for your skills as a communicator, problem solver, and keen ability to transform ambiguity into clarity, no matter what title you are given or what specific responsibilities you have.

What do you love about business analysis?

I found myself making a lot of mistaken assumptions about what to expect, having those assumptions prove to be unfounded, and then needing to find ways to adjust and course correct. Looking back, there is nothing unexpected about my experiences, except that they were unexpected to me at the time.

Knowing that many of you are just getting started, today I am sharing 4 of the things I wish someone had told me when I was just starting out in my business analysis career.

#1 – That I would need to set expectations early and often, and then again and again and again…

As a business analyst, it’s not uncommon to receive too many assignments, tasks that are outside your bailiwick, or unreasonable deadlines. I was surprised to find myself constantly explaining what I was doing, why it was taking so long, and what could be expected of me over the coming weeks, even though I didn’t always know what the next week would look like!

I also found that deadlines would seem reasonable but became overly optimistic when I didn’t hear back from stakeholders in a timely manner, couldn’t get time on the calendar with a critical stakeholder for weeks at a time, or encountered unexpected issues.

I learned to continually clarify my role, communicate about what would be done when, and seek feedback to be sure I was meeting expectations.

Click here to read about 4 ways to set clearer expectations

#2 – That getting other people to give me the information I needed could be a little painful.

Early on in my career, I naively expected unlimited access to stakeholders and their unhindered involvement in and passion about my projects.

The reality was much different. My stakeholders had multiple projects, conflicting priorities, and too much to do. Even when my project was important to them, it could still be difficult to get the information I needed in a timely manner.

Over my career, I learned to be a bit of a squeaky wheel – a very polite, diplomatic, and conscientious one – but squeaky nonetheless. My projects started to move more smoothly and I met my deadlines with less angst.

Click here to read about how to get the information you need from stakeholders

#3 – That although I was the requirements author, I was not the requirements owner.

I love to write and I love to write requirements. But I could get so caught up in writing and documenting and modeling that I would take on more ownership than was prudent. This would lead to a lack of buy-in from critical stakeholders, which could translate to unexpected changes late in the project.

The reality is that we absolutely need stakeholders to take ownership of the content going into the requirements document, even as we author that document on their behalf. And yes, they are likely to resist reading, reviewing, and providing feedback on requirements.

I learned that providing early, incomplete drafts that were clearly imperfect would help stakeholders see that they could add a lot of information and clarity into the requirements. I also learned to be very specific about the status of any given deliverable when sending it out, and equally specific about what I was asking of my stakeholders of this document at this time.

Click here to read about 4 steps to finalize a requirements document

#4 – That dealing with issues professionally would take a new kind of finesse.

I’ve always been a proactive person and a bit of a whistle-blower. When a new issue surfaced, I would signal the alarm, rally the troops, and facilitate a problem solving meeting.

However, discovering requirements is a gradual process of gaining clarity and minimizing ambiguity. At a certain point in time, every requirement was once an issue. Business analysis surfaces so many issues that you can’t possibly resolve all of them immediately.

With experience, I learned to blow the whistle more softly, keeping everyone informed about what was surfacing, but not unnecessarily alarmed. To keep the requirements process moving forward, I also learned to take ownership of the issues that surfaced inside of the requirements, and make more decisions about how to resolve issues and which options to choose or recommend.

Click here for quick tips on managing issues

Now that you know what to expect…

Now that you know what to expect, perhaps you won’t be as caught off-guard as I was during your first days as a business analyst!

For more help handling these situations professionally, check out the Email Communication Templates.  The Templates contains 32 simple, copy-and-paste email templates covering these business analyst work scenarios so you can stop worrying about how to write the perfect email.

Click here to learn more about the Email Communication Templates

Because looking back can help us look forward with more clarity and confidence, in this article we’ll look at 5 ways the profession has changed since 2009 or in the 5 years since the first edition of How to Start a Business Analyst Career was published.

Change 1: New Business Analysis Certifications

While the IIBA® Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP®) certification has been available since 2004, two new certifications have been created in the last 5 years.

• First, IIBA® introduced the Certification of Competency in Business Analysis (CCBA®) in 2011, providing a certification option for business analysis without the extensive work history required by the CBAP®.
• Second, Project Management Institute (PMI)® released the Professional in Business Analysis (PMI-PBA)℠ certification in 2014, providing a certification option for business analysts who work primarily inside projects and programs.

New certifications mean a growing awareness of the business analysis profession, along with professionals having options when it comes to adding to their individual credibility. What’s more, the new options have lesser work experience requirements, making certification a more viable option for more professionals relatively new to business analysis. As we look forward, the number of business analysis professionals will continue to grow.

Accordingly, the second edition of How to Start a Business Analyst Career contains a new section on certifications and how they can fit into your career planning.

Change 2: Expanded Set of Business Analyst Job Roles

Despite what we might like to see as business analysis professionals, business analyst job roles are still specialized. In the last 5 years, we’ve seen this pattern become entrenched within the profession, and experienced an increased number of flavors of business analyst job roles.

In the second edition of How to Start a Business Analyst Career, the discussion of specializations was expanded and several examples of how to leverage and highlight your industry and domain experience were included.

The new job roles added include:

• Business Intelligence Analyst
• Business Process Analyst
• Systems Analyst
• Product Owner

The book further explores specializations by splitting apart Industry-Focused, Tool-Specific, and Functional Domain-Focused Business Analyst Roles, which were all covered in the first edition, but not with as much depth.

As more organizations recognize the value of business analysts and look to increase the value provided by their business analysts, I think we’ll continue to see specializations expand, at least at the mid-level and senior-level roles.

Change 3: Increased Focus on Business Process

Although the vast majority of business analyst jobs fit within the IT Business Analyst job description, the business analyst role itself has seen an increased focus on business process. I know in my early days as a business analyst, a lot of product decisions were necessarily driven by technical constraints.

While we haven’t obliterated technical constraints, they tend to have a much less significant role in our early requirements discussions and we are free to explore more in the way of business needs and opportunities. This means business analysts are involved not just in analyzing and specifying software requirements, but also with understanding current state business processes, helping plan business process improvements and changes, and driving the implementation inside the business user community.

For many business analysts, these changes have resulted in a subtle expansion of their role. For others, they’ve found themselves drawn to one side or the other in yet another specialization force within the profession.

Rest assured, we’ve got you covered in the second edition, with additional skills for process analysts, a deeper focus on collaboration techniques, and an entirely new Underlying Core Competencies section. I also updated the discussion of the Business-IT balance specifically to address some of the shifts we are seeing in business analysis work.

Change 4: Increased Adoption of Agile Practices

Five years ago, agile practices were beginning to transition from the latest fad to a respectable trend. The business analysis community was just starting to get engaged in the discussion. As of 2014, the majority of business analysts I talk to have experienced or are working in agile teams. That’s because agile is much more widely accepted and adopted now as a discipline.

Strangely enough, despite historical claims that agile does away with business analysts, we only see positive signs for the business analysis profession so these two disciplines must be co-mingling.

In the first edition of the book, I was unable to cite any resources specifically looking at the intersection of business analysis and agile. Thankfully, this gap has been filled in many ways, and there are several relevant resources suggested in the updated text. The most prominent resource is Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis, co-authored by Mary Gorman and Ellen Gottesdiener, who also contributed a foreword to the second edition of How to Start a Business Analyst Career.

And while agile is clearly the way of the future, the book still contains a discussion of waterfall and iterative approaches because we still see many business analysts working in environments that approach projects in this way.

Change 5: Increased Awareness of the Business Analysis Profession

Obviously we are still fighting many battles to have our value, skills, and experience appropriately recognized. However, there are many signs that awareness of business analysis is growing.

Let’s look at a few key indicators:

• In 2010 the average business analyst salary as reported by the IIBA® salary survey, was $82,493 in the United States. In 2013, the average US salary for a business analyst rose nearly $10,000 to $91,514.
• Membership in the primary organization for business analysts – IIBA® – rose from 5,000 in 2008 to over 28,000 in 2014.
• There were numerous mentions of roles related to business analysis on top job lists, albeit often under titles such as Computer Systems Analyst, Management Consultant, and Business Technology Analyst.

Everywhere you turn, business analysis is being recognized where it was previously ignored or rising where it was previously under-valued. This doesn’t mean that we don’t individually experience frustration, but overall the tides have turned and are building in a very positive way.

And What Hasn’t Changed (Much)

Despite all the steps forward in the last 5 years, there are still some aspects of business analysis that haven’t changed all that much.

There is still a dizzying array of job titles referring to business analyst jobs and myriad job responsibilities included inside business analyst jobs. The section on hybrid roles was actually expanded to more fully address the challenges an aspiring business analyst faces when exploring job options.

Another aspect of business analysis that hasn’t changed much – and I see this as a positive – are the fundamentals. Here are two sentences that are exactly the same in both the first and second edition of the book.

“What is not going to change all that much are the fundamentals of business analysis. If you focus on learning the fundamentals and work your way through a few projects, you will reach a point where you have mastered the basic techniques but can keep on refining the art. “

And while refined and re-organized, the core business analyst skills and related business analysts skills lists remain essentially the same between the two editions.

It’s Our Time

After taking this look back through the profession, I’m energized because there seems to be so much momentum behind what we are doing in business analysis. I’m happy to see some of the positive changes – the growth in awareness and salary – along with the wider range of opportunities that are available to me with my business analysis background.

To me, this means that the work I love to do and love to help others do will continue to be valued and rewarded for a long time to come. It means that we will all have more opportunities to make a positive impact in our teams, organizations, and last, but certainly not least, our careers.

I can’t think of a more apt way to close this article than with a quote from the conclusion of How to Start a Business Analyst Career:

As business analysts get better, the world gets better.

I’m proud to be part of the business analyst community and to offer this new resource to help more talented professionals expand their opportunities in business analysis.

Click here to learn more about the book

As business analysts, we need to be wary of how we invest our time. Our analytical brains predispose us to misuse our time in ways that are not always productive in the bigger picture of things.

Here are a few of the most common time wasters I see in business analysis.

Time Waster #1: Perfecting Documents

Yes, our documents should be good. But all too often we spend more time on them than is merited, especially early in the business analysis process. Engaging stakeholder feedback early and often helps ensure we are on the right track.

Besides, when we perfect what should be draft documents, we get over-invested and tend to resist changes to those documents, making us less open to the very feedback we need to be successful.

A quick rule of thumb: Make every document good enough to take the next step forward in the project, and no better.

Time Waster #2: Attending Every Meeting You Are Invited To

As your influence grows, you’ll be invited to more meetings. Some business analysts complain about every day being all meetings, yet it is difficult to say no. What if we miss important information? What if the facilitator is upset when we don’t show up?

Steve Blais has written an excellent article about how to say no to meetings.

Time Waster #3: Learning Without Doing

On one project, I remember a developer coming to a status meeting week after week reporting that his progress was “learning more about tool X.” Weeks went by and we had nothing tangible to show the business. The project manager finally asked the developer to demo the tool to the other project participants. It became clear that his knowledge was still cursory.

In his defense, it was a very complex tool and the company probably should have invested in more training and consulting up front rather than allow this developer to self-study for weeks on end. Still, this did not put him in anyone’s good graces.

Let this be a warning to you. Accompany learning by doing. What’s more, make sure what you are doing has a tangible value for your organization. While it is much easier to learn one more thing before putting your work out there, you risk wasting a lot of time if you don’t produce a meaningful deliverable as early as possible.

The developer would have been much better served by creating a working prototype, no matter how preliminary, of how we could have used the tool in our organization.

Time Waster #4: Facilitating Meetings Without Agendas

One of the most valuable take-aways from our Essential Elicitation Skills course is the insight for how to create a useful meeting agenda, one that moves the project further ahead towards its goal. Although it can be tempting to leave the agenda open because you don’t know what you don’t know, taking a little time to plan out your approach yields huge time-saving dividends.

When you facilitate meetings without an agenda, you risk not achieving what you need to be successful. This leads to countless hours asking follow-up questions, scheduling follow-up meetings, or researching information. In other words, a lot of time is wasted.

Time Waster#5: Answering Communications – All the Time

While business analysts do need to be responsive, you also need a fair amount of focused time to successfully complete requirements documentation and other deliverables. Watching every email come in, answering the phone, or keeping your instant messenger open can create a steady stream of interruptions. I know it’s tempting to be constantly aware of what’s going on in your projects or be the first to know when a critical issue surfaces. However, every time you are distracted by a new message,  even if you don’t respond, you lose the time it takes to refocus.

While there are appropriate times to be accessible and available, and you definitely need to plan time into your work day to respond to communications, there also needs to be time to minimize distractions and focus your creative, analytic energy on the task at hand. If you never seem to get your deliverables done as quickly as you’d like, consider creating time blocks in your work day where you turn off distractions.

One of the many paths into your first BA role is proposing a new business analyst role in your current organization.  In this article, we’ll do a deeper dive into what that process looks like.

Step 1: Understand Your Organization’s Current State

There are 3 primary criteria that need to be in place within your organization for a new BA role to be created:

1. There needs to be a clear benefit or problem to be solved by adding business analysis competencies to your organization.
2. There needs to be enough project or process work to fill the plate of a full-time business analyst.
3. There needs to be management support for the new role.

While it’s relatively rare for #1 not to be true within an organization, because nearly all organizations are dealing with some level of change, it’s not uncommon for individuals in other roles to pick up the key business analyst responsibilities. For example, the product manager may work on the high-level business requirements and the technical lead may turn these into detailed system specifications. If this approach works for your projects, a formal BA role may not fill a needed gap in the short term and it will be difficult to make a case for a new role.

The second criteria is often not fulfilled in small organizations or organizations with very little to invest in upgraded systems and processes. In this scenario, you could instead propose a part-time BA role or a BA role that’s combined with other responsibilities, such as project management, quality assurance, or even business operations.

And, finally, all too often an organization meets #1 and #2, but not #3, meaning that there is an opportunity and enough work, but management doesn’t realize it. In this scenario, you must educate your management team about what kinds of problems a BA could solve and what kinds of projects a BA could work on.

The rest of this article assumes that your organization meets the first two criteria and that you need to help management buy in to creating a new role. (If this isn’t the case, you can continue to expand your business analysis experience while staying on the lookout for golden BA opportunities, which we’ll talk about at the end of the article.)

If you’re wondering whether or not you have the skills required to step into a full-time BA role, take our free Business Analyst Skills Assessment to gain clarity on your strengths and transferable skills. 

Step 2: Identify a Valuable BA Role

Now that you understand the context in which a business analyst role would fit, take some time to identify the core role to be filled by a business analyst in your organization. Identify the key responsibilities and skill sets needed, and even consider what types of projects the business analyst would contribute to.

Essentially, you want to write your own business analyst job description.

Business analyst roles vary widely across the industry. When putting together an ideal BA role for your organization, it’s more important that the skills and responsibilities be perceived as immediately valuable to the organization than they fit into an idea vision of a business analyst role you might find proposed elsewhere. You can leverage our Business Analyst Skills Assessment – a free download – as a starting point, but limit the initial set of responsibilities to those of immediate value internally.

Once in a business analyst role, you can always take on more Senior BA responsibilities.

Step 3: Propose the Role to Management

Proposed job description in hand, sit down with your manager or a manager you think would be receptive to creating such a role on his or her team and walk through your ideas. Discuss the problems or opportunities you’ve seen. Detail how the person filling the BA role could help solve these problems. Speak to tangible examples of where business analysis activities have already helped create value in your organization.

Your actions in this step will be better received if you’ve already begun to incorporate business analyst activities into your work. One of the reasons The Business Analyst Blueprint certification program focus on applying BA practices regardless of your job title, is that actions speak louder than words. If your stakeholders can see the impact of business analysis in action, they’ll be more likely to embrace the idea of someone filling this role on an ongoing basis.

As an outcome from this step, you are looking for the manager to create a new job role on their team. In some less formal organizations, you might begin doing the work before the role is “official.”  In other organizations, the role will be officially created and open to both internal and external candidates, in which case you’ll need to apply for it like any other job applicant. Let’s talk about that step next.

Step 4: Apply For the Role

Just because you succeed in getting a new role created doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be the one chosen to fill it. You may need to apply and you may be up against well-qualified internal and external candidates.

By taking our free Business Analyst Skill Assessment, you’ll gain a better understanding of where you stand as a business analyst and discover an action plan to expand your skillset.  

