In my last post I discussed The Six Key Characteristics of a Senior Business Analyst. If you have not read this post please take a minute to become familiar with how I define a senior business analyst. The post outlines how to identify a senior business analyst if you are a hiring manager. If you’re a BA, you can see if you have the characteristics of a senior BA. Knowing what a senior BA looks like is one step in transforming the business analysis discipline within your organization. Many of you are senior business analysts or work in companies with senior business analysts. Are you or the other senior BAs being utilized to maximize productivity or do all BAs have the same responsibilities regardless of skills and experience? In today’s post I will highlightfour ways to best utilize a senior BA to improve the effectiveness of your overall BA team, which provides the foundation for transformation.
Critical Projects
Critical projects bring a level of risk to the team assigned to that project. These projects can have executive visibility and/or cause fines or loss of market share if delayed or delivered incorrectly. These projects have management showing up at project kick-off meetings, saying “we have to get this right”. Managers want to sleep at night knowing their team has things under control and will take care of business. Senior business analysts have the techniques, experience, and mindset to make the project a success.
In addition, this gives the senior BAs some recognition and junior BAs something to strive for. By staffing the senior BAs on the critical projects they feel valued and will stay motivated.
Scoping and Planning
In my opinion the most important part of a project or sprint is to understand the scope and thinking through a plan. The senior business analyst has enough experience to help ensure the business analysis scope is understood and can determine the appropriate analysis effort necessary for the initiative. The senior BA can be used early in projects to help with scoping and planning then use a more junior analyst to implement the plan.
Coaching
Let me start by giving the difference between a coach and a mentor. A mentor is usually someone identified by the mentee. This is a personal decision made by the mentee to seek out someone they look up to and have an idea of what goal they want to reach through the relationship. The mentee manages the relationship. A coach is assigned to someone based on the job. Think about a hitting coach in baseball, or a strength coach used for many sports. The team management assigns a coach to each player as part of their job. I believe all junior BAs should be assigned a coach. They need support; they need someone dedicated to helping them develop.
The senior business analysts should be assigned to a junior business analyst to coach them up. Many organizations unintentionally leave junior BAs out in the world all alone. Junior BAs should have a coach to help them improve in their growth areas. Left alone during projects junior BAs can easily fall into two traps. They make a wrong decision on a direction to take on a project or they sit there almost paralyzed trying to figure out the best approach to take. Having a senior business analyst with their experience will help accelerate the decision making process for the junior BA and can help recognize where they may need to change direction. Overall this improves the speed and effectiveness of the junior business analysts. An important note is that the senior BA acting as the coach needs to be given the time to coach. This can’t be an added duty to someone’s workload that is already at capacity.
Lead Business Analyst
To help the work of a business analyst group excel, companies need to begin moving some of their senior BAs into a lead role. Here is a simple example organization structure that shows a lead role within each business domain area a group of BAs support.
The role of the lead BA, similar to the coaching role, includes non-project work. The lead can be used to in the first three areas, critical projects, scoping and planning, and coaching. In addition the lead BAs can develop and implement standards and practices for the larger pool of BAs. The lead BA should work closely with the business domain they support and help prioritize projects. One other way a lead BA can add value is helping with resource allocation for the BAs they are leading. Once scoping and planning is complete, the lead BA can assist the manager in determining the best resource to use for project level tasks.
The four ways I highlighted above have the potential for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the business analyst efforts for your team, which in turn improves project outcomes and customer satisfaction. The knowledge and experience of the senior BAs is handed down to the junior analysts allowing them to be more effective. By utilizing senior business analysts in one or more of these ways helps with a BA career path. Junior BAs have the ability to become senior BAs. And for senior BAs, the experienced gained will help them move into a management role, a strategic business analysis role, and a role in the line of business.
How are your companies utilizing senior business analysts?
Don't forget to leave your comments below!
written by Kupe Kupersmith, July 06, 2010
Thanks for supporting the junior BAs!
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written by Dan, July 06, 2010
We optimize our BAs by involving them directly in the quality/testing process. By the time the project goes beyond the design “phase(s)”, the BAs are undoubtedly the business subject matter experts (SMEs). The project team relies heavily on the BAs for resolving both requirement and testing issues. Contacting the customer to clarify requirements is the last resort.
