Among the Measures of Success for video conferencing discussed in my last article, “on camera presence” – being at ease and confident in front of the camera - seems the least intuitive.  You are either comfortable on camera or not; there’s seldom a middle ground.  In this post, I’ll explore adjustments we all can make to improve our on screen image.

Visual Effectiveness in Video Conferencing

Getting used to being on camera – A Lesson for the Shy

I have to laugh now as I look back to a time not long ago when, surprised to find a camera built into my new laptop, I disabled the internal webcam, and for good measure put a piece of masking tape over the lens. Ultimately an introvert, I was at first reticent about being under observation. I also found it disconcerting to have a mirror of myself onscreen, and frankly, it was distracting.

The best advice I’ve had regarding webcams was, “Get over yourself!”  If you have a choice of adding a camera pod for yourself as the leader of a meeting, then DO. The payback in terms of attention and comprehension is worth it. If you hate seeing yourself on camera, you need to get beyond that; practice with recordings and no audience if necessary. You should be prepared to professionally present – the more comfortable you are with your script and the technology, the better able you are to focus and engage. In addition to adjusting your attitude, there are a few environmental adjustments that will help:

• The room has adequate lighting. If your webcam is mobile, try different rooms and types of light sources. Be attentive to your positioning in relation to windows, skylights, etc.; notice which create more shadows and shine. If you wear glasses, check for unwanted reflections. Check your background too – what’s behind you that might distract attention?
• The camera is optimally positioned. Put enough space between you and the camera to create a clear frame for your face. Back up a little more to include small hand gestures, making sure your movements stay on screen. If you hope to demonstrate an activity, consider the best angle to view more of what you do and less of you.
• A headset for quality audio. An area mic or speakerphone picks up background noise. Instead, install a headset and disable the webcam’s microphone to greatly improve the audio portion of your broadcast.

Self-awareness – A Lesson in Web Photogenics

Eye contact is the element that makes it feel like you’re connecting with your video conference viewers. Make sure you’re looking at the camera’s eye in those moments when you most want to engage – locking eyes as you would in person. For a long time this felt unnatural to me, and my eyes drifted to my screen instead, even when I was presenting and facilitating. I had to work at looking at the lens just as much as I would if I were in a room full of people. It helped to think about who is in the virtual room and imagine the lens as that person’s eyes.

You should also note that the closer you are to the camera, the larger your facial and physical gestures will appear (good or bad). It turns out I’m a very expressive person in high definition, and I needed to curtail my eyebrow raises and waving hands. I reduced the drama by seating myself farther from the camera (yielding less exaggerated expressions) and I also work hard to sit still. Try adjusting your movements and body language for the camera’s screen space, and if you must move, be purposeful and graceful.

Finally, be aware of those times when your attention drifts or your less endearing tics surface. I tracked this phenomenon during a video conferenced team meeting where we were all on camera. I observed my colleagues  drinking coffee, scratching, leaning away, rubbing eyes, twirling hair, fiddling with jewelry, and eyes focused off screen. You see how distracting it can all be. A heightened self-awareness is essential to video conferencing.

Conclusion: See the Big Picture

Thinking about your own experiences with webcams at an office meeting, you may remember what you learned that was visual. Your colleagues are watching everything you do, and you in turn can see each of them.  The visual cues help confirm comprehension, agreement or dissension, and also reveal when participants become distracted or inattentive.

That much attention to the face-in-the-mirror can make anyone squirm.  I was able to learn about my on camera image by recording and critiquing practices sessions. Most webcams include software to record and view your screen presence, and in this way you can target changes. It’s easy to improve once you learn where to focus your adjustments. According to a report issued by the 1080 Group for Citrix, a 2011 survey of business leaders on how well they are using this technology yielded the following top factors that detract from on camera effectiveness:

• lack of eye contact with the camera
• a cluttered or distracting background
• distracting mannerisms or gestures
• poor lighting (too dim or bright)

By addressing these basic personal traits and environmental factors, you can make a tremendous leap forward in the quality of your video conferences.

Someday everyone will adopt webcams, making this technology as common in meetings as a flip chart.  Are you ready for your on camera debut?