Update your resume, prepare for the job interview, and be prepared to position yourself as qualified and ready to fill these new job responsibilities. In particular, speak to your experience doing similar business analysis activities in the past for this organization, your knowledge of and relationship with internal stakeholders, and the value of your organizational knowledge and expertise. This is also a good time to share any professional development you’ve done to grow your own business analysis skills and your intentions for continuing to expand your skill set.

Along the Way: Watch Out For Golden Opportunities

These 4 steps don’t always work in the short term. Even if your organization will benefit greatly from increased business analysis competencies, there can be external factors such as a lack of budget, overwhelm of work for your current job, or management resistance that impact your ability to propose and be positioned in a new internal business analyst role. If you hear “no” the first time, don’t give up, but do keep your eyes open for opportunities to make your case a second, third, or fourth time.

Golden opportunities that can break down the barriers to creating a new business analyst role include:

• Your organization starts a new project, bigger than your organization has taken on recently, such as a new software system, integration of a newly acquired product or company, or the re-engineering of a critical business process. Volunteer to help on the new project and look specifically for assignments related to business analysis.
• A key individual filling many BA responsibilities (but without the BA job title) decides to leave the company or take an extended leave. Volunteer to fill in for the gap left by this individual in the short term, especially the BA responsibilities. If the same position is reopened, consider applying for the open vacancy.
• Your organization begins growing unexpectedly and needs to quickly deal with “issues” related to increased customers, sales, or channels. Volunteer to sit on tasks forces, SWAT teams, or any new projects started to deal with the issues. Take on as many BA responsibilities as you can.

By demonstrating the value of business analysis activities to meet short-term needs, you’ll often be able to create long-term needs within your organization that eventually lead to a more formal business analyst role.

And while you are waiting for the golden opportunity to fill a business analyst role, be sure to continue to fill new business analyst responsibilities and practice using new skills wherever you can. You’ll be both solidifying your expertise in business analysis and demonstrating how these capabilities and skill sets will add value to your organization.

>> Get Your Quick Start to Success

Earn the respect you deserve and get the insider details on how to get into a business analyst career quickly, with our free Quick Start to Success workshop. You’ll learn how to avoid the most common pitfalls faced by new business analysts and the step-by-step business analysis process to create predictable, consistent project success.

>> Click here to register for the free workshop today <<

Case studies abounded. Real-world challenges were addressed head-on. And most importantly, opportunities for growth and change for those of us in the profession surfaced. Presenters discussed the kind of opportunities that will create the next generation of business analysts, but only if we, the analyst community, not only embrace them but also expand our skill sets.

While the challenges are significant, the rewards are substantial. Those that realize the opportunities of the next generation of business analysts will have increased influence, more exciting jobs, and be nearly immune to changes in project methodologies and role shuffling. Let’s look at why.

The Future of Business Analysis

Let’s start towards the end – at the most compelling presentation I attended at the entire conference. That presentation was delivered by Kevin Brennan, Chief BA at IIBA, on the past, present, and future of business analysis.  Kevin started his BA career like many of us – in an informal role with mixed responsibilities on a highly unsuccessful project.

Years later, studies show that projects are not doing much better. Why? Kevin says it’s because business value lies outside the project. It comes before the project – in deciding why to make an investment – and after the project – in helping transition project implementations into operations.

Today’s business analysts need to start taking responsibility for business outcomes, not just requirements work inside of projects. This is a big hat and the skill sets change.

• We are not taking responsibility for business outcomes when we document our lists of 1000s of system shall statements and call it a day.
• We are not taking responsibility for business outcomes when we stop working once the project is implemented.
• We are not taking responsibility for business outcomes when we fail to ask and understand “why?”, or even if we do ask “why” but don’t get to the underlying root cause that truly helps the business understand what they are doing, how they are doing it, and what the result is.

Kevin admits this is not going to be a short transition. The path to being a next generation BA starts with being an effective contributor today. And that might mean chipping in and taking on non-BA responsibilities – whatever it takes to build credibility as a team player. Then it’s time to move into a facilitator role, where you start to get stakeholders to think about tough questions. Often we have to propose answers, because the questions we ask are difficult ones. Once we’ve established that we can help facilitate a better understanding of what to accomplish in a project, then we get to make a move towards filling more strategic roles.

In many ways, the themes Kevin brought together in his keynote were played out in many small ways across the other sessions I attended. Each presenter filled their own piece of the BA pie.

Here are some of the other take-aways I had from BBC 2013:

Business Rules are Not Going Away

As businesses become more complex and more agile, managing business rules and business decisions will gain prominence.  There are great leadership opportunities for BAs to lead initiatives to separate out business rules from traditional requirements documents so they can be analyzed, implemented, and changed more effectively.

Yet, there is no one way to document decisions and business rules. Like everything else in BA, your leadership and judgment is required. Long lists are common, but difficult to comprehend and maintain. Business rules repositories often fragment rules implemented by process from rules implemented by systems. Visual models, such as process flows, concept models, decision tables, and functional decomposition diagrams help organize and analyze rule- and decision-related information.

Glossaries are Necessity

Ronald Ross started with a quote by the famous German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:

“All I know is what I have words for.”

Even though it might seem like your terminology changes quickly, often the reality is that your core business concepts and business knowledge are very stable. Glossaries help us define terms and use more consistent terminology across the organization and in our requirements documentation.

Glossaries are an absolute necessity in parallel with business rules and decisions. If rules are expressed using a variety of terminology or ambiguous terms they are likely to be misunderstood, misapplied, and implemented inappropriately.

Processes and Capabilities Are Key

I was surprised and disappointed at the undercurrent of politics that crept into some conference presentations. Were processes or rules more fundamental? Or capabilities or processes? Or cats or dogs? While IIBA representatives did a great job at rising above these debates (as any BA should, we’re leaders after all…more on that below), other keynotes chose to use the podium as a way to reinforce their preferences.

I share this not to overshadow the positive vibe of the conference but because the nature of the debate was eye-opening to me. It’s important to be aware of so you don’t get swept up in it. Dogma surfaces in many forms and often comes with unmerited confidence that can spread like wildfire.

Whenever you see someone speaking from a space of proposing that one type of requirement, one technique or one perspective offers a perfect or primary solution, take a step back. Learn from their passion, but not from their perspective. BAs need to have a perspective that is separate above all of this debate. Otherwise we risk seeing everything as a nail because all we have is a hammer.

But back to business processes and capabilities, a topic area where this undercurrent rose heavily to the surface. Business processes and capabilities exist in a relationship to one another. Processes are a series of actions that lead to an end result. Capabilities are the abilities an organization has or the outcomes it is able to achieve.

Obviously, if we are going to enter the world of taking responsibility for business outcomes, we need to master our understanding of both. We do this by not only analyzing business processes, but also by understanding the outcomes and results enabled by our organization’s efforts, which is a nice segue to my next take-away.

Metrics Matter

Metrics came up in every single presentation I attended.

• The BPM COE panel spoke to the importance of creating a value proposition and measuring the impact of the COE as a way to encourage the ongoing investments required.
• Ellen Gottesdiener’s talk on retrospectives suggested you start with bringing data about the project to the conversation, even if it is low fidelity.
• Making better business decisions requires data. Often the first phase of decision analysis reveals that current decision-making is rather arbitrary and uncovers opportunities to gather and report on more data to improve decision rules in the future.

Data, metrics, quantification. These are all new skill sets for many business analysts but an area where the profession is challenging us to grow. It’s also where BA meets value. That’s a big topic, let’s talk about it a bit more.

Increasing Your Value as a BA

Steve Erlank put it straight – if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Benefits and business outcomes must be quantifiable for us to understand project results and our own contributions. He broke becoming more valuable as a BA into three components:

• Focus on finding the value of projects, often by including more stakeholders and facilitating them to agree. This helps us explore stated wants and discover what the business truly needs – i.e. what’s good for the organization as a whole.
• Being selective in applying BA activities and choosing only the most value-adding activities to apply for each project. He suggested BAs create a balance sheet linking specific BA tasks to ROI.
• Building assets that contribute to organizational knowledge, whether they be business rules, glossaries, or knowledge bases. The BA brings out what the organization knows and helps it learn from itself.

Leadership Comes From All of the Above and Then Some

Leadership comes not from specialization but from what Bob Prentiss labeled being a polymath – or someone so skilled in multiple disciplines that they make their work look easy.

This means moving forward is not about specializing in business rules, BPMN methodologies, analytical models, glossaries or writing better requirements. It’s about learning to do all of these tasks well and being able to apply them as needed in your organization. This is a very high-level of skill, but it’s different than being a specialist.

My over-arching take-away is that core business analysis skills – defining terms, expressing requirements clearly, using visuals, and facilitating conversations will never stop being important for business analysts. Yet on top of these core skills, it’s becoming increasingly important that we layer leadership, breadth of knowledge, advanced communication and facilitation skills, and a focus on value.

Focusing on value takes not just insight, but guts. It means saying “no” and redefining your role around what matters. It means breaking away from business as usual to do something different that might create a break-through. It means asking the hard questions and proposing possible answers.

>>Looking For Some New Techniques?

My experience at BBC has reinforced that breadth and depth of techniques is more important than ever. One category of skills that is absolutely required for a next generation business analyst is visual modeling.

Click here to check out 22 visual models used by business analysts

(I expect you’ll find at least a few that are new to you and could make a strategic difference on your next project.)

It’s my honor to bring you this interview with Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman. They recently published a new book – Discover to Deliver – which makes a significant contribution to the business analysis profession. I was privileged to be an early reviewer and I highly recommend their book to anyone looking for a solid grounding in how to apply BA practices in an agile environment.

In this interview, we cover why Ellen and Mary embraced agile analysis, the business analyst role in an agile environment, and list specific practices you can use to evolve your business analysis skill set and stay relevant in an increasingly agile world. (And if you are interested in the book, there’s a discount for Bridging the Gap readers at the end, so be sure to check that out.)

About Ellen and Mary

Ellen Gottesdiener, Founder and Principal with EBG Consulting, is an internationally recognized facilitator, coach, trainer, and speaker. She is an expert in Agile product and project management practices, product envisioning and roadmapping, business analysis and requirements, retrospectives, and collaboration. In addition to co-authoring Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis with Mary Gorman, Ellen is author of two acclaimed books: Requirements by Collaboration and The Software Requirements Memory Jogger.

Mary Gorman, Vice President of Quality & Delivery with EBG Consulting, is an expert business analyst, facilitator, coach, and trainer. She has deep expertise in business systems and product development. Mary writes on requirements topics for the Agile and business analysis community and is a Certified Business Analysis Professional. Mary was instrumental in developing the IIBA^® Business Analysis Body of Knowledge^® and the IIBA^® certification exam. Mary is co-author with Ellen Gottesdiener of the recently released book, Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis.

Making the Transition to Agile Analysis

Laura: Over the last 10 years or so, you’ve transitioned from a focus on business analysis to Agile analysis. What was the key driver in this transition for you both as consultants, coaches, and trainers?

Ellen and Mary: We’ve been on this journey for about 12 years now, and we’re seeing more and more organizations adapting lean/agile practices. Just as important, we’ve seen how lean/agile practices amplify the benefits of business analysis.

Here’s why. Increasingly, our clients—like most organizations—need faster product delivery, super-efficient practices, and, above all, a relentless drive toward value. At the same time, they face a host of practical problems. First, products are complex and therefore expensive to build and maintain. Second, customers are getting more savvy and demanding. Next, requirements risks continue to be the most insidious challenge in any development effort. And then there is the fourth practical problem—people. Products are discovered and delivered by teams of human beings whose best work emerges from healthy collaboration. But that doesn’t happen spontaneously. People need to learn how to systematically plan and analyze the product at a high level while at the same time drilling down to the details.

A core element of these problems is the need to specify product requirements, the basis for development and delivery. While technologies get better and better, requirements remain a conundrum—they are necessary to know, but wickedly difficult to obtain and agree on. Requirements will always be, to paraphrase Fred Brooks, the most difficult part of any development effort.

The world recognizes the value of lean/agile development for many products: you have to plan for uncertainty, work on small batches of requirements, deliver them as soon as possible, test your assumptions about which requirements will deliver the most value, and all the while instill a sense of partnership among stakeholders. We’ve found the best products come from teams that act as a living learning lab—constantly delivering, learning, and improving. This continual improvement cycle is the hallmark of a successful lean/agile team.

Agile analysis synthesizes a toolkit of practices drawn from business analysis as well as requirements, project, and product management; strategic thinking; and collaboration.  We’ve been fortunate to work with a variety of clients either interested in or compelled to adapt how they go about business analysis and requirements practices.

When calibrated for the situation at hand (after all, context counts) agile analysis practices help product partners build the right product right, discovering and delivering high-value, high-quality products.

Also, before we go on, let’s take a minute and define what we mean by lean/agile. As defined in Discover to Deliver, lean/agile (or sometimes just agile) is “an umbrella term describing the family of practices for building software and systems using iterative and incremental development and delivery, with a focus on maximizing customer value while minimizing waste.”

The Business Analyst Role in Agile

Laura: You have been vocal for a number of years, in both the traditional and the agile communities, about distinguishing the agile BA role from agile business analysis work. Why? 

Ellen and Mary: Yes. We prefer to focus less on roles and turn the focus to goals. To that end, we published a widely referenced article, “It’s the Goal, Not the Role: The Value of Business Analysis in Scrum,” to jump-start this conversation.

Here’s why. As we observed agile teams, we saw many of them ignoring or avoiding requirements analysis, and they ended up delivering buggy software, fragile architectures, or products that had little value to users or buyers. In addition, we continued to hear a hue and cry from analysts who were confounded or worried about whether and how they fit into agile projects.

Before we talk about how business analysis skills fit, let’s clarify the work that needs to get done.

The entire product community—from the customer, business, and technology realms—shares responsibility for discovering the highest-value product to deliver at any given time. To continually make smart decisions, these people need to act as partners to explore product options, evaluate them to identify those that have high value, and define confirmation criteria to verify and validate the delivered product. This is the work of knowledge discovery—in other words, analysis. Furthermore, it’s not a one-shot deal. It’s ongoing. And it requires discipline.

This knowledge discovery work requires people who have interconnected skills such as strategic thinking, evaluating, and envisioning; elicitation, analysis modeling, and efficient specification; user experience and design thinking; user acceptance testing; and facilitation. Talented business analysts have all or most of these skills.

Laura: Given that distinction, and to use the language of “role” applied to agile teams, what business analysis skills and knowledge are applicable to which agile roles?

Ellen and Mary: Here are a few examples.

• A person (possibly a business analyst) who has skills in testing; defining lean, testable requirements; and turning examples into acceptance tests may serve as a tester.
• A person (possibly a business analyst) who has good analysis modeling skills, knowledge of user experience design and architecture, design skills, and a bent toward empathy for users may serve as a user experience designer.
• A person (possibly a business analyst) who has excellent facilitation, communication, coaching, and leadership skills may serve as a project manager, release manager, scrum master, coach, or software manager.
• A person (possibly a business analyst) who has rich domain expertise, especially in large organizations, may serve as a tactical product owner—assuming that the product champion gives the analyst decision-making authority.
• A person (possibly a business analyst) who is a domain expert, has strategic planning and thinking skills, and has a background in product management may serve as a product champion (also called a product owner or business owner).

How to Expand Your Agile Analysis Skill Set

Laura: I know many of our readers realize that Agile and Lean are significant industry trends, but are not yet employed in Agile software development environments. What concrete steps can they take to make their business analysis experience more relevant to an Agile environment so that they can remain competitive in the job marketplace?

Ellen and Mary: Indeed, we see agile less as hype and more as mainstream, commonsense practice. Agile has crossed the chasm of software practices. In other words, just as object oriented development went from hype to trend to common practice in software development, so too is agile becoming the standard product planning and analysis.

Business analysts need to take note: most organizations—especially the ones business analysts want to work for—are integrating, hybridizing, and synthesizing agile practices into the way they do business.

Here are specific recommendations for business analysts:

1. Learn the foundational principles and practices of lean, agile, and organizational change.

2. Become fluent in a variety of ways to elicit and specify product needs driven by value. This includes product visioning, goal and objective specification, risk assessment, and exploration and evaluation of options to fulfill product needs (product options) at any planning horizon.

3. Build mastery in analysis modeling. Learn how to use a variety of analysis models; how to select models based on the problem domain; how to calibrate models’ breadth, depth, and formality; and how to interweave them to yield clear and precise requirements quickly.

