Tag: Skills

4 Tips for Managing Ambiguity as a Business Analyst

Written by Giorgos Sioutzos on April 17, 2024. Posted in Articles.

As a business analyst, it is common to face ambiguity in many different forms and aspects. It may be the ambiguity of the business analysis approach you have chosen, the requirements, or the design decisions that you have to contribute to.

Ambiguity and constant changes are something that is expected. It’s up to you to respond constructively. The following tips may help:

#1- Approve Ambiguity

Although you may want to have full control over the circumstances, it will not happen. It may take time and changes in order to establish a business analysis approach to customers’ needs or understand the full aspects of the system to be developed. It is fine not to have the full picture from the beginning of the analysis journey, but it is your job to progressively clear out the context and the scope. Approve the ambiguity of the intrinsic part of the analysis.

#2- Mindset Shift

Ambiguity can cause plenty of negative thoughts and worries. Instead of entering into a negative, endless dialogue, try to view ambiguity as an opportunity for new approaches, for innovation, and for gaining experience. Ambiguity can cause team members frustration and challenges, as the situations triggering it are mostly out of our control. It is important to reframe biassed thinking patterns concerning ambiguity into positive ones.

#3- Utilizing Effective Risk Response Strategies

As a business analyst, you should cooperate with the project manager to recognize factors and assumptions that can affect the business analysis objectives. You have to understand the sources of the risk and craft alternatives you can use if those risks actually occur. Whether you are a lead business analyst or other team member, your ability to identify and respond to risks effectively will affect the team’s ability to successfully complete project tasks.

#4 – Have a Compass

Having a specific compass for ambiguous situations is essential to guiding your decisions and actions. Orienting yourself and leading your team through a period of ambiguity can be supported by a stable and valuable foundation of personal and organizational vision, mission goals, and objectives. Knowing at any time why you are doing something and what you want to achieve and being true to yourself and your team can guide you as the North Stare in unpredictable and chaotic situations.

By viewing ambiguity as an opportunity, you can reduce the stress imposed by an ambiguous situation, experiment with new processes and ideas, and develop your team members. Identifying a goal or value that can be used as a “compass” can contribute to avoiding actions and behaviours you will regret later.

Unveiling the Unsaid: The Power of Subtle Stakeholder Cues

Written by Adrian Reed on April 10, 2024. Posted in Articles.

When eliciting information from stakeholders, often what isn’t said can be as significant as what is said. Of course, the information that a stakeholder explicitly mentions is of crucial importance, but often there are subtle and nuanced details that aren’t obvious unless you look for them. Perhaps a stakeholder subtly pauses and looks uncomfortable and avoids answering a specific part of a question. Or perhaps they use a qualifying word like “usually” or “sometimes”. Either way, it is crucial to probe further and find out more.

Hearing What You Expect To Hear

Looking out for these clues is important, but is easier said than done, particularly when time is tight. When there are a number of stakeholders to speak to, it is easy to get drawn into a pattern of hearing what you expect to hear. We’ve probably all experienced this: after three people from different departments outline a process consistently, speaking to the fourth and fifth person seems like ticking a box. After all, they are going to just confirm what the first three people have described, surely?

That might be the case, but equally they might have additional insights that the original three did not. There is presumably a reason that they have been selected to participate in the elicitation activities, perhaps because they have a different perspective on things. Yet, it would be easy to let those discussions be swayed by the conversations that have happened before. To almost go on ‘autopilot’ and lead the stakeholder in a particular direction. It is worth being especially aware of those subtle cues and nuances in situations like this.

An Example

Imagine interviewing a stakeholder in a finance team about the invoice payment process. You’ve spoken to other stakeholders previously and you’re pretty sure you know the process:

“So, you get an invoice in, and as long as there’s a purchase order number on there, and as long as it’s approved, it gets scheduled for payment, is that right?”

“So, yes, mainly…. Yeah, mostly that’s it.”

It’d be easy to move on from this. It would be easy to assume that they are confirming some of the key decision rules (if an invoice has a purchase order number and has been approved, it gets scheduled). But the stakeholder has added qualifying words: mainly and mostly. These are easy to miss, but definitely require probing.

Probing might go like this:

“I noticed you said that this is mainly how the process works, are there other circumstances?”

“Yes, only very occasionally though. Sometimes, we get ‘proforma’ invoices that have to be paid immediately. We have a different process for those. Also, there are some cases where we pay up front by credit card. For example, booking training and conference places. That has a slightly different process too.”

Suddenly, a whole new set of facts becomes available. If this were a real situation, this would lead to further probing (e.g. “Are there any other times when the process operates differently?”, “Is there just one corporate credit card, and if so who is responsible for it” etc, etc).

Make Sure They Feel Heard

Of course, probing this way is important to ensure that nothing crucial is missed. However, genuinely listening is important for another reason too: to ensure that people actually feel heard.

If you’ve ever had the experience of speaking to someone who appears to be preoccupied, and is perhaps presuming what your responses are, you’ll know that this rarely feels great. As analysts, it’s important that we empathize with and genuinely hear what people are saying.

