Bridging the Gap

How to Be a Successful Business Analyst Without Industry Domain Knowledge

AaronWhittenberger — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:00:00 +0000

I have been asked often in my career if you can be a Business Analyst if you do not have domain or industry knowledge. Sometimes the question comes worded differently:

Can a BA move to an industry that they have not worked in before?

I would like to move to a BA career and I see many postings for BAs in ___ industry, but I have no knowledge in that industry. Should I?

The main point of the question remains the same. Does a BA have to have industry knowledge to be an effective BA?

Now in answering this question I do realize:

Industry Knowledge is an underlying competency in the Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK®)
Most job postings that you will read request or require industry knowledge
Most hiring managers prefer to hire BAs with industry knowledge

But I also realize:

You cannot get industry experience until you work in that industry (the whole chicken and the egg dilemma)
BAs move from industry to industry all the time

Realizing these things, I will answer the question that industry knowledge is not an absolute necessity. Industry knowledge will develop over time, but having good business analysis skills will allow you to be effective in business analysis tasks even though you lack that industry knowledge. I would never advise anyone to use the lack of industry knowledge as a crutch, but it can allow you to ask “dumb” questions that someone with great industry knowledge would not ask. By asking that “dumb” question, you actually make the business stakeholder think through a process to ensure that what they are telling you is accurate.

If you read my profile you will know that I have 26 years of work experience, and I will tell you that about 24 of those years are in the manufacturing and distribution industries. I have recently made a career move into the insurance industry. I had worked for an insurance company several years ago, for six months. Two other BAs were hired by the company at the same time and neither of them had any insurance experience. The average tenure on the BA team within the company is in the 20+ years. So the team had extensive insurance knowledge, but had not really kept up on the latest trends and techniques of business analysis. The hiring manager noted that sometimes key business stakeholders are left out of projects, which means that requirements are being missed.

My manager recently sat in on a Focus Group discussion on business requirements that I was leading. Following the meeting she let me know that in hiring three BAs with relatively no insurance experience that she felt that you do not need in-depth industry knowledge to be an effective BA; excellent BA skills make up for that lack of industry knowledge. She mentioned that I reaffirmed that opinion in the way that I facilitated the discussion, that I made the stakeholders think about the process under consideration while answering my questions.

So if you are considering a career move into an industry where you do not have industry knowledge, realize that you will be compared to other candidates that may have that industry knowledge, so give the hiring manager a reason to hire you instead by expanding upon your business analysis skills and competencies. Don’t let a lack of industry knowledge stop you from going for a good career move for you.

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Please leave them below.

The Shocking Truth About Aspiring Business Analysts

Laura Brandenburg — Mon, 14 May 2012 11:00:54 +0000

When I’m out talking about how I help aspiring business analysts, there are two very common assumptions:

An aspiring business analyst is currently in college and looking to start their BA career after they graduate.
An aspiring business analyst is typically unemployed.

The thing is, if we look at the readership of Bridging the Gap, both assumptions are wrong. Let’s take a look at the registration statistics from our January members-only webinar.

Aspiring Business Analysts Are Experienced Professionals

We know that business analysis is not typically an entry-level job. It takes experience handling business situations and developing communication skills to succeed as a business analyst. But would you have thought that over 13% of participants would have over 20 years of experience? Or that the bulk would have more than 6? Even the most commonly chosen range, 2-5, indicates that most aspiring BAs have invested at least some time building up their professional profile.

We are clearly a profession attracting experienced professionals. And since we know that your experience counts when making a BA career transition, being an experienced professional now-ready-to-become-a-BA is a great place to be.

(While I’m thinking of it, I’d like to point out that my upcoming My BA Career Choice course will help you do just that – look at how your career background and experience can be leveraged and map out a career transition plan.)

Aspiring Business Analysts Are Often Employed

While some aspiring BAs find themselves out of work and then realize that now is the time to make a career change, most of those we help here are employed. From reading the comments here at Bridging the Gap, I gather that many of you are underemployed or employed in a role that doesn’t quite play to your passions and are looking at a business analysis career as a way to move up.

Being an aspiring business analyst is not just about job search. Although, yes, even for employed professionals the best opportunity can be outside of your current organization. And my advice on updating your resume can apply equally well when submitting your application for an internal position. But in reality, job search is just a small component of making a career change. Other pieces include building experience, finding appropriate training, and, often most importantly, building up your confidence that you can do what it takes.

What Does This Mean?

Hopefully, it means you’ve found the right place. We’re not necessarily here to talk about what undergraduate degree you need, what’s the best MBA program, or what internship program to look at. (Though yes, sometimes we have written about those things.)

We’re mostly here to talk about how to make the best of all of the opportunities sitting right in front of you and, even more importantly, what you already have to offer to your business analysis career.