4. Learn how to think with, and specify with, a testing mind-set to verify and validate requirements concurrently. Find out how to devise acceptance tests from concrete examples and use them to both elicit and test requirements. Understand how to validate requirements by using measurable outcomes expected with each delivery. Learn how to help your technology, business, and customer partners by insisting on clear validation criteria.

5. Become a skilled facilitator, with the ability to design and lead collaborative work sessions for a variety of stakeholders, whether scopes are wide or narrow and time horizons are near term or long term.

We think these five steps not only will make you relevant and also will demonstrate the kind of business analysis leadership that makes you indispensable.

About Discover to Deliver

Laura: I couldn’t agree more. Tell us a bit about Discover to Deliver and how it will help new and aspiring business analysts apply Agile analysis techniques on their software development projects.

Ellen and Mary: By working with numerous agile teams—and non-Agile teams as well— we’ve learned, over many years, that great products are the result of stakeholders having a product focus, staying value-driven, and continually collaborating and conversing as partners. More and more, we’ve found ourselves homing in to help agile teams set context, be explicit about value, and learn from each other by having succinct, rich conversations about the product they’re working on.

We wanted to codify this know-how in Discover to Deliver in a way that would be useful and practical and would stand the test of time. After all, requirements are the basis for planning, architecture, development, testing, and, ultimately, product value. So we wanted to describe ways to do that well, honoring Lean/Agile principles.

Among other things, Discover to Deliver explains how to:

• Engage stakeholders as product partners.
• Identify value considerations in order to focus on high-value product needs.
• Clarify planning by recognizing multiple time horizons (we call them the Big-View, Pre-View, and Now-View).
• Plan and analyze product needs with increasing specificity according to planning horizon.
• Hold structured conversations to explore product options across the 7 Product Dimensions. The 7 Product Dimensions encapsulate what is classically referred to as functional and nonfunctional requirements. The structured conversation is a metaphor for the ongoing collaborative practice of exploring, evaluating, and confirming product needs
• Use the 7 Product Dimensions as an efficient way to holistically explore product options.

We took special care to make the book usable and practical for a variety of readers and learning styles. The book uses a straightforward visual language as well as text. In addition to a comprehensive glossary, the book offers a rich narrative case study that allows readers to “listen” as a team plans and analyzes requirements. And detailed case study examples are woven throughout the book. Readers can also refer to a suite of tools and techniques (with examples) that are mapped to the book’s key concepts and practices. A graphical navigation mechanism lets you see at a glance where you are in the book.

Laura: I know many of our readers already own and frequently reference Ellen’s Software Requirements Memory Jogger. How would you bridge their experience with that book to what they will gain from Discover to Deliver?

Ellen: I continue to be gratified when I learn of the value the Jogger book has provided to many people in our community—as well as many others in the software development community. Since I wrote the Jogger, Mary and I have adapted and extended traditional requirements practices as a result of our direct agile experience.

Discover to Deliver helps readers apply the foundational knowledge and skills described in the Jogger. The Jogger’s model essentials supplement Discover to Deliver, and vice versa. (We have crossed referenced the techniques in the two books, as well as mapped Discover to Deliver to the PMI-ACP® Handbook, PMBoK®Guide, IIBA BABOK® Guide and Agile Extension to the BABoK®; you’ll find these mappings on our book’s website, on the Resources page).  While it’s certainly helpful for Discover to Deliver readers to read the Jogger, it’s not necessary.

The same is true for my first book, Requirements by Collaboration. The essence of collaborative practices is as true today as when I first wrote the book. Many agile leaders and coaches are returning to Requirements by Collaboration to sharpen their skills in facilitating successful team collaboration.

>>Read More About Agile Analysis

Here are some additional Bridging the Gap articles about being an analyst in an agile environment:

• How to Create a Product Backlog
• How to Define Scope in an Epic
• How to Write User Stories

So this begs the question, what does success look like?

I believe that each of you owns your future and your career direction. I can’t tell you that you should be making $82,493 per year (which is the average salary of a business analyst, according to the most recent, but dated business analyst salary survey), or that you should be creating business cases or leading your team to create better software. I can’t tell you what your success looks like. That has to come from you.

But I can tell you what kinds of success others have found. Let’s take Rob Jowaisis as an example. Rob has shared the start of his BA career journey with us – just last week. You might read Rob’s story and say, “Well, he’s not done yet.” I say, “Of course he’s not done! Are you done?” I’m not done.

We’re done with our careers when we retire, and maybe not even then. Rob’s story is a success story. Rob is being financially rewarded for a job he likes and a job that is giving him opportunities to expand his business analysis experience. Rob is very close to closing the deal on a life-long dream of getting a college degree. Rob is a man with a mission. He is paying the price now for a greater tomorrow. He is a success. If Rob waits until he achieves every part of his dream to celebrate, he’ll lose out on enjoying the amazing journey he’s on.

Let’s take another example. One of our recent course participants, we’ll call her Jo, jumped on an opportunity to analyze a process for a local small business. Jo tackled one of their most complex and error-ridden processes. In the matter of a few hours of discovery and several more of analysis, she was able to put together that process in an easy-to-understand document.

They were so impressed, they asked her to come back and help implement the obvious improvements that were needed. What’s more, the business owner is well-connected locally and willing to make introductions to organizations that can employ Jo full-time.

Is she employed yet as a BA? Not the last time I checked (but she had just secured a second BA job interview from talking about this pro bono work experience).

Is she a success? Absolutely, and without question, yes.

The question is, what does success look like to you?

In essence, success doesn’t have to be about achieving a big milestone. That’s not to say that milestones such as new jobs and promotions aren’t important. They are.

• But that meeting where you leveraged a new communication technique and earned a new stakeholder’s trust and created a happier conversation for both of you? That’s a success.
• That pilot project you did using a new business analysis technique? That’s a success.
• That contract job that in the best of worlds leads to a full-time opportunity, and in the worst of scenarios expands your business analysis experience? Success.

I can tell you what it looks like to me and when I see it in others, but only you will know what it looks like to you. My challenge to you is not to blow success up into something so big you never achieve it. Make it small. Celebrate now. And you’ll get to those big successes much, much sooner.

The only failure is absence of forward progress. Failure is not experimenting with the new technique because you might not get it right. Failure is not sending your resume because you might hear “No.”  You are too special for that. Your life is too short to be doing less than fulfilling work. Your life is too short to wait until later to be fairly compensated.

We are a community of business analysts. We make change. We improve organizations. The world needs us to do what we do. The world needs your successes – the big and the small.

Have you ever heard stakeholders say things like:

“We don’t have time for up-front enterprise analysis… we just need to get going!”

“Why do I need requirements?  It’s simple – I just want xyz system. That’s my requirement. Now go deliver it, by next Tuesday please.”

“Why do we need to understand the ‘as is’ system – surely we can just worry about the changes?”

“Why do you keep asking me about business goals and objectives?  That’s not for you to worry about.”

If you haven’t ever heard sentiments of this type, I am extremely jealous!  I know from my work with organizations and BA practitioners in the UK, that misunderstanding, and in some cases resistance against the BA role does occur.  Sometimes it feels like they don’t really want a BA at all.

As a community, it’s easy to blame the stakeholders for misunderstanding the BA role.   “Those annoying stakeholders… why don’t they understand the benefits that structured change and analysis can bring to them?”   However, I think it’s time for us as a community to turn the conversation around.

A Challenge: The Cocktail Party Test

One of the challenges we face in articulating the value we add can be illustrated with what I call the “cocktail party test”.   Imagine you’re being introduced to a new friend at a party – someone you’ve not met before.  They don’t work in business change, in fact they’ve never worked in a project environment at all.  Perhaps they’re a chef or a baker.  Imagine you tell them that you’re a business analyst—and you’re met with a blank stare.   Followed by the question: “What does that mean?”

How would you explain your role to them? Take a moment to consider this before reading further.

This is what some people describe as an “elevator pitch”, and many BAs (myself included) find it incredibly difficult to succinctly and meaningfully describe the role and the BA value proposition.  What we do is so broad—we work on projects from conception to realisation—and it’s hard to cut down the essence into a single, snappy sentence. Particularly to someone whose role is outside of business change.

It’s like there’s a brick wall…

Add into the mix that if you ask 50 different BAs to describe the role, you’ll get 50 different descriptions, all of which are probably perfectly correct.  There will undoubtedly be some areas of controversy; what counts as “systems analysis” or “design” varies between organizational contexts. So, if as a community of analysts we can’t agree on a succinctly and useful definition of our role,  no wonder our stakeholders are confused!

You may ask “why does this matter?”  History is littered with expensive project failures… and we know that good quality business analysis (along with our change colleagues – project managers, architects etc.) can avoid this. But, sometimes it feels like there’s a brick wall between us and our stakeholders.   We know that we can help them so much… if only they’d engage us earlier.  If only they’d let us help them before key design decisions were made.   But they don’t yet know the breadth of problems we can solve for them.

The million dollar question:

So my final question:  Does anyone ever really want a BA anyway?  Or a project manager for that matter, or an architect? Controversially, I think the answer is no.  To draw on the commonly quoted cliché… people don’t buy drills because they want a drill.  They buy a drill because they want a hole in the wall.  In the same way, people engage BAs and other change professionals because they want effective business change that delivers business and customer value.  Sounds obvious, right?

However, this provides a useful lens to break down the brick wall of misunderstanding.  When we’re faced with scepticism, we need to break it down – brick by brick – by explaining and demonstrating how we add value in the context of the change that the business needs and wants.  Then, we need to faithfully deliver that change.

We can’t bulldoze down the brick wall, but through reliable and consistent delivery, mixed with superior stakeholder management and marketing, we can nibble it away—a brick at a time… leading to better quality earlier engagement and better quality project and business outcomes.

Are BAs difficult people?

Or, to look at the question differently, how can business analysts, despite their best efforts, be difficult?

Actually, the reverse is true.

The least difficult of all people are attracted to the BA role because the requirements of the role itself are difficult.

What we are required to do as BAs is difficult, maybe not for us, but for those that engage us and those that work with us. And this can make us be perceived as difficult to deal with, which is why soft skills are so incredibly important for success in this role.

Let’s look at why what we do as business analysts is inherently difficult for us and for our stakeholders. Let’s understand why we are difficult.

We Have to Say “No” or “Not Now” or “That’s Last on the List.”

Part of scoping a project that can be realistically achieved (i.e. requirements that are implementable within the project’s constraints) means saying “no.” Sure, we can help our stakeholders scope out a beautiful solution and they might love us for it. But at the end of the day, we deliver value when something gets delivered and change is made. Beautiful solutions on paper might have intrinsic value, but they don’t have real, practical value. They don’t generate anything in the way of business results.

Saying “no” and helping our stakeholders prioritize is the difficult work that BAs must do.

The Ambiguous Role of the “Liaison.”

Few aspects of our role come under more direct attack than that of “liaison.” I myself have been guilty of thinking of myself as a “go between.” In reality, as I wrote in a recent StickyMinds article, titled Three Essential Elements of Business Analysis,

At our best, business analysts engender collaboration amongst diverse members of a cross-functional team involving various departments within the organization and levels in the organizational hierarchy.

Getting everyone in a room to discuss a problem and find a suitable solution requires strong leadership and advanced communication skills. Bringing together the right business and technology stakeholders and keeping the discussion at the right level so everyone is engaged and time is used wisely takes a certain finesse.

These are difficult meetings to lead and difficult to participate in. Depending on your stakeholder’s role and competency, they might feel like their knowledge is challenged, their job is on the line, or that they have something to contribute but don’t know the right way to say it.

Change is Hard.

A recent course participant let me know her key takeaway came from the fact that I asked her to use a different template than she usually would to document a business process. She found using a new template to do a familiar activity a difficult task and, in the process, she felt like she had walked in the shoes of her subject matter experts for a day. She had a new appreciation for how difficult it was for them to change the way they have always done things, even when the change would make their job easier or the process more efficient.

The truth behind this realization is that change is hard. And as BAs, we help a lot of people change.

Another student wrote to me about a project she led as a BA intern. She’d discovered an elegant solution that was going to help the business be more efficient, but she faced resistance in discovering the information and incorporating the change.

Her question: Is it always like this?

My answer: Yes, most of the time.

Even with supportive leadership and willing stakeholders, change is still hard. You will face resistance. In fact, part of the value of the BA role is working through the resistance to achieve a positive result.

For New BAs, It’s Difficult to be Difficult.

I hope I’ve made it apparent now that sometimes being difficult is just the reality of the game. We have to lead stakeholders through difficult tasks like scoping projects, understanding models, and, often the worst of it, making decisions.

Part of gaining your confidence as a BA is embracing these challenges as learning opportunities. Part of becoming a great BA is getting our stakeholders to do difficult things, love us for it, and want to work with us again.

But getting to this point means that you take the difficult road, not the easy one.

• Instead of letting our stakeholders put everything they want into the requirements spec, we lead them through a prioritization process and help them see how prioritization helped them get more of the right stuff done (instead of just less stuff done).
• Instead of allowing conflicting stakeholders to duke it out and asking for their decision to document in the spec, we jump in and help them work through the issue and come to a shared solution. In the process, we help elevate everyone’s understanding of the issue and of each other.
• Instead of allowing a passive sign-off and waiting for the inevitable changes to come later in the process, we force true understanding and surface as many issues as possible as early as possible. We play the bad guy so IT or QA or the technical writer doesn’t have to.

Being a BA is Not for the Faint of Heart.

As much as we do here to help aspiring BAs find their path and as much as I want to help as many talented professionals as possible get started in their BA careers (and if you are one of them and new to Bridging the Gap, please join our free BA career planning course), I have to be honest and let you know that being a BA is not for everyone. If the idea of working through these sorts of challenging situations and investing in continuous improvement of your soft skills, especially your communication, leadership, and relationship-building skills, is not compelling, then this is not a good career choice for you.

It’s difficult to be difficult and do difficult work. But it’s also immensely rewarding.

In the words of one of my most trusted mentors, “if it were easy, anyone could do it.”

Click here to read why your organization needs you to step up.

• You hit roadblocks; you work around them.
• You don’t hear from anyone for months then you get 5 interviews in one week.
• You plug along adding value, getting very little feedback, and then seemingly out-of-the-blue you learn about a new internal opportunity.

Anyone who has successfully made a BA career change will tell you that when that opportunity came, it felt quite serendipitous. As much as we love to plan, we cannot plan a career transition in a perfectly linear step-by-step way. They are simply too unpredictable because you are at the mercy of many factors you can’t directly control.

I’ve watched a lot of people navigate this career change. Here are the signs I look for to know they are moving, not stuck.

#1 – You are Meeting Concrete Goals

When we put together professional development plans, a common tendency is to capture a set of activities we can do, but not make them very concrete. Here are some examples:

• Make LinkedIn connections.
• Go to networking meetings.
• Learn new skills.

#2 – You are Applying Your Training

I always get nervous when someone emails me and starts by listing the various training courses they’ve participated in. Participating in training is not itself progress. (Yes, this is coming from someone who provides business analysis training for a living!) Leveraging what you learn to take on new responsibilities or identify transferable skills is progress. Training can help you do that.

Someone with traction in their career is engaging in purposeful learning. They have specific expectations as to what they will achieve through training and are taking action based on those expectations. They also happen to be my favorite type of customer because I get to see them do amazing things and feel a small part of their success.

But I digress. Let’s move on to sign #3 that you are making progress and not spinning, even if you are not seeing big success signs all around you.

#3 – You are Getting Calls

If you are searching for a job, you are getting calls about potential jobs and landing some job interviews. They might not all be a perfect fit. But, if you compare the calls you are getting this month to those from last month, they are, relatively speaking, a closer fit to what you are looking for.

#4 – You are Hearing “No”

This one might be counter-intuitive, so let me explain.

• “No” is different than the dead silence of no response.
• “No” typically comes with information as to why your qualifications are not a good fit for a particular opportunity.
• “No” is not a rejection of you. It’s a “not now” or “not in this situation” or “not a good fit.”

Dead silence does not help you at all, which is what often happens if your career transition activities are limited to submitting 10 job applications a day via a job board or participating in self-learning without sharing the results of your work. If you are only getting dead silence from your activities, you might be busy, but you are not making progress.

If you are hearing “no,” you are putting yourself in a position to learn, and thereby making some progress. Which leads me to my next point.

