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

Faced with the unknown parameters of your project’s “Business Domain” you might check the Organization Chart, but you’re not sure who to dub with the Stakeholder title.  Annual Objectives Statements provide some clue to motivators, but not really an understanding of organizational alliances and conflicts.  What’s needed is something that reveals more than reporting hierarchy and goals.

Identifying all the right stakeholders

Enterprise Analysis has provided the answer for me.   By this I mean building Domain Models – simple relational diagrams, focused on understanding  the ways in which elements of the business connect to each other, What and Why rather than How. I’ve used Domain Models to ferret out missing Stakeholders in a number of ways:

• A new spin on the organizational hierarchy– we expanded the org chart to visualize the invisible organizational lines and informal matrix reporting structures.
• A process decomposition – we grouped activities into their common process objectives to determine contradictions to the organizational structure.
• A goal decomposition– we categorized the hierarchy of business objectives and metrics that the organization used to measure success,  how they align with the project goals, and who was accountable.
• A context diagram – we created a wheel of Stakeholders with the new system as the central hub, labeling directional lines to indicate sources and destinations of different information, treating the system as a black box so as not to get tangled in functionality discussions.
• A stakeholder relationships diagram – we brainstormed stakeholders, labeling directional lines with the expectations key players have of each other, and then filtered out the irrelevant by removing those not impacted by project deliverables.
• A process interaction diagram – this time instead of Stakeholders we took the core processes (top level of a process decomposition) and looked at how they feed each other to determine if there were other impacts to consider.
• A business interaction diagram – we took the stakeholder relationships diagram one step further by slotting the roles and organizations into categories of supplier, customer, competitor, and process participants, allowing us to pinpoint resource inter-dependencies and competing interests that could cause issues for the project if not dealt with.
• A business object model – we identified the components and types of products included in the project scope to study the context of information needs.

The Business Areas that are your sources of domain information may give you some resistance initially, but going through this process of discovering relationships can be cathartic for your business counterparts, increasing their awareness of throughputs and influencing factors.  Documenting this sort of information helps the business areas to visualize what’s really going on, and organize a change plan where needed.

Anticipating the positive impact new stakeholders will have on your projects

To put the results in a project context consider these examples from my project history book where the representation expanded to include new stakeholder perspectives:

• Added key internal Customers and every IT department impacted by a planned Help Desk application with automated ticket routing & tracking.
• Included Underwriters that would be trying to sell the Managed Care partnership being evaluated by the Claims group.
• Added Facilities Management to a planned implementation of a Claim handling workflow and imaging system that had huge impacts on the mailroom, the de facto scanning center.
• Brought Data Warehouse participation into systems design sessions that were repeatedly identifying the warehouse as the best solution option for managing financial, regulatory and customer reporting.
• Internal Audit was added to a migration project and wound up taking responsibility for the process QA due to the complexity of properly mapping financial transactions to Insurance, SEC, Actuarial rules.

Think about being able to suggest to your Project Manager additional participants who will make decision-making easier, or identifying administrators of downstream systems that will become part of the test team.  This recent Project Times article on Detecting Stakeholder Misalignment describes the impact to Project Managers when Stakeholders are overlooked, and by proxy, the  impact to the Sponsors of the project.  By identifying potential conflicts early in the project you’ve saved them both from greater, potentially project-killing battles down the road.  All it takes is the brave Business Analyst standing up and saying so.  Your models could generate what the article calls a “stakeholder consensus audit”, a diplomatic disclosure of conflicting ideals.   The rewards include the Holy Grail – Informed Stakeholders.

Knowing the relationships can improve your own relationships

Through Enterprise Analysis you learn about the things that are important to your project’s Stakeholders and how your project will have an impact. By taking this broader view of business value you also gather some key pieces of information:

• expectations of Stakeholders and the risks of not meeting them;
• triggers that launch activity;
• deliverables between process participants;
• inter-dependencies like supply chain, competition for resources, regulatory constraints;
• work product destinations and Customer demands.

All of this information helps you – the wise new BA on the project – to elucidate the business need and start formulating solutions.  You are alert to project issues, know who you’re dealing with, what they’ll expect and more importantly, what they’ll find issue with.  Others will start to recognize that you are able to take on this type of senior level responsibilities.

Creating success by revealing relationships

Never looking beyond the obvious direct impacts can leave a dangerous gap in your project team’s sources of information and makers of decisions.  An important contribution from the project’s BA is to examine organizational, information, process, and customer/supplier relationships. By understanding your Client’s value chain the solutions to their business problems become more apparent.  Including upstream and downstream Stakeholders enables your Project Manager and Sponsor to take the next important step: ensuring that everyone understands and supports the project objectives.  The more you know about the business domain the more your Client will relax and be confident that you “get it”.