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A reader asks:

Hello, I am very interested in becoming a business analyst, the only problem is I have no idea where to begin. One main question I have is what do I need to study in college that can lead me to the point of becoming a BA? I understand that the term “BA” can be a general term, however I am looking for the best path to take getting there. Please keep in mind I have started some classes in IT as a network specialist but have withdrawn from the courses at my school, due to me discovering that BA is the career I wish to pursue. Please help, any information you can give me in regards to this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Laura’s answer:

There are two main tenets of thought on how your studies in college relate to your career options after college. The first is to use your college experience to broaden your mind and thinking, pursuing a liberal arts education that may have little direct applicability to your future career. The second is to use your time in college to pursue training in a specific vocation and plant the seeds of your future career while an undergraduate.

To reveal my biases, I attended a liberal arts college and dual-majored in Philosophy and English. I didn’t start thinking about a career until my senior year when it became apparent to me that the continued education/professorship path was not a good fit. I remember many, many conversations with my parents talking about what I wanted to be when I grow up. I fought with the answer and fought the need for an answer. After college, as you can imagine, I found myself very satisfied with my college years but without any great career prospects. I managed to land an assistant editor job at a local publishing company and proceeded to work myself up from there, eventually landing in a business analyst role that would be the foundation for my first real “career.”

If I had to pick one college class that was the most helpful to me as a BA, Introduction to Logic would be it. In my first months as a BA, as I fought to think through designing systems, the concepts kept coming back to me. It turns out, there were a lot of parallels between picking apart a logical argument and designing a coherent system! While Aristotle did not teach me to write use cases, he sure taught me to think critically. And that has always been important as a business analyst.

I know many, many other BAs with similar stories. So, on the one hand, it may not really matter what you study in college, as long as you are learning and growing intellectually in a meaningful way.

But I know that many do not pursue education the same way I did, and are looking to build the seeds of a vocation while an undergrad in college. A few years back, I pondered what I would include in a college-level program dedicated to educating the next generation of business analysis professionals in a post titled, “Can we teach someone to be a business analyst?” My answer today is pretty much the same. A program would need to include education in the following:

• Communication
• Analysis/Problem-Solving Process
• Logic
• Public Speaking
• Facilitation
• A dash of the Business Analysis Fundamentals

To this I’d now add:

• Relationship Building
• Finance
• General Business

How can you take this and apply it to your course selection?

A lot of the advice regarding specific courses really depends on what programs your college offers. You might choose an “off topic” liberal arts degree that interests you and add some electives in business analysis so you leave college with an awareness of the core skills. Or, you might choose a more formal “BA” degree and make liberal use of your electives to choose from courses in fields such as sales, marketing, business, philosophy, psychology, and English to broaden your perspective.

Regardless, when you leave college, be prepared to build some professional experience outside the BA profession, as that’s where you’ll build the professional experience and transferable skills that will lead you to a business analyst job within a few years of graduating. You can accelerate this path by using your summers to work in internship programs.

How would you answer this reader’s question? Did you take any college courses that you felt really helped you as a business analyst?

Related posts:

1. A Case Study: A Business Analyst on an Agile Project
2. Help a BA! How do I transition from an intellectual analyst to a business analyst?
3. The Effectiveness of a Study Group Approach for Studying for the CBAP Exam

Just a quick update on our goal for 50 BAs in 2012. While we’re still waiting for our very first entrant for the 2012 Registry, we’ve added 2 BAs to the 2011 Registry, helped many rethink their transition plans in last week’s webinar, and are taking registrations for our next Launch Your Business Analysis Career course.

Who Has Been Added to the Registry?

Bethany Rein was a Capacity Planning Analyst with some online writing experience and previous work experience in systems implementation and technical customer service before starting her business analyst career. Her first BA experience was as a user rep for a development project, where she got to see a great BA in action and started asking questions. After lots of questions asked and lots of reading and researching, she interviewed for and accepted an Associate BA position in November 2011. She attributes her success to an awesome mentor and her willingness to seek out information (including the Bridging the Gap blog posts, free email course and LinkedIn group), a technical aptitude, an understanding that communication needs to be flexible and meaningful to the intended audience, and an enthusiasm for taking on new challenges.  She found the Bridging the gap resources easily digestible and appreciated the real-life stories shared by the contributing authors. Find Bethany Rein on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Sonu Singhal was a software engineer before he was a business analyst. After pursuing an MBA, he joined Barclays in early 2011. In the last year Sonu has worked on multiple projects related to information security, access, and identity management. Sonu leveraged Bridiging the Gap blog posts and the free email course. Find Sonu on Twitter.