#5 – You Are Learning From the Marketplace

In my philosophy training, I learned about a concept called “arm chair experiments.” The idea was you sit in a big comfy arm chair, consider a set of hypotheses, and then think through the implications of those hypotheses. You emerge a more enlightened soul, but you haven’t necessarily proved anything.

In the context of a career transition, you can get stuck in arm chair experiments too. Or, you can do things that give you real information, such as talk to recruiters, apply to jobs and follow-up on your applications, and discuss career options with your manager.

It’s easy to sit back and make a set of assumptions about how your experience will be valued. And it’s easy to do so and be wrong.

Those who are putting out a consistent stream of feelers have real information to work with and are moving forward. Those who are conducting arm chair experiments are stuck trusting their own (often mistaken) assumptions.

#6 – You Are Validating Your Learning

Sometimes I’ll hear someone say that one recruiter told them X was a bad idea. And they stopped doing X. Oftentimes X is something very worthwhile, like soliciting LinkedIn recommendations, applying to jobs just a slice beyond their qualifications, or reaching out directly to hiring managers.

Yes, feedback from the job market is important, but it’s also important to validate one person’s opinion against those of others and to understand why this particular person is giving you this particular piece of advice. Questioning well-intentioned advice gives you a broader perspective and helps you avoid being busy without making progress.

#7 – You are Revising Your Approach

A career transition is a learning process. Every time you submit a resume, interview for a job, or talk to another business analyst you can learn something about your local BA job market and the value of your experience.

This means that your plan will change. You might start pursuing opportunities internally and switch your focus to transitional roles at new organizations. Or vice versa. You might switch from applying to 10 random jobs per day to submitting custom, well-researched applications to 5 on-target jobs per week.

As long as you are setting concrete goals, learning from the marketplace, and validating your learning, you will revise your approach as many times as you need to until you achieve your career goal.

Career transitions are not a linear process. Revisions are a sign of progress.

The Most Important Thing

The most important thing not to do is to substitute effort for progress. The most important thing to do is look for any external sign of success and celebrate it.

In fact, if you’d like a little dose of celebration and an idea of what success look like, I suggest checking out this post next:

http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/what-does-success-look-like/

For some reason, this feels like a difficult conversation. But it doesn’t have to be.

This feels like a difficult conversation because there is a bit of fear that can surface on both sides. For you, the fear is that your boss might say “no” and what that means. For your boss, it’s trading something that’s working, even if it’s not working well, for an unknown and what that might mean about how she looks to her boss.

At the end of the day, it’s likely that your boss cares about a few key things and once she hears you confirm that her fears aren’t based in reality, then you are likely to get permission to take on a new task.

(Just watch out, because this can be a slippery slope…but a very good one if you want it to be!)

#1 – I’ll Continue to Fulfill My Day-to-Day Responsibilities.

Most of you have too much to do, not too little. So when you go to your boss asking to do something else, the logical assumption to be made is that you need your boss to take something off your to do list.

Do you?

If you don’t, you want to let her know why and how. How can you do something new and fulfill your existing responsibilities? Or, even better, how can you do this new task and fulfill your existing responsibilities better? If your boss hears this, she may not even need to hear the next two things. That’s how important it is.

Now, if you can’t honestly say this, then it helps to go in with a plan.

• How do you propose to have your existing responsibilities fulfilled while you complete a new task?
• Can you mentor someone more junior in your department?
• Delegate to someone who has the time?
• Get the new person to do it? (And, while I’m thinking of it, any time a new hire is being made is an excellent time to be proactive about shifting your role, as there is a new person waiting to take on the tasks you need to hand off to make your career goals possible.)
• Complete the activity, just on a different schedule?

Yes, it’s your boss’s responsibility to ensure all the work gets done…but she’s done that by hiring you. Recognize that in your request you are creating more work for her, and help her sketch out an achievable, sensible plan.

#2 – I Can Do This.

While your boss typically has a good idea of your capabilities, it might be narrow or she might be missing windows into some of your special skills, particularly your business analysis skills.

Therefore, when she hears, “I want to try X,” she thinks, “I need to help you with X.”

But maybe you’ve got that covered. If you’ve found a book, an online resource, or a course to take on your own time, you may not need help with X, just permission to do X.

Alternatively, you may have found a mentor in your organization who has already taught you to do X or has committed the time. If any of this is the case, let your manager know so she doesn’t fill in your request with her own story about how she needs to support you.

Now, it may be that you don’t have this covered and do need your manager’s help. Recognize that this makes the request on her time a bit bigger and be ready to let her know exactly what help you need:

• money for training,
• review and feedback,
• permission,
• soliciting stakeholder involvement, etc.

The more specific you can be, the easier it will be for her to say “yes” as she isn’t committing to an ambiguous task.

#3 – This is Important Because ____.

While we already know that doing this task is important to you, why would it also be important to your boss? Does it help solve a problem, prepare for a new and bigger type of project that’s coming soon, or stand to make your department more reputable or efficient? The important thing here is to look at things from your boss’s perspective, not just your own, and ask what benefit you doing this task can have for your boss.

For example,

• I know we’re hiring a new person to help with this task. When I first started, I made a series of mistakes that I didn’t need to make. If I document this business process, I can review it with the new person and help them be more successful right away.
• Last time we did a project like this, we found several errors after the software was released. In fact, 15 customers called to complain! If I help organize user acceptance testing and detail out some test scenarios, I think we can cut that down significantly.
• We’re consistently inconsistent and it’s causing confusion when new people work together. By documenting the process and reviewing it with the team, I can help us get on the same page, work more effectively, and work more consistently.

With these three communication points prepared, you are not guaranteed to get your boss’s blessing, but you are definitely stacking the decks in your favor. And those that consistently stack the decks in their favor eventually draw a Royal Flush.

Interested in learning more?

Click here to read how to be the one good things happen to << those happen to be my top 6 career management lessons.

As I’ve been thinking about eggs, it got me revisiting the chicken-and-egg scenario for aspiring BAs. You know the dilemma: I can’t get a BA job without experience but I can’t get experience without a BA job.

So, what comes first the business analyst or the business analysis experience?

My answer: They both happen at once.

Let me explain. Being a business analyst is 80% mindset. It’s more about how you approach a problem or an opportunity than what your title is or even what responsibilities you have at work.

This reality empowers you because while you can’t control what your boss asks you to do or what your job title is, you can control your mindset.

• When your boss asks you to add a new field to the database, do you take the time to understand what business process requires this?
• When a customer calls to complain that your product “doesn’t work,” do you look at things from their perspective and how the tool you support works within their process (i.e. using a few elicitation techniques) or do you rattle off product specifications and claim the product works “as designed.”
• When a co-worker complains about the input they receive from your department, do you put up a wall of defense or jump in and discover how the hand-off works between your respective departments?

(By the way, if you are looking for more helping stepping through this process of looking at problems, building a BA mindset, and even racking up some valuable business analysis experience along the way, the virtual courses in our professional development series are designed to help you apply BA techniques whether or not you are employed as a BA.)

By focusing on the business process and the root cause of the problem, you can be a self-proclaimed business analyst doing business analysis work before anyone ever anoints you with the business analyst job title. By reframing the opportunities right in front of you, you can cultivate the mindset of a business analyst and at the same time build a business analyst work experience worthy of adding to your resume or chatting with your boss about come performance review time.

It’s time to break the egg.

>>Looking for More Opportunities?

Here are some articles to help you cultivate your business analyst mindset:

53 Tips for Discovering All the Requirements

How to Expand the Work History Section of Your Resume

5 Processes Worth Mapping

And you won’t want to overlook How to Start a Business Analyst Career, the most comprehensive guidebook available to help you craft a plan to get started as a business analyst.

You finally find a job as a business analyst! You start your new job with high energy. But then days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months. One day you wake up and realize that while you might have the business analyst title, this isn’t at all what you expected out of a business analyst job.

Two of our community members are dealing with this very issue.

I need help with a bit of an identity crisis. I was recently hired as an IT business analyst. After 6 months on the job I realize that what they really want is more like a project coordinator or admin assistant. My boss forbids me to write design documents or detailed requirements for our software projects. How can I turn this around, or is it likely to be a mistaken hire?

***

 I recently made a big change; moved overseas and managed to get a Business Analyst position coming from a more Service Delivery in IT/Telecommunications background. However the job hasn’t been what I expected so far…I have been here for almost year and while I think I have done some good stuff here like writing training and other documentation as well as testing some pretty complex solutions, I haven’t really had the opportunity to do any of the core BA activities. What advice would you have for this sort of situation?

What’s going on here? There are a few reasons why this might happen.

The Job Title Was Wrong In the First Place

It may be that the manager or human resources professional in charge of putting together the job description simply titled it wrong. Take a second look at your job description. Do the responsibilities line up with the definition of a business analyst role?

If there isn’t a fair amount of overlap in responsibilities, you have the title but not the role.  You’ll need to determine if you can turn this role into a business analysis role, move into another role in the organization that does have business analysis responsibilities, or if it’s time to move on by moving out.

Your Manager Doesn’t Understand Business Analysis

Perhaps you have the title and the job description is a fairly close match to a true business analysis role. Then what?

Well, if your job description says “analyze requirements” but your manager forbids you to write detailed requirements documentation, then it might be that your manager doesn’t truly understand what it means to be a business analyst. This is an opportunity to educate your manager. Use references from books and websites (like this one maybe!) to help communicate how you could be helping the organization.

But this conversation should not be one-way.

Take time to understand why your manager hired a business analyst in the first place. In that answer lies the value of employing a business analyst to your manager and the seeds of some real business analysis responsibilities. For example, if your manager wants “requirements analyzed” or “clarity for the dev team” but doesn’t want a “detailed requirements spec,” understand what they are expecting. Ask for work samples, templates, or a detailed explanation of what’s required.

It may be that you two are using different language to talk about the same deliverable or the same language to talk about different deliverables. Getting more specific can often clear up these misunderstandings. And this leads us to our next possible issue.

More Pressing Matters Take Priority

If none of the above fits, it’s quite possible your manager hired you to do business analysis but organizational priorities have since shifted. Since the skill set of a business analyst tends to help us do well in a wide variety of roles, they reassigned you to more pressing tasks.

If this is the case, it’s time for a heart-to-heart conversation with your manager. You deserve to understand if this is a temporary sidetrack or a complete redefinition of your role. With this information in hand, you can make a good decision about staying put or pursuing other opportunities.

Choose Your Path

No matter where this analysis takes you, realize that you always have a choice and it’s your responsibility to choose.

• You can choose to stay and do the work in front of you to the best of your ability, letting go of the resentment and frustration.
• You can choose to gradually expand your role to higher-level responsibilities and inch your way into business analysis.
• You can choose to move into a new role in a new department or a new company, with more potential and opportunity.

Whatever you choose, we at Bridging the Gap are here to support you in expanding your skills and experiencing more confidence and success as a business analyst. Be sure to check out our online business analyst training and business analyst template toolkits. And don’t miss the book on getting started as a business analyst – How to Start a Business Analyst Career.

When I was preparing for my CBAP, I learned that it had been really easy to scan the BABOK and say, “I’ve never done that.” But when I dug deeper during exam preparation, I discovered my 10+ years of business analysis experience was even more relevant than I thought.

If I twisted my view of the world just a little, I could see where I had not fully appreciated what I was able to do as a BA and often why I was able to succeed as a BA.

What’s amazing is that this activity, to deeply appreciate your experience and learn to talk about your experience in the terms that are quickly becoming standard within our profession, has great intrinsic value, even if you don’t care a darn about the CBAP.

You might find value if:

• You are reworking your resume or preparing for a business analyst job interview and you want to incorporate BA appropriate BA terminology.
• You think you might have some business analysis experience, but want to see how qualified you are as a business analyst.
• You’ve been putting off your CBAP application because documenting your BA work experience overwhelms you.

The BABOK Tasks

Here are the tasks from the BABOK v2 we were able to address before BABOK v3 was released. Use these stories as a guidepost to discovering your own relevant business analysis career experiences.

• Getting Elicitation Right – With Preparation (BABOK 3.1)
• Do You Define the Business Need? (BABOK 5.1)
• Evaluate Solution Performance (BABOK 7.6)
• Do You Have a Favorite Elicitation Activity? (BABOK 5.2)
• The BABOK might not be a methodology, but the BA still needs one (BABOK 2.1)
• It’s Not “All Requirements” – Assumptions and Constraints Matter Too! (BABOK 6.4)
• Mind the Gap – The Capability Gap (BABOK 5.2)
• Are You Responsible for the Solution? (BABOK 7.1)
• Business Analysts Plan to Plan (BABOK 2.3)
• Good Things Come in Nice Packages (BABOK 4.4)
• Oh where, oh where does this requirement belong? (BABOK 7.2)
• The Value of Reusable Requirements (BABOK 4.3)
• Let Your Stakeholders Know You Heard Them (BABOK 3.3, 3.4)
• What are your requirements verification practices? (BABOK 6.5)
• How to Distinguish Requirements Validation and Verification (BABOK 6.6)
• Let Your Stakeholders Know You Heard Them (BABOK 3.3, 3.4)

>>Learn More About Becoming a CBAP or CCBA

Interested in becoming a CBAP or CCBA? We cover 8 steps to the CBAP certification, that will take you to just learning about the certification to successfully sitting for the exam.

Click here to read the article

How Technical Awareness Will Set You Apart

At a CIO Panel put together by the Cincinnati IIBA Chapter as part of their professional development day earlier this year, the panelists emphasized again and again the need for strong business analysts to be aware of emerging technologies and how these new possibilities might impact the businesses in which they work. They painted a picture of IT-savvy business users coming to the project with new ideas and expecting the BA to be able to keep up with the conversation or perhaps even drive it into new territory.

In other contexts, I’ve seen BAs (or been the BA) with some awareness of new possibilities helping the business stakeholders break out of their rut of expecting little from IT and see into the realistic future of how to leverage new tools to improve their business process, or increase their effectiveness.

Regardless of the BA’s role of defining the solution, being aware of the solution options just makes good career sense. For one thing, it can help us hold our own in conversations with our stakeholders. For another, it can help us come up with new and innovative solution approaches to address critical business needs.

What Technologies to Be Aware Of

“Technology” is one of those terms that is just about as broad as “Business.” It can mean and include many things. When we talk about becoming more aware of emerging technologies, what, exactly does this mean? Emerging technologies could include any of the following:

• New tools and third-party software applications. For example, if you are in publishing, the latest content management technology would be especially relevant.
• Capabilities of custom-coding technologies (such as .NET or Java). More than a few years back, I remember learning that .NET 2.0 made a certain kind of real-time data processing fast and efficient, essentially blowing away a problem I’d worked with on a team a year earlier (coding in the 1.0 version) for months without a good resolution.
• New technical developments related to your industry or business domain. Are there new tools or capabilities your partners are making available which will also be available to your competitors?
• Social media applications. External technologies such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, 4Square, etc enable organizations to communicate with customers and potential customers in new ways. Because they are supported external to your organization, they can sometimes provide very cost effective ways of meeting new business needs. For example, could marketing’s new idea for a community site be fulfilled by a Facebook fan page?

Resources Available on Emerging Technologies

One of my favorite new magazines is FastCompany. This is not just a tech magazine. As I read, I learn not just about what’s new and interesting but about how other businesses are applying these technologies, gaining a blend of new business and technical ideas in one swoop.

Other resources include CIO.com (or the print magazine), Mashable.com, and Forbes Tecnnology.

And one very important resource to keep in mind is your own professional network. With so many possibilities, we can do much better if we pool our resources. Whether that means you form a small group of BAs who share emerging technologies of particular interest, attend a local professional meeting of IT professionals, or find an enterprise architect or two in your network (I’m lucky, I’m married to one) to meet for lunch on occasion and hear about the latest developments, finding a way to discuss these ideas with others will make the ideas (which might seem outlandish at times) more concrete.

I’m the biggest culprit when it comes to seeing a new technology — my immediate reaction is almost always “what would I do with that?” And the answers almost always surprise and enlighten me.

Laura, I wanted to let you know that your article on system knowing and BA competencies has been a critical article for me, as this both encouraged me to make a recent job transition, and it has been assisting me in pulling through that transition. In short, I began questioning my skillset and considering if I was an effective Business Systems Analyst, or if I was relying on my technical and systems knowledge to see me through. When I initially encountered this article, I put a two-fold plan into action: a. achieving the CBAP certification (I suppose as ‘proof’ of my BSA legitimacy, as well as an avenue to opening new opportunities), and b. breaking away from my current domain and existing systems knowledge (with which I had grown comfortable) to a completely different domain in which I had no little to no prior knowledge.

