Bridging the Gap

How’s The “50 BA” Project Going?

Laura Brandenburg — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:00:15 +0000

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.

If your project is a turkey, kill it early

Adrian Reed — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:00:57 +0000

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!

Help a BA! What is the best way to tackle behavioral interview questions for a BA job?

Laura Brandenburg — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:00:31 +0000

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).

Why I may never adopt the practice of “just-in-time requirements”

Adriana Beal — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:00:55 +0000

The agile movement promotes positive change when it encourages teams to work together to create products that are fit for purpose with as little non-value-added activities as possible. Agile approaches embrace mechanisms for continuous improvement, and include practices that can be traced to Lean thinking, a management philosophy that aims to identify what creates value and eliminate all other activities. The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste–in other words, create more value for customers with fewer resources.

All is well until the talk extends to applying the “just-in-time” concept to software requirements. According to the November 2011 Draft of the Agile Extension to the BABOK Guide,

Within a sprint, business analysis activities focus on defining the requirements for the backlog items being worked on and the acceptance criteria for those items. This method is frequently referred to as just-in-time requirements gathering; developing only what is required for the current sprint and only done to the level of detail required to enable the team to build the product and acceptance criteria.

JIT applies primarily to repetitive manufacturing processes in which the same products and components are produced over and over again. (Raymond A. Jacobs).
Photo credit: inju

Agile approaches focus on building user stories or simple features that can be implemented in a short time period (usually 2 weeks). From my experience with complex software projects, detailing just the stories that are required for the current iteration can actually generate waste. Limiting the analysis to what is being produced in the next cycle prevents analysts from studying requirements in relationship to other requirements, and from seeing each piece of a system as a meaningful component of a working whole. Stories depend on each other, and in-depth understanding of their integration into a working system may be crucial to ensure that what is being built now won’t negatively affect what is going to be built in a later cycle, thus preventing avoidable rework.

In an agile project, unless I’m limited on time and resources, I will make a point of looking beyond what’s planned for the next iteration, and start elaborating related stories, even if they have been deferred to a a future cycle. This exercise often increases the value delivered by each incremental story implementation, helping ensure that underlying problems are being addressed in a way that will continue to work in the future, and facilitating the discovery of overlooked requirements–some of which may even require additional user stories to be included in the backlog.

Proponents of the practice of “reducing work in progress” will disagree with my approach of anticipating the creation of use cases, business logic, acceptance criteria, and any other requirements-related models I’m able to produce as early as possible in preparation for future iterations in my projects. The evidence I’ve gathered in past projects, however, is that making an effort to analyze and communicate the full picture of how each feature or story interacts with others (even when those will not be implemented right off) is actually a way of preventing waste. Taking the broader view to study the complete feature in detail, in parallel with working in smaller stories for immediate implementation, works for me as a risk-minimizing approach that helps stakeholders better understand the final solution while it’s being incrementally delivered, and increases the odds of the right decisions being made while the project is under way.

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

BAs make the world a better place

Ryan Knapton — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:00:40 +0000

As human beings, each of our time on this planet is finite. We know that time is precious, and we want to spend it doing things that make us happy. For many of us, one aspect of happiness is the ability to make a positive difference, to help put other people into a better position than what they were before we came around – in short, to create happiness. A lot of individuals make it their life mission to do such tasks, and they truly do impact people in so many wonderfully different ways.

BAs help the world go round

How do BAs make meaningful differences?

But as a business analyst, how do we make a difference? When we get up in the morning, how much of the reason why is because we want to get out there and make a positive impact? It’s a bit more difficult to see straight away as compared to say, a nurse or a doctor, but if we peel away some of the layers and really think about it, we do put people in better positions than what they were before we came around. It’s more subtle than saving a life (and I’m not going to argue that it’s more valuable!), but it is important and it does make a difference.

If we do our work right, people will have a happier work environment. If we make project interactions pleasant and fun, people will enjoy themselves more. If we really listen to what people have to say and take their suggestions to heart and incorporate it into the project change, they will know that they are making a difference. They will get out of bed with a stronger sense of purpose, a clearer validation of why they didn’t remain under the sheets.

This is one of the things that gives me purpose, one of the reasons why I get out of bed. If I’ve helped individuals be happier at work, I’ve helped them be happier at home, in their families, in their communities, with themselves. Roughly 33% of our life is spent at work so if you’re not happy at work, that is going to impact your happiness away from work.

The above thinking really does motivate me. But it may be a bit too abstract for some people. So how about a more tangible difference?

A more concrete difference

As we are all too well aware, the current financial turmoil in the world is partly due to individual greed. While I do not buy into the whole “witch-hunt” for bankers, no one can argue that a few self-centred individuals helped get us into this situation. And the man-on-the-street taxpayer has had to fork out plenty of cash to keep the system afloat.

Here in the UK, in an attempt to make the system more stable, regulators created the Independent Commission on Banking. This was headed by a man called Sir John Vickers, and the final recommendation report (a.k.a. the Vickers Report) was published in September 2011.

The report focuses on creating stability in the banking sector, as well as making the banking sector more competitive. Both are driven out of the need to protect consumers. In terms of stability, one of the suggestions is to separate retail banking from investment banking, to insulate the taxpayer from risky bets made by investment bankers.

While I have no problem with investment banks, I support the principle of insulation of core banking services that normal individuals require. I don’t think that banks should be too big to fail, and I see merit in protecting the taxpayer. Investment banks should be allowed to take risks, to grow, but when that risk backfires, they should be allowed to fail, to go insolvent. And this must not impact regular Joes like you and me on the street.

As BAs we have the potential to really make a difference to people’s lives. We’re not yet sure how this particular legislation will actually take shape, but whatever the final outcome, BAs will be required to understand the changes and then implement them. Systems will require decoupling, processes will need to be re-engineered, new technology will need to be designed. It will give BAs a real, concrete chance to make a difference to millions of people; to put people in a better position when the next financial crash occurs.

Not convinced?

Are you happy at work? I know a lot of BAs who love what they do, and if you explore the reasons with them it tends to boil down to having meaningful relationships with people. BAs love creating strong networks, we love bridging that gap. We don’t understand when IT and business don’t get along, and drag the project into the mud.

We want to move forward, to put the project in a better place than where it was before we arrived, to put the company in a better place than where it was before the project started. We want to understand people, and reflect that understanding in our work. Through this understanding we create strong relationships that break down silos, which inevitably make people happier.

We often need the concrete evidence to feel like we are making a difference. These examples are such as the Vickers Report – you can see a real difference being made to customers. But the softer things are just as real, a happier employee will contribute more at work, at home, in the community. We do make a difference; remember that next time you hit the snooze button!

The Vickers Report is just one example of how BAs can make a difference. There are others – which have you come across?