What Happened During the Webinar?

In last week’s webinar (which had over 300 registrants), we talked about how transferable skills are the key to making your BA career transition a reality. The positive feedback has been pretty amazing. 90% of participants report feeling more confident about their career options and many have shared very kind words.

“Your ‘simple’ hour webinar awakened possibilities that were previously not evident. You provided a glimpse of a simple framework that can help us ‘unearth our skills’ and face the possibilites of a brighter future.”

“It’s given me the confidence to begin calling myself a BA.” 

“The webinar was indeed very informative and encouraging for participants like me who are planning to take up a career in BA that too with a non-IT background.”

I’m hoping these and other participants are well on their way to making their BA career goals a reality in 2012. I’m looking forward to doing a repeat of this webinar and building on it’s success with future Bridging the Gap webinars in 2012.

Did you miss this webinar? Sign-up for our eNewsletter to be notified of similar events in the future.

How Can I Get More Support For My BA Career Transition?

The next instructor-supported session of Launch Your Business Analysis Career starts next Thursday, February 9th. We’ll help you qualify yourself for BA jobs by completing a deep down BA skills assessment. For a full 4 months, you receive guidance from myself, Eric Shayne Elliot and Ivy Nichols, as you take forward steps on your BA career transition plan.

The structure of this course and the personal feedback from the instructors was invaluable in helping me to explore applicable career experiences, identify action steps, and encourage me to continue on my path to business analysis. Even if I do not end up in business analysis, this course has helped me identify my marketable and transferable skills and will undoubtedly benefit me in my next job search. -Andrea Tinnen

Registration closes on Wednesday, February 8th. Join us today.

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1. How do I know if I’m ready for my first business analyst project?
2. Excellent free webinar series for business analysts
3. Help a BA! Is project management the natural progression of the BA career path?

Right, I might be branded a heretic, but I’m going to say it.

Organizations that deliver every project that they kick off (with the project’s scope intact) are either extremely lucky, extremely risk averse, or extremely misguided.

This sounds like a contrarian view, and may even sound a little controversial.  In fact, you might (quite logically) be thinking that an organization that delivers every project is in fact extremely successful. I beg to differ….

As all of us who have worked on projects know, it’s extremely difficult to accurately estimate the costs and benefits at the very outset.

Bad projects should be axed sooner rather than later!

Whether your project is agile or waterfall, the reality is that you’ll get a much better understanding of scope, benefits and costs as the project progresses.  However well-intentioned the project, you might find that it’s just not feasible once you’ve “opened the hood” and had a better look inside.

Even the most talented teams sometimes initiate projects that turn out to be turkeys. A key differentiator between organizations is how they behave when they find out that the project is going to be an absolute flop. In fact, the way organizations react can be poles apart depending on the organizational culture, and whether the executives encourage their team to tell them the cold hard facts.  Four broad categories of response are explained below – these aren’t extensive by any means, but give a flavour of response:

EGO FOCUSED

In some organizations, even “turkey projects” will continue if they have strong executive sponsorship.  In organizations like this, business cases are largely “tick box” exercises. Some ego-focused organizations are run based on fear, and this will lead to information being subverted.  The sad truth is that the exec will probably never hear the truth, as middle management act as a “filter” because they fear for their jobs. Within Ego-Focused organizations, there is often a “blame culture,” since nobody wants to take accountability.  Objective and independent Change Management professionals will have a hard time in organizations like this; they will be treated with suspicion, and stakeholder management will be key.

BAD BUREAUCRACY

Some organizations drown in the “red tape” of bureaucracy   Even if projects aren’t going to deliver any benefit, they continue anyway.  You’ll hear phrases like, “Hey, we fought hard for that budget, I’m not giving it back to corporate!” And “This project is on the roadmap…. We have to deliver it despite what the figures tell us.”  In organizations like this, it’s hard to get projects initiated, so nobody is going to give up. Delivering something (anything!) is considered better than waiting for the next year’s planning cycle.