It was a frightening choice, and I had to keep telling myself why I was making the move. When I finally made the move, I had to once again tell myself why I had made the move. Even now, when I get discouraged and crave the familiarity of old systems, I realize I need to maintain faith in my BA competencies (I might make a case that the BA profession is in itself a ‘system’!). I admit, I was surprised that I was hired into a new domain sector (even if inside the same industry), so I consider myself lucky to have been hired by someone with the foresight to recognize that BA/BSA skills need not be systems nor domain specific.

Clearly, Eve is taking on the right challenges and taking ownership of her career. Clearly she sees herself as part of the BA profession and is focused on staying relevant. Clearly, we are really lucky to have her here at Bridging the Gap.

My challenge to you this week is to consider whether or not you are taking on the right challenges to move your career forward. Are you stuck in a comfortable place where new challenges are few and far between? Or, are you taking steps to put yourself in the uncomfortable situations that create growth. I dare you to take a critical look at where you are at, and where you are headed and see if it might make good career sense to stretch yourself just a bit farther.

>>Get Help Stretching

Our course participants tell us that while participating in our business analyst training programs, they stretch their skills farther than they expected to. Our instructor-led training includes a unique combination of on-demand content, 1-1 instructor support, and live webinar interaction that helps you stretch your skill set. You leave not only with knowledge but also new experiences (and PDs or CDUs too).

Click here to check out business analyst course offerings.

Regardless, how others’ perceive our work is critical to improvement and that’s a concept that’s built right into all of our instructor-led courses here (this is one of the many attributes that makes them unique in the marketplace). Understanding how our work is perceived gives us critical information when it comes to increasing our value and improving the actual work that we do.

But how do we come to understand others’ perceptions? One word: feedback. We need to hear or read what they actually think about what we are doing day-to-day.

OK, but how do we get it?

Here are a few techniques I’ve used to get feedback on my work, even when I’m a consultant and there are no performance reviews or formal evaluations.

1 – Ask For Feedback on a Deliverable or Meeting

Sometimes it can be tough to ask for direct feedback. And others might think that it’s the job of our manager to give us that feedback. So asking for feedback on a deliverable, such as a requirements specification, or a meeting, can be a nice way to slide around this dilemma.

I particularly like to ask for feedback on my meetings. I’ll wait for a meeting that comes to a close a bit before the scheduled time, and then casually ask participants to share any feedback on the meeting. I’ll say something like:

We’ve been running meetings the same way for awhile and it would be great to know how this is working for you. Do you see any areas we could improve? Or, is there a way I could help run these meetings more effectively?

Or

This is the first time we’ve tried this format for a meeting. How did it go? Anything we should adjust for next time?

Now, when I receive feedback, I tend to interpret it directly. I incorporate the feedback into improving the meeting, but also use it to evaluate my skills and find ways to improve more generally. For example, if someone says that it would be more helpful to have a visual instead of a text document, I’ll not just make this adjustment for the next time, but also reflect on how I could have anticipated this request and improved the meeting, thereby honing my meeting preparation skills.

2 – Watch For Non-Verbal Feedback

While our teammates might not want to give us direct feedback, few can help giving at least some feedback non-verbally. This might be as obvious as an eye roll (I’ve had it done to me) or as difficult-to-spot as a slightly puzzled look. Either way, being hyper-aware of this non-verbal feedback can create an opportunity for more feedback. Take the chance to ask the person, in a non-threatening way, if they have any ideas for how to improve whatever it is that you are discussing. Or simply ask if they have anything to add.

The challenge with non-verbal feedback is that you don’t necessarily know the trigger or the meaning. You could think that eye roll has to do with what you just said when the reality is that a rude teammate just noticed your lunch in your teeth! Without validating and drawing out the real feedback, you risk changing behavior that doesn’t need improvement at all.

3 – Ask for Direct Feedback

Some organizations support direct peer feedback via formal 360 review processes, which is great. But in lieu of a formal structure, simply asking your peers for feedback on your work could turn up some hidden gems. Instead of asking for general feedback, ask specific questions, focus on the impact of your work, and try to ask questions framed by the goals of the team. Some possibilities include:

• How did you see my efforts contributing to the success of this project?
• What did I do that was particularly helpful to you?
• Do you see any ways I could have made contributions to help alleviate some of the issues we faced as a project team?
• I felt like this {meeting, email chain, etc.} didn’t go so well and I’d like to improve how I handle similar situations in the future. Do you have any specific suggestions for me based on your own experience?

The trick is to be sincere and open-minded. As soon as you try to defend yourself, you are likely to shut the other person down. Instead, ask clarifying questions and, if appropriate, for advice.

Since peers might have a limited perspective of what great business analysis looks like, it’s a good idea to ask several peers similar questions and compare notes. It’s also important to reflect deeply on what you learn. Or, discuss the feedback you’ve received with a senior BA, mentor, manager to validate it and decide how to improve based on what you learned.

>>Improve Your Requirements Writing Skills

Looking for practical ways to reduce requirements defects while also improving your requirements specifications? Check out one of our business analysis training courses:

• Business Process Analysis
• Use Cases and Wireframes
• Data Modeling for Business Analysts

At Bridging the Gap, we help you start your business analyst career and gain confidence in your business analysis skills.

Could you provide tips to not appear ‘meek’ in interviews and during your first days on the job? When I start a new job I’m usually quiet while I listen and gather information. I am called a sunny person because I smile and talk positively around everyone. So, the context is from other people that are going to be working with me, after 5 days on the job – observing me. My latest manager has reported this to me that the functional analysts are worried because I seem meek. I checked with a former boss and he thought so too at the beginning. So, I guess having been seen like this in several jobs – I don’t think that is the way I want to come across. How do you seem strong, capable and intelligent without being meek, or going the other way and seeming like a bulldozer?

Laura’s answer:

I think I often act similarly in a new position and it is great that your latest manager took the opportunity to give this feedback…otherwise how would one know about how such laudable actions (taking time to understand before being understood, and cultivate a positive relationship with your stakeholders) are being perceived?

As I thought this one over, a story came to mind. In my director role I interviewed someone to take over the PMO for our organization. She had worked with our CIO previously, so her capabilities were known. After we had each met with her, our VP of Technology made an interesting point. He thought that as a leader of project managers, she seemed like she might be a pushover and he was wary about bringing her onto our team because she didn’t seem like she could stand up to the business. The CIO (who was anything but meek herself) reported that was one of her strong traits. She created the perception that she was acquiescent, but when circumstances dictated it, she held fast. So she built strong relationships without being confrontational and created a position of strength for her team.

Perhaps part of this story rings true to you? And you might wonder whether it’s worth changing this initial perception, and what position of strength might be sacrificed in the long run, if you did?

But perhaps some expectation setting is in order, and some small tweaks might help you. Another story comes to mind, but this might seem unrelated so please bear with me at first.

I’m a writer and a note-taker. If I’m in a meeting, I write notes. As I prepare for my CBAP, I’m practically rewriting the whole BABOK by hand. When I interview someone for a new position, I also take copious notes. It’s how I process information best, and when I was sometimes in meetings 5-6 hours per day, I needed to use every tool at my disposal to ensure I processed the information coming in.

But I noticed that my note-taking was sometimes having adverse impacts on job interviewees or in 1-1 meetings with staff. Even good candidates get nervous and I realized that my note-taking was sometimes causing them to hesitate and not fully engage in our conversation. So I started a new habit of explaining my note-taking at the beginning of an interview, and let my staff know about it too, just to be sure they understood that regardless of what I thought about what they were saying, I was going to take notes. I apologized if this was distracting and explained my way of processing information.

This seemed to help ease the tension a lot. This habit has filtered over to my consulting where if I’m in a meeting with new stakeholders, I just mention my note-taking habit up front and let them know to expect it. Typically in this situation, I also take the opportunity to cast it as a benefit, letting them know that I take a lot of notes so that I don’t have to come back to them repeatedly with the same questions.

How might this help you? Well, would it make sense to consider being up front about some of the ways you behave that make you be perceived as meek with your manager or other analysts, and provide them with alternate interpretations for these behaviors up front? Possibly let them know that you tend to be acquiescent as you build relationships with new stakeholders and that this has caused you to be perceived as meek in the past, but it really helps you in the long-run get done what needs doing. Perhaps by admitting this “flaw” in the beginning, you’ll be able to control the perception from those who really matter, avoid any negative short-term consequences, and also be able to do your job in the way that makes you successful?

>>Learn More About Starting a New BA Job

What to Expect in a Business Analyst Job Interview

How to Get Noticed for On The Job Opportunities

How to Learn About a New Business Domain

Here are 7 tips for getting the most out of working with a career coach.

1. Have a clear goal for the relationship and a general direction for your career. If you don’t know what you want out of working with a coach, you are likely to be disappointed. If you aren’t sure about your next step, your goal might be to find the direction for your career, that’s OK. But if that’s it, be clear about it.
2. Ask your coach if they can help you achieve your career goals. Sometimes coaches do not have the business analyst skills or experiences you might assume they have and would rather help you find the right person than lead you astray. Be honest and up front about what support you need so they can best support you.
3. Be open and willing to accept help. Oftentimes the advice that comes from my own business coach is completely unexpected. I sometimes find myself thinking he didn’t get it. Then I roll over his input a few times and realize he saw a truth about me or my business that I wasn’t even aware of. And sometimes when working with a coaching client, they shut down every suggestion I make so quickly that we never get anywhere. These relationships tend to fizzle out quickly on both sides. When you work with a coach, be open to the unexpected. (I often say than in requirements elicitation, sometimes my best questions are those that get misunderstood by my stakeholders. It’s the same way when you are working with a coach.)
4. Share your progress. Whether it’s an “aha” moment based on the input from your coach or a total disaster based on advice they gave you, share it. Your coach will learn more about what works for you and what doesn’t and be able to improve their approach to your relationship. A good coach is going to be invested in you personally and want to help celebrate your success.
5. Own the relationship. Don’t expect your coach, even a paid one like me, to drive your bus. As the client, you are in charge of your own career and will do most of the driving in the coaching relationship. This means you come to meetings with questions, feedback, and discussion topics and you do the work that comes from the meeting.
6. Invest for the long-term. From time to time, I receive panicked emails looking for short-term support. At its best, coaching is a long-term relationship and the more the coach knows about the entire context in which you work, the better advice they will be able to give.  This doesn’t happen in a half hour conversation or a quick document review.
7. Engage in a professional relationship. Your coach is not your therapist, your spouse, or your best friend. Don’t treat them like one. They are a trusted professional advisor. That being said, there is a fine line between personal challenges and professional ones.

Along the winding country road that leads to my house there’s a sign posted, hand-painted in large block letters – “Patience & Persistence” is the message to all who go by.  The author’s meaning isn’t clear. From the jumble of in-progress construction projects on the property, perhaps it’s a message of encouragement to the neighbors that soon an eyesore would become a palace.

For me, the message rings of hope … that being focused and tenacious can drive a positive outcome.

I’m smiling as I write this, and it’s not just the bright spring day that has me in a good humor.  I’ve reach a new turning point in my journey to work virtually; the story that I started sharing with you here a year ago has taken a course with the best of all possible outcomes.  Patience and Persistence are responsible for the results, and I can’t help but think back to another time when these characteristics came into play, transcending some very fundamental obstacles in the way of my desired career path as a Business Analyst.

Turning Rejection Into Opportunity: How I Became a BA Intern

My first job after graduating with a BBA in Computer Science was as Benefits Analyst in the HR department, calculating pensions and collecting health care payments.  I won the position mostly due to a Finance class that gave me experience with Lotus 1-2-3, a rare commodity in 1985 (there were few PCs in the office back then, and spreadsheets were found on the ironing board).

But a senior project in system analysis made me aspire to take on the Business Systems Analyst role, a combination of Business Analyst and Project Manager that resided in the IT Department.  To get there I had to migrate from HR to IT, no easy feat since job posting candidates typically had several years’ foundation as a Programmer, with the best and brightest choosing to move into this role with greater influence on solution design and implementation. There were no entry-level positions.

After being rejected from the candidate pool a second time I started considering options outside my company, while at the same time developing a strategy to build my case internally.  The Patience & Persistence approach?

• Expand your network, making the most of new connections made through the interview process.  They all know you’re looking and you never know where a job lead will come from. Bonding with your prospective boss and co-workers will also help them to support a decision in your favor if it ever came up again.
• Repeatedly reach out to your growing network and find ways to help them without anything expected in return. In this way you stay on their radar and show your win/win attitude.  Call it good karma, but in my experience, those who give, get a second look.
• Demonstrate your capabilities in a way that mirrors what your prospects do now and supports what they want to do in the future.  Create deliverables for them or share samples of your work that align with their own work products, in terms of presentation style, charts and graphic exhibits, etc.

Eventually I had a heart-to-heart with the IT Department Head, recapping my assets as someone who was capable of comparable work plus knowledgeable of the business side, someone that might soon be lost to a competitor given no other choice. My arguments prevailed, and together with my new Team Leader, we defined an intern position that would include coaching to fill gaps in my knowledge while I took on IT’s l-o-o-o-n-n-g list of low hanging fruit: short, easy projects that delivered immediate value – and helped me to earn my paycheck as a Junior Business Analyst.

Finding the Path to Your Own Professional Vision

We leave this story at a promising crossroads – a novice BA exploring the possibilities. In my next article we’ll fast forward in time to explore how Patience and Persistence recently helped me to triumph again in my search to become a Virtual Business Analyst.

Think about how you project your capabilities when investigating new opportunities.  In what ways can you better communicate your vision and demonstrate the assets that you bring?

Nothing happens unless first a dream. – Carl Sandburg

The heart of job offer decisions comes back to two key elements:

1. Benefits – What are the benefits of each opportunity in front of you, relative to the short and long-term trajectory of your career?
2. Risk – How much risk are you able or willing to absorb right now in your career?

This sounds familiar right? We do this type of analysis all the time on our projects. This is yet another example where we can use our business analysis skills to help our business analysis careers.

Let’s Look at Risk First

All too often though, we forget the benefits and let the notion of risk freeze us and prevent us from making any decision at all.  Risk is the probability of a negative impact. Let’s take a look at both the negative impacts being in the wrong job could have on your career, and the factors which increase the probability that something negative will happen.

How do you use these factors? Just as an example, let’s take the professional in a typical “jack of all trades” type position. This person wears a lot of hats and is successful mainly based on their deep expertise in a system. Wearing a lot of hats isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it can expose you to multiple responsibilities and increase your marketability in organizations valuing employees who can pitch in and contribute in multiple areas. But it might limit your options when it comes to pursuing more formal roles within a profession, whether business analysis, development, or project management. The quality and depth of your experience may not stack up to someone who has spent the last several years focused on building a career in that profession.

But what about that system expertise? If your expertise is in a mainframe system that the company is visibly retiring bit-by-bit, the value of that expertise is declining every day. That creates job instability for you, unless you can expand your role and develop expertise with a long-term impact on the organization. But other areas of expertise can be very valuable and have long-term marketability, such as expertise in a widely-adopted tool like SAP or Salesforce.com or SharePoint.

Then over on the probability side are all of these factors that might increase the chances that something bad will happen. In immature organizations, we simply don’t do as much business analysis, which can lead to diminished marketability. In highly specialized roles we increase the changes that economic factors will make our roles (and our skill sets) obsolete (think of all those working in the financial sector in and around New York). If our organization does not perceive value in business analysis, then we’re less likely to have the opportunity to take on more advanced responsibilities, progress our careers, and may even face a bit of job instability when the purse strings get tight.

The point is not to rest on any one factor, but to look at all of them and consider where your risk points are and what aspects of your role might counter-balance those risks.

But What If I Needed a Paycheck Yesterday?