Bob Galen reminds us to “…keep in mind that collaboration is a key principal in agile contexts…There’s a strong connection between the BA role and the testers…”
BAs become a critical project resource for planning and sometimes even executing the tests along with the customers/testers. Who else is best to evaluate both the quality of the requirements and well as the validation of the requirements? On governmental contracts, where agile methodology is still a tough sell, it’s also much easier to justify the need for BAs throughout all of the project phases.
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written by Kupe Kupersmith, July 06, 2010
Thanks for your comment. A similar argument can be made about being PMs. Individuals that play the BA role get pulled into to do QA work as well as PM work. I'll let David Wright talk about his feelings on this! David, if you are reading please chime in.
My post today was not addressing the full scope of the BA role and how all BA's are utilized. I am in agreement with you that a BA should be used throughout the project in some form or fashion. definitely to address design, development, and testing questions that arise. I am addressing ways to utilize your senior team of BAs. In my opinion having a senior BA testing or playing the PM role is not the best use of that individuals skills.
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written by Simon Papson, July 07, 2010
Kupes, I know this isn’t the main thrust of your blog (far from it!), but this resonates with me.
What does a hypothetical junior BA do when they’ve stepped out into the big wide world to expand on their meagre BA experience to date, only to find that the first job they land is acting as the solo BA on a project in a company which isn’t large enough to warrant having a second BA, let alone a senior one? How does a junior BA such as this become a senior BA without a coach?
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written by Kupe Kupersmith, July 07, 2010
You are not alone. I hate to put you off, but my next blog is focused on that topic. How to become a senior BA.
My one piece of advice I will leave you with is to find a coach outside of your office. You seem to be very active in the online communities. You have coaches all over the world at your finger tips. Although many can't be there with you day in and day out, you do have a support system of BAs at all levels willing to give feedback.
You should also set-up a feedback system with your team and business stakeholders. At intervals that make sense, ask for feedback on your elicitation techniques, your deliverables, etc. Are the people you work with satisfied with your work? Ask for feedback, thank the person for their feedback, implement the feedback into your work, and provide updates to the ones giving you feedback on how you have changed based on their feedback. If you take those steps people will feel comfortable giving you honest feedback in the future so you can continue to improve.
OK, I am giving too much away...I want you to read my next post!!!!
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written by David Wright, July 07, 2010
Actually, I am surprised that BAs are so frequently mentioned in context of testing. Certainly the quality checking and validation of requirements should happen when requirements are determined, long before testing begins; then it is too late.
QA work is its own discipline. Consider that most projects are enhancement to current systems. You need testers with experience testing a system, to do things like regression testing and other techniques to make sure the enhancements did not break the system, let alone meet the requirements. A BA can effectively deliver requirements for such projects, but may be very ineffective as a tester if they have no experience with the system. So, I agree with Kupe that utilizing Senior Business Analysst effectively does not mean having them do other peoples' jobs as well.
As for the becoming a SME, that is a slippery slope to assuming you actually know the business better than the business people. Certainly a BA has been most exposed to the business that generated the requirements, but those requirements belong to the business, not the BA. Any real questions that cannot be answered by the current set of requirements must be raised with the business.
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written by Holly Martin, August 03, 2010
I agree with @dwright that QA work is a discipline in and of itself and many of the lead QA analyst that I work with definitely have better skills than I in test planning and test execution. They are the expert in that.
However I also agree with @Digigaps that BA's do have a role in the testing phase. I frequently assist our QA lead in test planning, reviewing the requirements with them and coming up with an initial framwork for the QA approach to a project. As the liaison between product owner and the technical team I can provide a lots of guidance on what the users view as critical elements for testing. I will also participate in test execution support as a supplement to the QA team. QA may come to me to help clarify user expectations for a requirement, especially when there is disagreement on expected results between development and QA. I will also do some of my own testing outside of the regular test plan that the QA team is executing. A different perspective can often help uncover defects.
Also, by participating in the testing phase I get some closure on the project. I enjoy being there at both the beginning and the end of a project. To see it come to fruition. To know that all the hard work I did during requirements phase paid off.
So I encourage folks to keep your BA's engaged throughout the project. Find a role for them in testing, you'll benefit from their perspective.
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Your Lead BA organizational structure gives rise to the opportunity for the Lead BA to coordinate the junior BAs activities in building an Enterprise Architecture and an internal BA Body of Knowledge for the organization. That role will have some inherent coaching activity within it.
Do you think another good use for senior BAs is to perform Enterprise Analysis activities? I would want my most senior BAs performing competitive advantage, capability gap and market analysis and feasibility studies.