SINGLE-MINDED DELIVERY OF PROJECTS

In these organizations, all projects will continue.  Once initiated, the only objective is to deliver them.  In fact, it’s rare that anyone will look at the business case after version 1.0.  These organizations feel like factories for delivering projects, and there’s often a focus on delivering quickly.  The danger however, is that these organizations may inadvertently deliver the wrong thing quickly.

BENEFITS FOCUSED

In a benefits focused organization, a “turkey” project would be paused when the cracks appear. The team reflect, and determine whether there is a better way of delivering Customer and Business benefit.  If there is, then perhaps the project is re-scoped.  If there isn’t, then the project is scrapped.

In my view, benefits focused organizations are the ones that are most likely to succeed in today’s competitive environment.  There is simply no room for organizations that rely on “luck” to deliver their projects.

If an organization truly does deliver every project it initiates, then I maintain that it is either very lucky, very risk averse (and only chooses “safe” projects which won’t set the world on fire and won’t gain competitive advantage) or just simply misguided.

So, what type of organization do you work for? And what type of organization do you want to work for?

I’d love to hear your thoughts, please add a comment below!

Related posts:

1. Thinking outside the project: implied responsibilities of an agile product owner
2. Five steps to a failed IT project
3. If a project is approved, do you need to do a business case?

A reader asks:

What is the best way to/how to tackle behavioral interview questions?

Laura’s answer:

Honestly.

I thought about ending the post with this one-word answer. But then I just couldn’t do it. So let’s take a step back and address the underlying components of this question.

What is a behavioral interview question?

Behavioral interview questions ask the candidate to give concrete examples of how and when they’ve used specific skills in their work history. Say I was interviewing a candidate and crafting use cases was very important, I might ask the candidate to tell me about a time they used use cases to document requirements. Or, if we tend to have challenging stakeholders, (who doesn’t?) I’d ask about how they handled a situation where the sponsor was not willing to compromise on scope.

Why does the BA interviewer ask behavioral interview questions?

Because how you do business analysis is very important. Knowing how to do something is not the same as having done it in a real-world situation. Having the technical skills of a BA or knowing how to write “perfect” requirements specifications is not enough. As a BA, building relationships, communicating well, and handling sticky situations with grace is just as, if not (depending on who you ask), more important. Behavioral interview questions are one way to ascertain whether or not you can do the job and do the job well, because you have done it well before in a similar situation.

(Conversely, having real-world experience, even without the formal knowledge of a BA, can often be a huge asset, something I help aspiring BAs discover in Launch Your Business Analysis Career.)

Just be sure not to do this…

There are hundreds of lists of possible behavioral questions. As a BA, you like to prepare. Your first thought might be to prepare an answer for every possible question.  Having a great, canned answer for each is not only not feasible, it’s counter-productive.

It’s counter-productive because in the interview you want to be fully present and putting your best foot forward. If, instead, you are searching your memory for one of several canned responses you’ve prepared, you risk missing the essence of the question and properly positioning your skills and experiences.

How do I prepare for behavioral interview questions?

Instead, take a few key career highlights and practice talking about them. If your career background largely matches the background the employer is looking for, it’s likely that in your key career experiences you’ll have a story or two that will be relevant for most of the behavioral interview questions you’ll receive.

Second, before the interview, take some time to familiarize yourself with the terminology of the organization and practice telling your stories using the terms that are most likely to be used by the interviewer.

It’s important to note that this approach also works for the aspiring BA who might have a lot of relevant work experience but is just learning to “talk the BA talk.” By learning to talk about past experience using BA terms, you’ll prepare yourself for the behavioral interview questions, multiplying the value of your past professional experience in a BA context.

How would you answer this business analyst’s question?

**For our support discovering how your BA skills and experiences can be positioned in a job interview, check out  Launch Your Business Analysis Career (for aspiring BAs) or Tackling the BA Job Market (for intermediate and senior BAs).

Related posts:

1. Help a BA! How do I answer these BA interview questions?
2. Help a BA! What questions should a BA ask in a job interview?
3. It’s not what you know; it’s the questions you ask: Interview with Cecilie Hoffman