We’re not always in a position to make a decision based on the long-term. Sometimes immediate financial or even career concerns are also a significant factor. When you are deciding to look for a new job or bypass a not-so-right job offer, think about  your financial runway.  Entrepreneurs use this concept a lot when they talk about starting a new business.  They ask, “How many months do I have before I simply run out of money?” Your cushion might be a little bigger.  It might be, “How long do I have before I have to start drawing on critical savings to pay the mortgage? ”

Now, Let’s Look at the Benefits

Risks often prevent our clear thinking, so I’ve spent the most time on them. But benefits are important as well.  If you look at where you are today and where you want to be two to five, to ten years down the road – however far you can look, does the opportunity help you take a forward step in that direction?  Or is it in a different direction that might eventually lead to where you want to go? Will you be building valuable career experiences and will you be minimizing your risk?

Warning: Avoid the “Grass is Greener” Syndrome

A lot of times we can look at jobs outside our company and they seem perfect on the outside.  Few people want to tell you the truth in an interview — that the boss micro-manages and the stakeholders avoid you at all costs and it’s just miserable to work here. You might be looking at your own imperfect situation and thinking any situation can be better.

Yes, the grass is always greener somewhere else. Until we get there. Then we sometimes realize they have similar fundamental flaws and our last opportunity didn’t seem quite so bad.

So take that into account and do some diligence around those benefits. Make sure the grass really is greener.

Pulling it All Together

Weigh the pros and cons of all the options available to you, and weigh them not just against the short term of, “What will they achieve for me next month?” but the long term of, “Where do they take me in my long-term career plan?” Look at the relative risks of each situation. After doing your research and looking at the pros and cons, you might take a deep breathe and decide based on your gut — often your gut gives you information that doesn’t show up on any spreadsheet or comparison chart.

And remember, every situation can be influenced by YOU. Careers are not something that happen to us, careers are something that we build in response to the opportunities that we discover along our paths. The decision you make at this juncture could be the most important in your career, or it could be that either answer will lead you where you want to go. I can’t help you see into the future, only make the best decision based on the necessarily limited information you’ll have to make it.

Get the Book

In How to Start a Business Analyst Career, you’ll learn how to assess and expand your business analysis skills and experience.

This book will help you find your best path forward into a business analyst career. More than that, you will know exactly what to do next to expand your business analysis opportunities.

Click here to learn more about How to Start a Business Analyst Career

I was a project manager for 25 years, but for the past 4 years I have been involved in software QA and Process Improvement as a consultant for CMMI and other standards. I’ve been giving serious thought to moving towards a BA emphasis in my career, returning to earlier roots as a systems analyst. However, I’m no longer a ‘spring chicken’ and am wondering if makes sense for a post-60’s skilled/experienced individual to begin contemplating a career in BA? Be honest!

Doug’s Answer:

Pondering a career change at any stage in life is a hefty undertaking, and while I cannot speak directly to the complexities of those past my own age, I can make the attempt to give some general advice. What I see in the poster’s question is a great degree of experience that does not jump right out and say “business analysis”. However, everything this person has done involves a large degree of analysis technique and skill in order to be successful in the above respective roles.

As a PM, this person would have encountered organizational skills and potentially the rigor involved in CMMI-based methodology that typically requires detailed check points and documentation, as well as phase gate approvals. If this person has been in an industry that is under regulation and has the potential for audits, there is even greater emphasis on knowing what must be accomplished besides the actual project work. This brings a high degree of discipline.

As a Process Improvement consultant, this person would have been involved in many efforts that involve changes to organizational structure. This must include a large analysis effort revolving around business unit impact, application impact, infrastructure assets, resource requirements, and even simulated exercises to test potential new processes. Many of the analysis techniques described in the BABOK are used in this area of expertise, such as root cause analysis, decision analysis, interviewing, observation, etc. So, the poster would have gained exceptional experience as an analyst even if that is not what his or her title indicated.

So, to the question then. To me, it would make more sense to not necessarily switch careers but to re-brand your capabilities in a different way that emphasizes your ability to analyze…because that is what this person has been doing essentially. A career switch can be a huge, lengthy and often frustrating undertaking if positions are not forthcoming for the job seeker. My sense is that this poster has a ton of capability to bring to bear and would be better recognized and utilized as a senior consultant that has expertise in guiding analysis efforts for many types of projects. I also think that the job search results might be better than if he/she is marketing himself/herself as a fledgling, yet elder analyst. I don’t believe in job discrimination based on age, but the reality is that it occurs. I would offer the advice that this person should be presented as an experienced mentor who is brought in to resolve issues, so that should be the focus of self-marketing efforts.

Then how does one really get one’s head around how to make that happen, especially if there is no recognition that perhaps analyst skills are already present? Start reading and taking some classes. Read through the IIBA BABOK to recognize skills you already have. Read business analysis articles, blogs and books to recognize how analysts perform their duties formally, in order to understand that much of the current skills really do translate into formal analysis skills.

Finally, you’ll want to sign-up for Laura’s free step-by-step BA career planning course, download Laura’s eBook on How to Start a Business Analyst Career and keep your eyes posted for enrollment into future business analyst training courses.

You could make a lateral move from one role to another: for example, business analyst to project manager (or vice versa) or business analyst to business process engineer, etc. But if you really like your role, but are itching for something new, it might be time to make a lateral move within business analysis. What does this mean?

Well, it means you work on a project or with a department that falls outside of your typical scope of responsibilities. Many organizations that are creating centralized BA teams already support this by assigning BAs to project not based on their background, but based on their availability or fit.

But many BAs work with a single business unit, a single system (or set of systems), and on projects that are roughly the same in approach. Find work in a new domain or try a new approach and you’ve just expanded your awareness of business analysis.

New Stakeholders, New Ticks

Let’s talk about why this happens. When we work with the same stakeholders, we learn what makes them tick. We know that Bob does best at 9 am on Tuesday’s and that we can drop by on Wednesday afternoons. We know he likes visuals, like wireframes. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Over time as you work with the same stakeholders, they learn you and you learn them. Unless one of you is especially difficult, the challenge of figuring out how to work together is gone. Get yourself a new set of stakeholders and you have to go through this learning curve. You’ll also test your people skills big time.

New Systems, New Focus on Analysis

Same thing for systems. Over time you learn what the system does and you subconsciously work through technical challenges in your requirements. You can safely make a lot of assumptions in your analysis because you know the lay of the land. Work on a new system, one in which you are not an expert, and all of a sudden your analysis competencies are tested again and you become more aware of what you do and why you do it.

New Methodology, New Awareness

The same thing happens when you switch methodologies. During my first three positions, I was dealing with new stakeholders and new systems, but used essentially the same methodology. Then I started contract hopping (which is a great way to stack up lateral career moves one after another) and I found myself knee deep in an agile environment.

All of a sudden, my business analysis process was tested. Did I really need that document or that section? Could the same thing be accomplished in a user story? What was missing now that I had this big list of user stories but no big picture? These were questions I grappled with (publicly) and they made me a better business analyst.

Even though I’m still no agile expert, I’ve challenged myself to streamline my processes, focus my efforts, and cut out pieces of requirements documentation that I didn’t even realize were fluff. But I also added some key pieces back in, realizing that agile methods didn’t necessarily create a substitute for great business analysis. This also led to more confidence in my abilities and a better understanding of the value I provide.

New Project, New You!

Unless you are working on the killer of all projects that is a new career-changing experience in an of itself, it may be that a lateral move or a new type of project might be exactly what you need to hit refresh and rekindle your business analysis career path. After all, when the path up seems blocked, it’s up to us to find a work-around.

>>Get Confident in a New Domain

Interested in receiving a comprehensive set of questions you can ask in almost any project context? Want to feel more confident asking questions in a new domain? The Requirements Discovery Checklist Pack includes over 700 questions, categorized and cross-referenced so you can prepare for your next elicitation session with a sense of ease and confidence.

Click here to learn more about the Requirements Discovery Checklist Pack

Michelle’s Response:

After reading this question, I found myself thinking that yes I have been through this before and I have also been able to make this work and have successful sessions with my stakeholders.  The most critical difference that I can see is the stakeholder who can see the value of fixing or changing the process.  Most stakeholders want to be there; they want to be able to help.

However, two thought processes might be happening here:

First, what does a BA do and how can she help me?

Second, how does this change affect me and my team?

Recently I had several business owners miss my meetings or show up late.  When I talked with them, they did not see the value in a business analyst.  They had the understanding that I was an administrative resource who was to be utilized as they wanted – mostly for note taking and for setting up meetings.

Now this is just fine if that was the role I was hired to do, but I was hired to move forward on a business process change.  I talked with them about the change, what I could do to help them and the value I could provide.  Understanding what their process is and being able to represent it during full team sessions is critical.  In addition, bringing back updates to proposed thoughts and ideas becomes valuable to the process owners if they cannot always attend every meeting.  But I could and I would be able to represent their team on their behalf.

Change is such a difficult process to go through whether it is in your personal life or business life.  I always come into a project fully appreciating the change that the business owners will be managing.  I sit down with them, usually one on one (or by conference call, again one on one) first to talk about that change and start building a relationship.  What does it mean for them?   What does it mean for their team?  How does this change affect their process coming into their team and leaving their team?  How do they view this process, and can they find the value in the change?

Then I talk about how I can help with this.  How I can support them with understanding the change, making it work for them, documentation, training, and whatever else they need.  If they see the value then you become part of their team too, and the trust that you build is the most important part of the developing relationship. They start attending your meetings because they trust you and see your role in helping them achieve their goals.

>>Prepare More Effectively For Your Next Meeting

Want to feel more confident asking questions in a new domain and save valuable stakeholder time in the meetings you facilitate? The Requirements Discovery Checklist Pack includes over 700 questions, categorized and cross-referenced so you can prepare for your next elicitation session with a sense of ease and confidence.

Click here to learn more about the Requirements Discovery Checklist Pack

Your annual performance review can be a good time to step back and look at the big picture of your career. It’s often the ideal time to get your manager’s feedback on your skills and solicit support for the following year’s professional development opportunities.

What follows is my strategy for preparing for a performance review meeting, which will help you solicit feedback from your manager and have an open conversation about your career development.

Step 1. Conduct a Self-Review

Take some time to reflect back on your year. What were the highlights and lowlights? What are you especially proud to have accomplished? Looking back over your business analyst experiences can help you see how far you’ve come during the year. It can also help pull together what might seem like scattered experiences into a common theme, helping you identify how to move forward.

If you had performance goals for last year, completing a preliminary self-reviewwill help you prepare for the conversation with your manager about your year’s performance. Most managers will ask you to submit this in writing anyway.

One mistake I see many business analysts make is to focus just one what they did that was “special.” In reality, oftentimes our best work and accomplishments stands out in our fundamental responsibilities. Keeping a project journal can really help make this task easier each year.

Step 2. Identify Questions to Ask During Your Performance Review

Just like a job interview, a performance review should not be a 1-way conversation. Your manager will probably have some questions for you about your career goals in addition to their feedback about your performance. Also prepare some questions to identify what’s going on in your organization as often changes and improvements can lead to new professional development opportunities.

Here are some questions you could ask:

• What are the organization’s key priorities this year?
• What changes will our team / department face this year?
• How can I best contribute to these priorities or changes?
• What resources will be available to me to grow professionally?
• Where would you most like me to improve this year?

Step 3: Prepare an Initial Set of Performance Goals

As you look forward to the coming year, what will you accomplish? How will you invest your time and energy to support your employer and grow your career? You’ll find the most fruitful opportunities in the intersection between your business analyst goals and your employer’s key objectives.

As you think about your goals for the coming year, consider what support you need from your manager to achieve them.

• Do you need business analyst training? And, if so, what’s the budget and timeline? Often manager’s have at least some funds allocated towards training and you may be able to influence where and how they get invested.
• Will you need to be assigned to new types of projects to stretch or hone a specific type of skill? If so, now is the time to put that request in and lay the groundwork for getting assigned to the right kinds of projects.
• Do you need direct support from a coach or a mentor? If so, ask your manager if they’d be willing to mentor or coach you or if there is someone else in your organization available for mentoring.

A little preparation can go a long way to turn what might feel like a tense discussion into a collaborative conversation. Remember, this is your career and your performance review. Your company stands to benefit just as much as you do from your improved performance.

>> Start YOUR Path to Success

If business analysis is a career that you want to pursue, the absolute best next thing to do is to join my free Quick Start to Success Workshop. In that workshop, you will learn more about the business analyst career path as well as details about the business analysis process framework that will give you the structure that you need to manage your day and your projects appropriately.

>> Click here to join the Quick Start to Success workshop <<

The most recent salary survey of practicing business analysts was conducted by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) in 2017. Summary details are available here.

Finding #1: The Business Analyst Salary Continues to Grow, Certification Helps

In the United States, the average business analyst salary is $94,881. This is up from $91,512 in 2013 and $82,493 in 2010.

Of course, salary averages vary widely between countries and based on dollar values and purchasing powers. Worldwide, the average salary for women is $78,980 and men is $75,410.

In comparison, the average salary of top 5 certification holders came in at $85,804, or an 11% increase in earnings, showing a significant advantage to pursuing a certification such as the CBAP.

Finding #2: More BA Experience = Higher Salary

Across the board, the average business analyst salary increased with years of professional experience. Respondents expect an average salary increase of $2,078 / year and individuals entering the BA field expect the largest salary increases.

Unlike previous reports, where education did not have a significant impact on salary, the 2017 report indicated that 79% of respondents hold either a bachelor’s or a master’s degree and that a master’s degree plus experience resulted in $2,566 more in earnings.

What’s more, the average anticipated salary bump in the first 2 years of BA tenure was 37%, meaning that those entering the profession anticipate significant increases over their previous roles.

The good news for you is that even if you’ve never held a titled business analyst job, you may have qualifying business analysis experience. While it’s not a direct output of the report, investing the time in discovering your transferable skills and experiences could make a significant difference in your starting salary in your first or next formal business analyst position.

What’s more, the average tenure of respondents in 2017 was 10 years, the average age is 39 years, and the average age with less than 2 years of tenure is 35.6 years. This data shows that despite new programs for entry-level college graduates, the business analysis profession is largely made up of professionals with deep work experience and professional maturity, and this is consistent with our own experience at Bridging the Gap.

Finding #3: Business Analyst Salaries Diverged Significantly by Industry

In all countries, salaries diverged across industry.  For example, in the 2013 report, in the United States, the lowest paying industry averaged salaries at $81,741 and the highest paying industry averaged salaries at $109,288.

The 2017 report indicated that respondents working in the top 5 industries earn 11-27% more than peers working in other industries.

If you are considering focusing on a specific industry in your business analysis career, the report can help you make a wise financial decision. While exceptions always exist to every average, your choice of industry could have a significant impact on your long-term salary potential as a business analyst.

 >>Learn How to Get Started as a Business Analyst

In How to Start a Business Analyst Career, we discuss all types of business analyst job roles in greater depth and you’ll learn how to assess and expand your business analysis skills and experience.

This book will help you find your best path forward into a business analyst career. More than that, you will know exactly what to do next to expand your business analysis opportunities.

Click here to learn more about How to Start a Business Analyst Career

It is important to have a conscious professional development strategy and this is likely to involve a number of activities.  However, it is good practice to build in professional development to your weekly and monthly schedules.  Professional development doesn’t have to be costly or time consuming, and it’s important not to overlook the experience we gain in our project work.

One of the single biggest ways we develop as BAs is through the work that we carry out day-to-day, and I have found that keeping a project journal is an incredibly useful professional development tool.  It can be tempting to move straight from project to project without taking any time to reflect on what has been learned, but consciously recording relevant information in a journal (acronyms, terminology, lessons learned etc) can be an effective way of crystallising knowledge and storing it for future use.   This can become excellent reference material if you work on a similar project in the future.  The act of reflecting on your progress and recording it, is useful in itself, as it helps you to consolidate your knowledge and consider what you might do differently in future. It can also be useful to review the journal periodically, to reflect on previous projects and ensure any knowledge is carried forward.

You can spend as much or as little time on this activity as you like.  It would be valuable even if you only spent 15 minutes writing a summary after every project engagement.

A very light-weight journal might include:

• Project name
• Date started/date completed
• Techniques used
• Stakeholders worked with
• 3 things that worked well
• 3 things you’d do differently next time
• Biggest learning point
• Acronyms & terminology
• Other relevant information

You can tailor your journal to your particular needs and preferences.  I keep an incredibly light-weight journal.  By keeping the journal short, this makes it very quick to update (which means I am much more likely to do it!).

A project journal can also form a useful part of your stakeholder management strategy.  For example, you might learn that a particular stakeholder likes to receive information in a particular way (perhaps they prefer diagrams, or value telephone calls over e-mails).  It can be incredibly useful to record these preferences, so that you can keep this in mind for any future engagements.