Whether you have your PMP, are a Six Sigma black belt, are a talented technical writer looking for new challenges, a software developer who has always enjoyed the people-side of technology or ___ {insert your career background here}, I’m here to support you along your career journey into business analysis.

And it would be my honor to help you craft your map in our next session of My Business Analysis Career Choice.

Do You Make This Mistake With Your Online Profile?

Laura Brandenburg — Mon, 07 May 2012 11:00:53 +0000

As I walked into the most recent Denver IIBA meeting, someone threw me an easy question.

“Can you please introduce me to Laura Brandenburg?”

“Sure, that’s me!”

Is it time to update your profile picture?

“Ooh…you look different? Maybe your hair is longer?”

Awkward silence.

As I was driving home, I reflected back to the last time someone commented that I was easily recognizable from my profile picture…I was really proud that the real me and the online me were in sync. Oh, right, that was nearly two years ago.

Are you making this same mistake? Keep reading to find out and, if so, consider these 3 simple steps for improving your online profile photo.

6 Signs Your Photo Could Be Improved

Your photo is more than 3 years old.
We can’t see your face clearly.
Your photo looks more like a mug shot than a head shot.
You cropped your photo out of a group photo.
Your photo is, well, not a photo. You are a real person, right? A drawing, cartoon, or caricature might be cute but it’s not a photo.
Um, what photo? The default gray box provided by your favorite social networking site is not a photo. Neither is one of the system-provided gravatars.

This is an online world and we are visual people. Updating your LinkedIn profile, commenting on blogs, and participating in online discussions are all great ways to cultivate an online identity. Because people remember faces better than names, it pays to make the most of your online investment and gain some visual recognition for your contributions.

You probably know all of this, but you think the solution is way too complex. Here are three simple steps to take.

Step 1 – Find Someone to Take a New Profile Picture (This Is Easier Than You Think)

The thing is, getting a decent quality photo can be relatively easy and it doesn’t have to break the bank. I’ll be updating my photo in a couple weeks when a good friend of ours takes some family photos.

Find a friend who is studying digital photography. Ask them to snap a few high quality shots of you in front of trees, a brick wall, or rocks. Really any neutral background will do. The siding of your house or your office building is probably good enough given the right lighting.
Even if you can’t find someone studying digital photography, ask the person you know who takes the best photos (you know the ones, they post pics on Facebook all the time and they look great).
Finally, you can hire a professional photographer to do a photo shoot, ballpark price would be about $100. (If they are charging much more than that, you’ll be getting much more than you need for a head shot to use online.)

[Start of Side Bar for Professional Chapter Leaders] While I’m thinking of it, this would be a great member benefit or revenue opportunity to consider. Hire a photographer and host a photo shoot once every year or two before a Chapter meeting. [/End of Side Bar for Professional Chapter Leaders]

Step 2 – Look Your Best But Not Glamour-Shot Best

This photo you’ll have taken is going to identify you online. A decent photographer will use lighting to help you look your best – your real you best. We’re not talking glamour shots here. In fact, a glamour shot is not going to do you any good. I don’t want to see you with a boa or with a save-it-for-the-80s hair-do.

And the pictures from your wedding or your best friend’s wedding…how often do you look like that?

Instead, consider how you would prep yourself for an important meeting at work or a job interview and do something similar for this photo. Better yet, save yourself a little time and get the photo taken on the way to a job interview or important meeting.

And, unless you want to portray a distinctly casual image online (this works for very few people), don’t choose your Friday casual wear. Choose a professional outfit. A dress shirt or blouse is a good choice, so is a jacket if that’s something you’d wear at least once per week. Remember, prospective employers or other business analysts will be using this photo to get a feel for you. Dress the part.

Step 3 – Upload the photo everywhere

Using the same photo in each of your professional online hangouts, supports a continuous online identity. The only place I use a different photo is on Facebook (which I don’t use professionally) and inside My Business Analysis Career.

Also, create an account and upload this photo to the Gravatar system. Most blogs and many websites, including Bridging the Gap, use this system to automatically pull in your photo when you leave a comment or write an article.

Your Next Step

Don’t be the unrecognizable one at your next professional meeting. Do an honest gut check on your online photo. Does it represent the best you? Are you using it consistently to establish a professional presence?

Leave a comment below with your next step to improve your online identity.

Another BA On Our Registry! From Call Center to Business Analysis

Laura Brandenburg — Fri, 04 May 2012 11:00:06 +0000

This week we added a business analyst to the 2010 section of our Registry of Business Analysis Career Transitions. I receive a lot of questions from aspiring BAs who have experience in call centers, so I’m excited to share Mina’s success story.