>> Learn the Business Analysis Process

An essential element of succeeding in a business analyst job role is understanding the business analysis process. We walk you through an 8-step business analysis process in the BA Essentials Master Class. You’ll learn a step-by-step business process that you can customize to meet your organization and project situations, how to create a timeline for a new business analyst assignment, and be prepared to handle the more common issues BAs face on new projects.

Click here to learn more about the BA Essentials Master Class

• Consider the focus of the meeting or workshop;
• Minimize duration & maximize value;
• Involve everyone – create a collaborative spirit among those who will participate.

With these themes in mind, your distributed team’s discovery, design and planning activities can be accelerated with the use of virtual brainstorming to collect divergent information. Allowing remote and local participants an equal opportunity to reflect and contribute their unique perspectives will make effective use of your meeting time.

Best practices for virtual brainstorming

There are a couple of things I found surprising when I first started conducting virtual brainstorming sessions:

1. Silence can be productive. I like to start a live brainstorming session by asking each person to quietly consider their individual answer and jot down their conclusions.  At first the silence feels a bit odd during a teleconference, but allowing time for personal reflection encourages subsequent contributions from those with a more contemplative style.
2. Anonymity is an equalizer.  When the organizational hierarchy or clients are present at a meeting some people tend to filter their words and stay in the “safe zone” of conversation.  However I was delighted to find that the self-editing tends to disappear when text input is gathered anonymously.  Virtual meetings can actually deliver an advantage over face-to-face: participants  get to see everyone’s comments  but not who they are attributed to, generating a more true and robust collection of insights and concerns.

Virtual brainstorming scenarios

When a distributed workshop calls for brainstorming ideas, plan your virtual meeting with a web and teleconference tool that will simplify the process. Here are a few scenarios that business analysts deal with quite often.

Scenario 1: Gather team input.

Web-based whiteboards enable a meeting leader (or participants, with permission granted) to scribe during a virtual meeting.  Capture discussion bullet points on a blank screen that is shared on each participant’s computer screen via the internet.  Some tools even have drawing features to graphically represent the discussion; my favorites create a work space for multi-user drawing & virtual sticky notes; find a tool that’s compatible with your style by experimenting with these free web resources:  Scribblar, Twiddla, and Dabbleboard.  Other tools are purely text-based, using a discussion board interface; Writeboard and Huddle whiteboard feature work well to create a new topic for multi-user editing or comments. Another option to try is the text chat function common in web conferencing software (for example GoToMeeting or Webex).  Pose a question to stimulate written brainstorming contributions and ask everyone to concurrently type their responses. The Chat window will provide a shared scrolling view of the individual answers.

Setting it up: Determine who will attend, then use the tool’s invitation features to send an e-mail link that will help attendees to schedule and join the electronic workspace at the appropriate time.  Once the meeting is done the tools enables saving a record of your whiteboard work.

Scenario 2: Stakeholders must collaborate to uncover key issues & impacts.

If generating ideas has been problematic try using small group breakout sessions to encourage everyone to participate. Results improve by pairing a smaller number of people together for private collaboration, then having each small group report their results to the combined assembly of participants.  MaestroConference enables a teleconference leader to designate small group membership and initiate a timed breakout session.  Most web conferencing software also includes a phone breakout feature for their audio tools.

Setting it up: In addition to the invitation process, the meeting leader designates random or assigned sub-group membership.  Once the teleconference is underway, meeting leader features allow you to launch the breakout session, instantly initiating multiple private teleconferences.  Designated facilitators can even drop in on the individual conversations if needed to guide the discussions.  Closing the breakout session using manual or timed features rejoins the audio into a single conversation.

Scenario 3: Requirements sign-off from a client with a globally distributed team

When time zone differences interfere with same time communication turn to asynchronous brainstorming. Asynchronous activities do not take place in real time; rather participants log in to contribute on their own schedule.  Document editing and threaded discussions are conducted over the Internet in a shared space for text editing (mirroring word processing features) and comment entry (as a discussion post). This type of brainstorming can also help to gain input in advance of a live workshop or as a follow up assignment. Your organization may use a Business Collaboration platform such as SharePoint; a Yahoo Group or Wiki can also serve this purpose in the private sector.

Setting it up: A similar invitation process authorizes invitees to join the working document space.  The discussion host can set up alerts to be notified of additions from collaborators.

My virtual collaboration experiences have become more engaging and productive by introducing these methods for gathering wide-ranging input.