The journal itself can be kept in any format you like.  You could keep it on paper, electronically or even on your iPhone.  I personally keep mine in Excel, as it is easy to sort, search and update. The important thing is to get into the habit of updating it, and allowing time to reflect on your progress.  Why not put a monthly reminder in your calendar, blocking out 15 minutes for reflection?

One final benefit of a project journal is that it provides an excellent repository of information which you can use to periodically update your CV or resume. It will also help you if you decide to apply to become Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP ®) qualified, as you will need to provide evidence of your project experience.

However you address your professional development strategy, I hope that you have found this article useful, and I hope that you consider reflecting on your experiences and keeping a project journal.

>>Invest in Your Professional Development (for free)

Start your business analyst career with our free step-by-step career planning course. Upon joining, you’ll also receive our BA career planning guide and follow-up insider tips via email.

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In flat organizations, you get less time with the boss

As organizations become flatter, the size of staff under any given reporting manager is becoming larger. This leaves them less time to spend with each employee individually. Moreover in many flatter organizations, managers have not just managerial responsibilities, but also strategic project responsibilities. They might be meeting with clients or vendors and leading one or more strategic initiatives for the organization.

At one point in my career 15 people reported to me. I relied on heavily on a mentoring program within the group to help new employees get up to speed and be successful. I relied on my project management team to keep the highest priority projects moving and overcome challenges within a project. While I did my best to stay informed and check in with each person each week, sometimes travel and other distractions got in the way. The individuals on my team who were proactive about keeping me informed also received the most support.

Let’s look at 5 concrete things you can do to get and stay visible.

Idea #1: Send your Manager an Article

Sending an article shows that you are aware professionally and are considering the broader impact of your role and decisions you make day-to-day. Ensure the article is relevant to your organization, in terms of a current priority or a decision that is being discussed. This shows you are becoming aware of the broader challenges your organization is facing and interested in helping out.

Idea #2: Request a 30, 60, or 90 Day Review

Look for feedback about how you are doing. Be prepared to ask questions about where the company is headed so that you can learn how to frame your value in terms the manager will understand. Provided that you get to spend 30 minutes or so with the manager, use this time to learn about his/her preferred methods of communication, current priorities, and challenges. Also ask questions that will help you understand how the perceive your work and what’s most important to them in terms of being successful in that job.

Idea #3: Plan Strategic “Fly-Bys”

One of my past managers would do what we called a “fly by”. He’d come out of a meeting with the board or a call with a client or partner and drop by to land a significant project on your lap. Not a lot of context. Not a lot of direction. Just, “hey can you start looking into this. It’s really important because…”. He nearly always got people to act because of the perceived importance.

Now, I’m not suggesting you try this directly on your boss, but why not drop by just to say “hi” and have a brief conversation? To prepare for this conversation, have one important topic at hand and be clear why it is important within the context of your organization. You could use this to frame an article you sent or to talk about a challenge you just overcame in a project that you think they should know about for some reason.

One topic that your manager will care about. Aim for a 3-5 minute conversation. Don’t sit down unless asked to do so. Just talk for a bit, make your point, get a bit of input, and then leave. If you develop a habit of doing this once every week or two, your manager will learn that you are going to share something relevant and you won’t take an unnecessary amount of their time in idle chit chat.

Idea #4: Submit a Weekly Report by Email

Include your current projects, what you’ve completed, and any outstanding issues. Again, short and informative is key. Make it an easy read that just focuses on the key points. If there are any outstanding issues in the report, you might include them and then use the “drop by” method to ask a question about it.

Idea #5: Leverage your Stakeholders

In many organizations, stakeholders have a lot of influence over which business analysts are assigned to their project. By cultivating strong business stakeholder relationships, using many of the same techniques above, you’ll have your stakeholders talking about you and keeping you visible in discussions or meetings where you might not even be present.

Flatter organizations are becoming more common. Hours of face time with a manager each week is most often not a viable option. It’s not effective way for knowledge workers to make the best possible contributions. But minimal face time should not translate into no face time. It’s important to be proactive about staying visible and I hope these ideas we came up with help you as well.

>>Are You Ready to Hit “Go”?

Staying visible also means being self-directed. Our free step-by-step career planning course walks you through multiple ways to move your BA career forward. Upon joining, you’ll also receive our BA career planning guide and follow-up insider tips via email.

Click here to learn more about the free course

In my previous article for Bridging the Gap, I wrote about the importance of right-sizing your initiatives to get beyond a career plateau as a business analyst. A reader left a comment saying, “if your management listens, you can think about taking initiative, else, its just a waste of time and energy”.

That comment made me realize that we should be discussing also how business analysts can significantly improve their chances of being heard as they try to create new opportunities, from getting help with eliminating skill gaps, to participating on more high-visibility projects. The formula for successfully selling your initiatives to your boss is actually simple, if frequently overlooked by brain-powered workers:

1. understand your management’s framework;
2. persuade your audience not just to accept your point of view, but to take concrete action as a result of it.

In order to sell your ideas effectively, first you must have a clear understanding of what your organization is trying to achieve, and why. This will help you establish a clear “line of sight” between your initiative-taking goals and your team’s and organization’s goals. But you can’t stop there; you also need to present your ideas in a convincing way. If you typically find it difficult to create buy-in for your ideas, read (or reread) Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and start learning the mechanics of persuasion, and practicing the ability to deliver your message to your target audience.

Remember, your ability to “get management to listen to you” is directly dependent on your ability to take information, select key points, and deliver them in a manner that convinces the listeners to accept your message. The way you present your initiatives to your boss (or the people you need approval from) can have a dramatic influence in how your ideas are received.

The steps below, adapted from an article published at The Cranky Product Manager, provides a good framework to help you to achieve this goal:

1. Create a short, easy to read handout for your boss, making the case for what you want, and including if possible several options for him to consider (see an example in the article mentioned above).
2. Make an appointment with your boss to review your handout.
3. Go over your points one by one, finishing with a persuasive review of the benefits for your boss and the company.
4. If your boss doesn’t immediately choose one of your recommendations, negotiate a time frame for a decision, and immediately set a meeting for follow-up.
5. If you get a “no,” don’t get overly frustrated. Try to understand the rationale behind your manager’s decision, focusing on any bottom-line implications, and see if you can come up with a different strategy to get what you want.

Remember the lessons from Made to Stick: a good story engages the listener with something worth listening to. Make your message relevant and interesting to your management, and the probability of your ideas being heard will rise dramatically.

It’s common for me to receive emails from business analysts who are feeling frustrated with their current situation at work, all related to the same theme: the limited business analyst role they are given in their organizations. Frequent complaints include:

• In my company the BA is involved in projects only when all the important decisions have already been made.
• I’m expected to put together requirements documents without enough time to do the necessary analytical work.
• I’m not being involved in business discussions that affect the scope of my projects.

This is clearly an example of the “medium-sized stuckness” situation described by Laura Brandenburg in her article Where is your business analyst career stuck?. These people have hit a plateau in their careers, and most likely are living a vicious cycle that reinforces itself through a feedback loop. Their work isn’t making a big impact in terms of value creation, which makes it almost impossible to change the narrow view that others have about their role and consequently elevate this role to a more influential level in the organization.

In recent articles, I wrote about the importance of making a more compelling case for management to start seeing the BA beyond the presumed role of requirements recorder, and of taking charge of your learning and career development objectives to create opportunities for yourself.

It’s a theme I feel I have to constantly go back to with BAs asking for help with their careers, and I’ve begun to suspect that the struggle many of these professionals are experiencing has to do with their too narrow definition of the meaning of “initiative taking”.

In the book How to Be a Star at Work: 9 Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed (an excellent resource included in my list of  recommended books), professor Robert E. Kelley describes the problem:

In Chapter 5 on initiative, I told the story of Caren, the production specialist for an advanced materials ceramics company, who confused initiative with “initiative-lite”. Like many average performers, she mistakenly believed that finding better ways to do her job constituted initiative. She was responsible for representing her department at technical team meetings and then reporting back to her coworkers. Her problem: she could not participate in the meeting and also take good notes. So out came a tape recorder, allowing her to participate in the technically challenging discussions. In Caren’s view she had taken an important initiative.

As any star performer knows, doing a job more efficiently seldom qualifies as an initiative. If you are finding it difficult to elevate your role and become more involved in the process of driving organizational change, perhaps you need to reassess your level of initiative taking, and follow some of Dr. Kelley’s recommendations. Spend more time understanding what is the “critical path” for your organization, and what “white space” outside your regular job (but connected to this critical path) you could be stepping into to help your projects in both the local and global context. See if you can move from “horizontal” to “vertical” initiatives (instead of solving a local problem, begin to look for systemic problems that could lead to corporate-wide optimization).

BAs who really take initiative, and seek out responsibility above and beyond the expected job description, get noticed when it counts. If you become known as an individual who can use information and organizational knowledge to improve decision making and efficiencies in the organization, you will find it much easier to get involved in the discussions that were previously happening quietly at the top of the organization and taking a while to filter down to you.

As a BA consultant/contractor, I’ve been hip-hopping organizations so frequently, that I’ve rarely faced the “problem” of application expertise. When you are new, you are simply not the expert. And I have been lucky to find myself in completely new domains, facing new challenges, and new areas of knowledge to explore.

All of a Sudden I Had a Little Expertise to Offer

Then I was assigned a small enhancement project to help our marketing team scope a change they needed within Google Analytics for some reporting. Even though I use Google Analytics weekly to track the stats on this blog, I didn’t get the sense that I was being assigned as an expert, just that they wanted some more detail before they put the usual IT expert on the chase.

OK. No problem. I read the background information, come up with about 4-5 elicitation questions and get on the call for the meeting. But then through the course of the discussion, I realize that I know exactly how to solve the problem. A short discussion to validate that my solution would work in their environment and “ta da”, problem solved. No one from IT needs to get involved. I feel pretty darn good about myself.

I share this story because I would guess that many of us really like to be the experts. And when you are not hip-hopping from one contract to another, you’re not in the situation, like I am, where you can force yourself not to be the expert.

It’s Fun to Use Your Expertise and Solve a Problem

It also is very evident that you’ve added value to your organization. When I left that 45-minute meeting, there was no doubt in my mind that I had just earned my “billable time”. I knew I had. Not only had I given marketing the solution to their challenge, but I had saved at least a couple hours of management and development time coordinating the resources and investigating the problem. I had potentially saved countless hours of building a custom solution to the problem if the team had lacked expertise in the tool and the solution I happened to know about had not been discovered.

The Danger: Getting Stuck in an Area of Expertise

But where does this take my BA career? In my situation, I’m relatively safe for awhile. There are so many projects that this wee bit of application expertise I’ve been able to muster will not be pigeonholing me into a certain set of projects. Of course, I’m sure I’ll be the first one to get the next Google Analytics question and this could turn up a nasty project on my plate at some point, but it’s probably not going to cause a lot of headaches. It’s not going to limit my experience on this contract. But what if, like many of you, I was the expert on Salesforce.com or SAP or a company’s proprietary system that a host of people use every day to do their jobs? If there were enough projects and small requests to keep me busy within my area of expertise, I’d probably be stuck for awhile.

And I think that’s where many of you find yourselves at this current point in time.

My point? Well, as we look at the world of business analysis and see a host of jobs that require industry and domain expertise and ask whether or not this is right for the profession, I want to challenge you to also look at yourselves.

There is a certain lure of being the expert.

It’s not that it’s wrong.

But it is limiting.

If you want to grow in the business analyst profession, you will not always be the expert. You will bring expertise in the ways of business analysis: elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation. You will be an expert communicator and problem solver. But you might not always be the expert or be able to solve the problem on the spot.

And actually, there’s more value in being able to facilitate a smart group of people solving a problem than to jump in and solve it yourself. You can solve much bigger problems this way.  But first, you’ve got to let go of your expectations that you can be (and should be) the expert.

A good question to ask yourself is: “Are my strengths grounded in my domain or technical expertise or my business analyst competencies?”

The job is in mortgage industry and I will be working with a top leader in mortgage solutions for some of major banks like BofA and Chase. I am concerned about what kind of portable skills am I going to acquire. My role currently is creating technical designs wherein I would be basically working on a document laying out what changes that need to be done to which places in code. The document is meant for developers and I create that based on the Business Requirements gathered by our company BAs. I am afraid that I will learn too much about the tool but not grow as much as I should, if just in case I was to leave this company after 2 years for example. I would ultimately like to see myself as a BA and then PM.

What do you have to say about this?

Laura’s answer: You raise a great question and just the fact that you raise it tells me that you are taking your career in your own hands. So first of all, well done on looking at the long-term potential of this position and how it meshes with your career goals!

I think you are correct to acknowledge the limitations of your current role to qualify you for future business analyst roles. As a Technical Analyst you will become a systems expert over time and it sounds like your current role is leveraging your programming competencies more than your business analyst skills.

All is not lost. First off, there are BA competencies that you will expand upon in this position. You will become very good at communicating with developers and understanding what makes them successful. And you will do this without actually doing the development work, which is an important layer of abstraction. You will also become an excellent consumer of business requirements as provided by your BAs. You will learn what kind of input makes you successful as a technical analyst and you will have a deep understanding of the process between business requirements and technical specifications.

Because you know the limitations of your role going in and you have a clear set of career goals, you can keep your eyes open for other opportunities that might surface to build transferable skills. Can you build business analyst experiences through new assignments?

• Maybe your team needs to improve it’s processes?
• Maybe you could shadow the business analysts through requirements gathering?
• Maybe a business analyst will go on an extended vacation and you’ll be able to step up and assume some of the responsibilities? (I actually qualified myself for a QA role when a senior person on my team spent 3 weeks in Japan — don’t count on it but it does happen!)
• Maybe a business analyst position will open up while you are working as a technical analyst and you’ll be able to apply. Your system knowledge could be viewed as a strong asset for a BA position in the same company and thereby help you to build more marketable competencies.

I wish you the best in your new role. I hope you enjoy it and are able to make the most of it.

Get the Book

In How to Start a Business Analyst Career, you’ll learn how to assess and expand your business analysis skills and experience.

This book will help you find your best path forward into a business analyst career. More than that, you will know exactly what to do next to expand your business analysis opportunities.

Click here to learn more about How to Start a Business Analyst Career

I had the opportunity to speak personally with Durga Patil, a business analyst with L&T Infotech. Durga has been a business analyst for over three years and prior to becoming a business analyst held various roles in software development and testing. Below is a snapshot of our discussion.

Laura: What is the BA role like in your organization?

Durga: In India, the BA role has become much better defined and valued in the last 3-4 years. In my organization, the BA role used to be part of the project manager’s or project lead’s responsibilities. Now it’s a separate role and that enables the business analyst functions to be much more valued by management. In my organization, the BA manages the client and the PM manages the team.

Laura: Tell me about how domain experience impacts your role.

Durga: I work in the insurance domain and I came into this role with a technical background. The business advised that to jump in my career, I should gain domain expertise. I pursued an academic degree in insurance which taught me much of what she needed to know and helped me understand my customer’s perspective. I chose this academic path because the SMEs I was working with all had it. The rest of the domain knowledge came from experience with different projects.

Laura: That sounds like a great piece of advice. If domain experience is required to advance your career, talk to experts within that domain about what training and education they would recommend. I can imagine each domain would have different requirements.

Durga: Yes. It really made a difference in how I am respected within this organization.

Laura: Tell me about business analyst training opportunities and how that helped your career.

Durga: I was lucky that early in the formation of the business analyst role at this organization, they provided fairly comprehensive training on how to be a business analyst. That training provided a solid base to start working within the role. We learned how to elicit requirements and convert requirements into a language that technical professionals could work easily with. Such a training session sets a strong foundation towards developing strong business analysts in the organization.

Laura: What advise would you give to new business analysts?

Durga: As a new BA, I advise you to leverage others’ experiences. Allow experienced people to help/guide you learn how to use the BA skills and techniques to improve how you do things. Also network extensively to meet BAs outside your organization because you can learn so much from their experiences. My mentor always used to tell me “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”

>>Are You Ready to Hit “Go”?

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Reader question:

I am a business analyst, currently working on projects in public sector. However, I really want to move to financial industry where my passion is. I read a lot of industry-relevant materials, covering front/middle/back office operations, but when starting my job hunting, I feel no way to leverage any of them, as everywhere is requesting working experience, which I don’t have.