Mina Joseph graduated with an MIS degree in 2008 was a contact center representative for a year and a half before she started her business analysis career. During that time she always looked at the problems the organization faced and turned them into opportunities. For example, the high volume of sales calls and staffing issues created needs for simple applications that can facilitate the work. She was promoted internally to a business analyst position. The key to her success was spending the first few months monitoring how things are done, what the business processes are, and understanding the organization’s strategic objectives. Absorbing all this enabled her to turn problems into opportunities. She highly recommends our free email course as a resource, noting that it helped her add a touch to her style.

Congratulations Mina and thanks for sharing your story!

Are you in a call center or operational support role? How do you think Mina’s story will help you think about your career change to business analysis?

How to avoid 7 common workshop pitfalls

Adrian Reed — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:00:43 +0000

OK – I admit it. One of my favourite parts of the BA role is facilitating workshops. I love being able to coax ideas out of people’s unconscious mind and I love the co-operation, creativity and healthy tension that present themselves in a good workshop. Executed well, a workshop is a valuable use of stakeholder time. Real-time collaboration can shave weeks (or months) off a schedule when compared with tiresome and drawn-out e-mail communication. However – not all workshops achieve their goals. What are some of the common pitfalls, and how can they be avoided? I have listed 7 key pitfalls below:

Workshop planning is key!

1. Insufficient planning and preparation

A workshop needs structure, and a good facilitator will spend time considering which methods, tools and techniques should be used. It’s important to craft this into a carefully considered agenda to make sure that the key points can be covered in the allocated time.

The amount of planning needed is likely to vary depending on the number of attendees, whether it’s a routine or a “One off workshop”. Think of it this way – if you hold a 3 hour workshop with 10 people present, that’s 30 hours of collective time. That’s a huge cost! The workshop needs to be a success, so don’t feel guilty spending 3 or 4 hours preparing.

Preparation involves preparing your audience by providing them with an agenda, and where needed making individual phone calls/visits to ensure they have everything they need. It also involves planning to arrive early to set up the room and test any equipment needed.

2. Unclear or non-existent workshop goals

Have you ever been to a meeting or workshop where nothing has been achieved, and the conversation has gone round and round in circles? This can be down to the fact that stakeholders had a different understanding of the purpose of the workshop. Perhaps one thought it was to define scope, and another thought it was to reduce scope. Subtle differences lead to people talking cross-purpose. All workshops should have an agreed goal/objective up front.

“We are here to focus on… This workshop will be a success if by the end of the meeting we achieve…”

3. Inviting the wrong people

Workshops are most effective when they are kept short, succinct and the key decision makers are in the room. If you can’t get the key people to commit to attending, consider deferring the workshop. If it looks like the workshop will involve 25 people, consider asking what each individual’s area of expertise is. Are they a decision maker? Do they need to be there? Could the workshop be split into two shorter focussed workshops to keep attendance down to a manageable level?

4. Letting energy get low

A workshop should be interactive and energising. If you need creativity, think of ways to keep the energy levels high. Bring cakes. Take away the seats. Use colour, music… do whatever you need to keep people engaged and interested!

5. Ignoring conflict

It’s all too easy to gloss over conflict in a desire for stakeholder consensus. I have a controversial view here – workshops are exactly the right place to encourage conflicting ideas to be discussed! Let’s face it – conflict is going to occur sometime during the project. Better to get it on the table when people are together, so a resolution can be found early (or at least the issue is acknowledged).

6. Feeling afraid to jump in

This is something I used to struggle with. I think it’s a product of being British (and our national obsession with “politeness”), but I used to find it difficult to “interject” and move someone on. Sometimes people seem to make their point over and over again, or perhaps they go drastically off topic.

Let me set the record straight. As a facilitator, it is perfectly OK to respectfully cut someone short, to “park” an item, agree a future time it’ll be discussed and move on through the agenda. In fact, it’s quite likely that the rest of your audience will thank you for it! Make sure you have an “actions log” and “parked ideas log” so that these ideas and concerns aren’t lost – they can be discussed offline if needed.

7. Not documenting the meeting

Chances are, nobody will remember the decisions that were made in a meeting held at 10:30am on a Monday morning 6 months ago. To ensure there is a clear understanding of what was discussed and agreed, it is worth ensuring that the workshop is recorded, in whatever format works for you and your stakeholders. It should also be made available for review after the workshop. (You don’t have to take this role on yourself. You could consider allocating the role of “scribe” to a willing volunteer.)

A good workshop can be productive, fun and effective. Good planning, preparation and facilitation is a key differentiating factor. And some cakes or candy to bribe the attendees can be a good move too!

I hope you’ve found this article useful. What other workshop mistakes have you seen? Do you have any recommendations? I’d love to hear them – please add a comment below.