Broaden Your Professional Horizons with Business Analysis
Fourth of five articles drawn from “Turbocharge your Skills and Career with Business Analysis,” presented at Dreamforce 2022.
Discovering the Organization
Business analysts’ curiosity focuses initially on an organization's values, purpose, and direction. The following five questions from management guru Peter Drucker can get them off to a good start:
What is the purpose of the business?
Who is our customer?
What does our customer value?
What are our results?
What is our plan?
The answers to these questions offer insight into what drives the organization and its direction, providing context for further discovery within the organization.
Two Perspectives of the Big Picture
Once business analysts gain insight into the organization, they deepen their focus on an organization’s domain, feeding their curiosity with the domain’s terminology, goals, and processes. Finally, they focus on the domain processes, teaming with domain experts to discover how to improve them.
Analysts learn how business processes achieve domain goals while analyzing the processes for improvement. They can ultimately connect those goals to the organization’s purpose.
Business analysts learn about the organization from the outside in. Then, as they analyze its requirements, they see from the inside out how the organization domains work together to fulfill the organization's purpose.
As analysts explore a domain’s processes with experts, they ensure the experts understand and appreciate the benefits their solution(s) will provide, for example, relieving the experts’ workload with automated processes. When the experts help the business analysts learn the domain, they ensure the experts get credit for extra effort.
Forming Alliances for Success
When business analysts start on a project, they also need help facing challenges that arise - reluctant or conflicting stakeholders, inadequate resources, and other roadblocks. Allies help them work through these challenges to get the requirements right the first time.
Analysts should have a primary ally who stays on top of the project day-to-day and knows all the stakeholders. For example, agile development has product owners - business stakeholders who oversee solution development.
A primary ally should have enough experience in the organization to know who can remove obstacles, settle disputes, and find what the analyst needs to keep the analysis process going.
People often ask what to do when stakeholders have a conflict they cannot resolve, even with the business analyst's help. They should consult with their primary ally to escalate and resolve the dispute.
Executive relationships provide a unique opportunity for business analysts to broaden their horizons. Executives see how the solutions fit in the big picture and can sell the benefits to other executives and managers. They can also introduce other allies to the business analyst.
If you’re a consultant working with a client, ensure you have good relationships with the Information Technology stakeholders. They should familiarize you with their policies, especially around security.
Maintaining Valuable Career Relationships
As business analysts venture from project to project, they work with different stakeholders. They build and maintain a growing network of allies and stakeholders, at least via LinkedIn. For example, a problem could arise that someone in your network can help solve. Their network could even offer new career opportunities.
Broadening Professional Horizons
When business analysts start working with a new organization, they learn it from the outside in, beginning with the organization’s values, purpose, and direction. Then they have the context for a deeper dive into a domain. Once they understand the domain’s terminology and goals, they dive deepest into its processes to discover opportunities for improvement.
As analysts discover how to improve processes in multiple domains, they learn from the inside out how processes meet domain goals, which in turn fulfill the organization’s purpose.
No one expects business analysts to deal with stakeholders without help - they need allies to help them with difficult stakeholders, clearing barriers to discovery, and finding resources. Their primary partners have a day-to-day understanding of the project, know all the stakeholders, and have management influence.
Analysts can also ally with domain experts, project managers, and IT stakeholders to keep the project moving forward. Allies help business analysts see the big picture around their solutions.
Understanding the organization, its domains, and processes enables business analysts to connect solutions to their business value.