Is there anything you could recommend, helping me getting what I want? Thanks and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Laura’s answer:

It does seem that in the financial industry many positions require industry expertise and this can have a direct impact on your business analyst job search process. Is your passion for the financial industry strong enough that you would consider accepting a different, possibly entry-level role, to gain the experience and qualify yourself for the BA jobs? It might also be worth setting up some informational interviews with people in your area that have the type of position you’d like to have and learn specifically from them how they were able to break into the industry.

In your situation, I think the most important thing you can do is network and meet professionals within your target industry. You will learn a lot from their first hand experience and this might eventually open a door for you if you can earn the trust of a hiring manager who might be in a position to overlook the industry experience requirements you are finding.

>> Create Your BA Career Plan

Start your business analyst career with our free step-by-step career planning course. Upon joining, you’ll also receive our BA career planning guide and follow-up insider tips via email.

Click here to learn more about the free course

When it comes to building a career, there are dozens of reasons to find your way into business analysis. You are a good communicator, you seem to get the business and the systems side of things, you make a lot of positive things happen. You become a business analyst. You excel at your work. You become a senior business analyst. But then you stop and say “where do I go from here?”.

There are many answers to this question. In fact, there are as many answers to this question as there are people bold enough to ask it. Careers paths are personal decisions. What that means is that it is up to each and every one of us to define our career path based on our strengths and our passions, independent of our employer’s promotion path (assuming you are lucky enough to have one) and specific career options.

It’s what smart employees do.

It’s what promotable business analysts do.

That said, there are some career options we generally see BAs fall into as they move up the proverbial ladder.  (Of course, there’s a whole other list of promotion paths within business analysis…You don’t have to leave us to move up.)

• Business Analyst lead or manager (being able to lead other BAs takes many new skills)
• Project Manager (We hate to admit it, but it’s true in many organizations the PM is the senior role. However I’ve also started to learn about PMs wanting to be promoted to BA.)
• Business Architect (Read Pat Ferdinandi’s story about being a Business Architect or “Chief Thought Translator”)
• Enterprise Architect (a combination of up-to-date tech savvy and business analyst skills would make you extremely marketable)
• BA Coach / Mentor
• BA Trainer (A favorite of yours’ truly!)
• Product Manager (product management and business analysis share many competencies)
• Content Developer / Content Strategist (think about the content behind a site like Amazon and what analysis goes into bringing it all together and you’ll see what I mean)
• IT Manager or other IT leadership role
• Blogger / Author (this is one of the paths I’m obviously exploring!)
• Independent Business Owner / Entrepreneur (start your own business, possibly even one supporting business analysis, like Adam Feldman did)
• Business Operations Manager / Director (leading a business operation takes many BA capabilities)

The host of activities involved of business analysis prepares you for a variety of roles across the organization and to take on a host of new responsibilities. I’d also go out on a limb and say that the best of you as a BA is also going to the best of you in another role. The best CEOs and CIOs I’ve worked with would have been very good business analysts earlier in their career. They brought a level of analysis, thoughtfulness, and essence to their work that few leaders I’ve worked with have done.

So let’s consider the following questions:

What was I doing 10 years ago?

What are you doing now?

What do you see yourself doing in 10 years?

Here are my answers.

Where was I 10 years ago?

I was 5 months from graduating from Hillsdale college with a combined degree in philosophy and English. I spent my month long holiday break reading The Rule of Metaphor by Paul Ricoeur and attempting to conceptualize how I could turn my cursory understanding language creates meaning into a defensible thesis and earn myself honors in philosophy. As yet, I had no concrete post-graduation plans. I had considered grad school, but something about the application process and limited prospects for those interested in continental philosophy kept me from following that path fully.

Jumping ahead a few months, to June 2000, I graduated with those honors and a week later started a job at the Gale Group as an assistant editor. It was glorified data entry and I knew from almost the very first day on the job I needed a way out. I felt my decision to pursue a liberal arts degree was going to hold me back. I was wrong.

What am I doing now?

Jump ahead 10 years (and bypassing many interesting adventures) to today. I have found my way out and am sitting between the cusp of two careers, one as a business analyst consultant and one as a business analyst author, mentor, and coach. I am knee deep in figuring out how to blend these careers, build and grow a business, and find my own career path.

I look back and I see a varied career progression, one opportunity leading to another. But now I have fully discovered my passion for the activities of business analysis and, for the first time in my life, have a focused career direction. My passion centers around achieving and helping others achieve what I consider the business analyst’s mission:

Out of chaos, we create order.

Out of disagreement, we create alignment.

Out of ambiguity, we create clarity.

But most of all, we create positive change for the organizations we serve.

This is an exciting time.  I know that where I am at now is a darn good place. I have a network of professional support that I would have thought impossible a year or two ago. I have opportunities to share my perspective and help others share theirs. I am meeting more interesting people and building the foundations of relationships I hope will grow for years to come. I am more passion about my work than I have felt for a long time, possibly since I was knee deep in that dense text by Ricoeur. And most of all, I am confident that by being true to myself, clear about my goals, honest with my peers, and dedicated to this community that something great will happen.

What do I see myself doing in 10 years?

I have never been good at predicting the future and I refuse to hold myself accountable to the next few hundred words. But I do expect that I will have found a way to balance my career and a family, continued to help evolve a profession that will have changed significantly in the recent decade, and helped several business analysts build successful and rewarding careers. I hope to be able to look back on some meaningful accomplishments and have stories to share of how I’ve helped others.  I see at least a few of you being close friends and colleagues and having built stronger bonds with many more of you than the limited time of this past year has allowed. I hope I am a stronger leader, a deeper contributor, and have built a few more marketable skills and experiences so I have a strong foundation on which to build the next phase of my career, whatever that will be.

And you?

So, now it’s your turn. What are your answers? Feel free to leave a comment below or leave a link to the answer on your own blog. This is a fun question and I can’t wait to read your answers.

As I’ve read about in a wonderful book called, The Introverted Leader, you can support your confidence in uncomfortable situations through preparation, presence, push, and practice. (This works even if you are an introvert like me.) Let’s look how to apply each of these practices to elicitation.

Step 1: Prepare to Elicit Requirements

The more you prepare, the more confident you’ll be. To prepare for an elicitation session, conduct as much research as you can to inform yourself about the problem and the existing situation.

• Talk to the sympathetic people first. This might be the person that hired you or your designated go-to person in the department.
• Learn the business and explore the system. Obtain as much insight as you can into how the business operates and the system works using the available information and tools.
• Start a list of key terms. If a glossary exists, use it as a reference to find the definitions of terms. Often you will find additional or alternate terms that are not included in even the most up-to-date glossary. Keeping terms straight can help you carve a more efficient path to real understanding.
• Start a list of questions about the system, about the process, the people, and about the project at hand. Think why, what, how, when, who.  Keep this question list handy as you meet with people about the project and use it to guide your discussions.
• If system documentation is non-existent, create models as you learn about the business and the system.

Yet, the nature of an elicitation session means that you will encounter unexpected information. That’s why step 2 – being present – is so important as well.

Step 2: Be Present in your Requirements Elicitation Sessions

Presence relates to how you handle yourself with others. If you are prepared, you should be confident and 100% present in your initial discussions. To create presence in an elicitation session:

• Use your list of questions and agenda items as a guide, but go with the flow. Once your stakeholders start talking, let them speak through their thoughts. While later in the process you make need to practice guiding conversations and even interrupting, your initial meetings should follow the energy of the stakeholders.
• Focus on seeking to understand stakeholder perspectives. Avoid second-guessing the questions you have or what you do or do not know. Keep it top of mind that this is your opportunity to learn more about the project and the stakeholders’ opportunity to unfold their perspective.
• Be an active listener — summarize what you hear and ask intelligent follow-up questions. But don’t be so worried about your next question that you forget to listen!
• Be OK with momentary pauses. Collect your thoughts, review your questions, and continue the conversation.

Steps 1 and 2 will get you started with confidence. Steps 3 and 4 will expand your skills in requirements elicitation.

Step 3: Push Yourself to Become Better at Requirements Elicitation

By pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, you advance your capabilities and your leadership. You stretch yourself and improve your capabilities.

Some ways to push during elicitation include:

• Find gaps in your understanding and find ways to fill them. This might require involving an additional stakeholder or asking for a demo or observation.
• Seeking out the perspectives of higher level stakeholders. Drop by an executive’s office or take advantage of a chance meeting in the hallway and ask for what they value the most in the project.
• Use a new elicitation technique as part of elicitation. Learn a new way of modeling or a new tool and incorporate that into your elicitation activities.

Step 4: Practice Eliciting Requirements

As an analyst you want to grow into a professional who loses that initial feeling of fear when a new situation presents itself and become comfortable with the unknown. This happens through practice.

Practice is about repeating behaviors, even if they feel uncomfortable at first, until they become part of who you are. Through practice, elicitation will become almost second nature and you’ll be well prepared to handle a wide variety of new and unexpected situations.

Some ways to practice elicitation include:

• Practice asking your questions and listening to the answers with a friend or trusted colleague. You can practice elicitation techniques as a meeting attendee or in a 1-1 conversation.
• Anticipate the types of feedback you might receive and practice responses.
• Keep the momentum going by scheduling elicitation sessions. After every meeting, define the next step and make it happen.

With consistent practice, you will be able to spend less time preparing and more time being present in your elicitation activities. As your confidence grows, you will be able to handle more ambiguity in the initial phases and more dissonance among your stakeholders — i.e. more challenging projects.

Your Reward: Confidence!

By preparing, being present, pushing yourself, and practicing, that uncomfortable feeling will be replaced with excitement and confidence. As has been reinforced for me by Jennifer Kahnweiler’s The Introverted Leader: Building Your Quiet Strength, becoming a better leader is about continuing to invest in your own personal and professional development, increasing self-awareness, building on your strengths, and choosing new challenges.

I started my first BA job by transitioning from a QA engineer role into a BA role. I had acquired deep system knowledge. I knew how the system was put together and how the developers designed solutions.

I didn’t know a lick about business analysis (well at least I thought I didn’t, but I later realized that I actually knew a lot about business analysis before getting into the role). And I learned quickly how to get the business perspective and create requirements specifications.

I loved to work through technical challenges and facilitate problem-solving sessions, and was mostly successful because I had an understanding of the conversations, the possibilities, and most of the trade-offs. I could facilitate because I knew the problem space just about as well as anyone else in the room.

>>> The take-away lesson: Strengths in system knowledge or industry expertise can help you navigate into your first business analyst position. 

Then I moved all the way across the country and started doing BA work for a new product to integrate with a legacy system. I still believe this was the most complex, gnarliest system I’ve ever dealt with.

No longer did my system knowledge serve me. I had none.

I had to step back and think about why the heck I was a BA and what I brought to the table.  It turned out that this was the best career move of my life. If I had stayed in my old company, I might never have learned to learn new systems, to be a BA with no system or industry knowledge, or to rest on my core competencies in elicitation, analysis,  and communication.

And did I ever learn. 

• I learned to facilitate discussions when I was the least knowledgeable person in the room.
• I learned to evaluate business requirements before functional ones.
• I learned to build systems from scratch.
• I learned to dissect complex legacy systems.
• I learned that so many technical concepts are very general (databases, scripts, processing, rendering, rule-based logic, etc.) and that it matters less what the code is written in and more on what it does and how it works.

Of course, along the way I had my share of missteps, oversights, and mistakes. But I was learning each and every day.

>>>The second take-away lesson: Be aware of what grounds your strengths. Put yourself in situations to help you grow your strengths into portable competencies.

I’ve never looked back from my decision to rest more on my competencies than my know how. Sure there are still positions that want a specific skill or a certain technical ability. I have no problem learning these things. But I know that none of this makes me a better business analyst generally, only helps me address specific problems in specific situations.

So, if you are currently a business analyst or if you want to be one, ask yourself:

• Where do you find your strengths?
• Could you be equally effective outside your comfort zone?
• Are you testing yourself and developing your competencies?

Expand Your BA Strengths

Check out our business analysis training courses to discover how we can help you grow your core business analysis skills and as you push the boundaries of your comfort zone.

I believe that good requirements make the technology shop a better place to work and make that work more fulfilling for everyone involved with technology.

What causes low morale on technology teams?

If you are a leader in any business or organization, then you probably understand that part of your role is to help others find fulfillment in their work while at the same time generating business value from that work.  I learned this a few years back while reading James Autry’s book titled The Servant Leader.

Few developers on a technology team are fulfilled in their work when they deliver a brilliant piece of code that no one ever puts in production.  No product managers are fulfilled when they wait 2 months for that perfect feature that would generate more revenue only to have it miss the mark.  No software tester is fulfilled when they find every bug in the code, ensure it’s fixed before release, and then hear someone from the business say “it doesn’t work”.  These are not positive situations for your employees.  They breed discontent and distrust.

Leadership can support alignment between business and IT

The alternative is to be an advocate for two accountabilities within your organization:

1. Aligning your business team around what is to be built. And this means everyone: marketing, product, sales, customer service, and finance.
2. Aligning your technology team around a solution that solves the business problem and delivers real value.

Yes, it can be a difficult process to gain alignment on requirements and project outcomes and to make the time up and down the organization for the collaboration and reviews necessary to create this alignment.  But, creating focus on these two accountabilities can create a waterfall effect within your organization of clearly defined work directly tied to business value. These are the spheres within which the best business architects/analysts,  project/portfolio managers, enterprise architects, and development managers are their most productive.  I am proud to take on these challenges not just because they create value within organizations (although they most certainly do), but also because they help create better places to work.

So, if you’ve put off this challenge within your own organization or just hoped it would solve itself, take a hard look at the impact it’s having on your employee morale, productivity, dedication, and motivation.

Here’s a list of assignments you may want to consider and discuss with your manager:

#1 – Find efficiencies. Look for ways your organization can save money.  You probably have the detailed business and system knowledge to propose many ideas on their own, but you also have relationships across the organization that you can use to vet your ideas. Collaborate with your manager to set a target for, say, reducing printing costs or saving energy and then head out to find solutions, implement changes, and measure the results.

#2 – Participate in sales activities.  Is your organization focused on sales this year?  Consider you help your sales team on calls with potential clients?  Your detailed knowledge of your products and systems might just help seal a deal with a particularly challenging client and this experience will provide them with a new appreciation for the customer’s point of view. Read about how Kym Byron’s business analyst team supports sales activities.

#3 – Re-evaluate vendor contracts. Take this time to review the contracts you have in place with vendors, ensuring you are leveraging everything you are paying for or looking for ways to save money during the next renegotiation. Learn more about vendor selection practices from Susan Penny Brown.

#4 – Conduct ROI analysis on all new projects.  If you don’t have a comprehensive system in place for evaluating new project opportunities, you’ll need one to inform the prioritization of your now limited technology dollars.  Develop a program for predicting and measuring ROI.

#5 – Conduct a competitive analysis. This may be taken care of by another department, but if not it’s an interesting assignment for a BA. Take the time to really dig into the details of your competitor’s products and do a thorough comparison. You’ll leave this task with a host of new ideas to consider for your next project.

#6 – Define the business architecture. You want to do it but there never seems to be the time.  Use this opportunity to fully define and evaluate your business architecture.

#7 – Conduct a current capabilities assessment. Do you have undocumented systems?  This can be a huge liability.  Conducting a full assessment of your current capabilities can make your existing technology assets more valuable in the eyes of a potential investor.  You might also turn up new opportunities to leverage what you already have to cut costs or drive revenue.  Good documentation and a shared understanding of system functionality will position you to more efficiently build on that functionality during your next project.

#8 – Document existing business processes.  Are your current business processes documented? Have they been reviewed recently for opportunities to improve in efficiency or potential value adds for your customers?  A downtime in new project work is an ideal time to re-evaluate how you run your business and a good BA can step up to this challenge, either by leading the project or facilitating many of the discussions around business processes.

#9 – Build an organization-wide project list.  Think outside the typical technology project list and inventory all initiatives across departments.  Build intelligible reports that show how these efforts are driving the business forward.

#10 – Improve your BA process. A lull in project work is the perfect time to create or update a requirements template, create a tips list, or evaluate a part of your business analysis process that doesn’t seem to be working well.

A lull is a perfect time to show how you can go above and beyond to add value to your organization.  Propose one or more of these ideas to your manager and discuss how you can best serve the current organizational focus. Or, just start working on the idea and see if it sticks.