Listening in this way will help uncover important information. It is a crucial and often taken for granted skill, but one that we can probably all hone and improve upon!

Ego Check: The Secret Sauce of Successful Business Analysis

Written by Steve Jones on March 14, 2024. Posted in Articles.

You’ve spent days or even weeks working through your discovery and analysis details to craft wire frames for a new application or capability. You know what your stakeholders might ask for in terms of alternatives, so you create those versions as well. The day arrives when you’re finally ready to share with business and IT, the work you’ve labored over.

The big meeting happens and your stakeholder destroys everything you’d worked so diligently over, ripping your heart out.

Sound familiar? Some people take this as a crushing defeat and question their choice of profession.

Don’t let this be you!

You need to have a thick skin in this game. As a business analyst, your role resides at the crossroads of business operations and IT solutions. Navigating the complexities and personalities of both requires not only some technical knowledge and business acumen but also a crucial personality trait — the ability to leave your ego at the door. While this notion may seem daunting at first, it stands as one of the most invaluable skills a business analyst can possess.

Bringing your ego along in conversations tends to add chaos, disrupting free-flowing communication in an environment that might already have some chaos. Setting aside your ego entails acknowledging you don’t have all the answers; that meticulously crafted strategies may necessitate revisions; and that your perspective, no matter how comprehensive, may not encapsulate the entirety of a problem or its solution.

Within the dynamics of a business environment, ego can often act as a hindrance, impeding effective communication. A business analyst who can restrain their ego is more amenable to guidance for research and receptive to feedback, fostering continuous learning and growth.

While criticism is frequently viewed unfavorably, it carries substantial value within a business context, serving as an indispensable tool for development when harnessed constructively. As BAs, our mission revolves around streamlining processes, enhancing capability & value, and facilitating change — tasks that demand perpetual scrutiny and re-evaluation. Feedback, including criticism, serves as a critical lense through which we refine our insights and strategies.

You need to be strong enough to withstand the critique to investigate what the underlying cause or comments are about. When the feedback seems overly harsh and does not feel like it is constructive, exercise what you have available to you – use your tools to continue the conversation. Start by expressing appreciation for the input. Depending on the harshness of the initial comments, this can be disarming, so utilize the connection to ask questions for feedback that could be actionable areas for your improvement.

In addition to seeking constructive feedback, you can also practice the agile principle of Simplicity. If you don’t quite understand what “the art of maximizing the amount of work not done” really means for a BA… it’s this; don’t spend so much time trying to produce a pristine wireframe or perfectly crafted requirement. Do enough to identify value during conversations.

While on a project or during a product increment, the initial requirements documentation is really intended to be just enough to draw out the valuable conversation to confirm understanding while narrowing in on the solution and it’s constraints to facilitate realization of the business value.

Internalizing feedback can obstruct the broader perspective and overall objective of the task at hand. Conversely, leveraging feedback as a means of self-improvement can significantly elevate your standing within the team, while enhancing the quality of output and fostering stronger work relationships.

Keeping your ego in check does not mean a dismissal of your ideas, opinions, or self-assurance entirely. Rather, it involves striking a balance — knowing when to advocate persistently for your ideas and when to step back, listen, and glean insights from others. For seasoned analysts, this should be second nature but it’s worth a reminder from time to time.

In conclusion, the absence of ego can quell the chaos, amplify your capacity to discover and comprehend the real issues, and embrace diverse perspectives to construct robust and effective solutions. Thus, resisting the urge to take criticism personally and ensuring that our egos do not overshadow the primary goal of problem-solving constitutes an trait every successful business analyst must master.

Strings Attached: The Art of Adapting Templates in Business Analysis

Written by Adrian Reed on March 13, 2024. Posted in Articles.

I’ve recently started learning to play the ukulele. I made a decision early on that I’m not interested in learning ‘properly’, I don’t want to commit to formal lessons, I just want to try a fun new hobby. For that reason, the (very little) I’ve learned has been learned largely from YouTube.

When I say I’m not learning ‘properly’, I’m really just learning chords and tabs, I’m not reading sheet music and I’m pretty much just strumming along to the YouTube videos. That is perfectly fine for what I am aiming for, I never want to be a professional, I just want to play some simplified versions of songs I know.

In the dim and distant past I took piano lessons. Back then I could read sheet music (in treble and bass clef), knew about timing and some of the theory behind music. That knowledge has all gone now, and I have no idea how to play a piece of sheet music on the ukulele!

Now, you probably didn’t come here to read about ukulele playing, but there is relevance here, I promise! It’s all down to application within a context.

From Ukuleles To BA Templates

One of the things that I see a lot on social media is people asking for (and providing) BA templates. There’s a huge draw in using a template, it means that you don’t have to start from scratch. Things like templates and checklists can be very useful to make sure there’s consistency, and to make sure things don’t get forgotten. (I have a travel checklist for that very reason.)

Yet a template without an understanding of the underlying theory and rationale can be dangerous. It can lead to slavish adoption (“well, I need to put this diagram in, because there’s a section for it… the template is ‘best practice’ after all”). Just like my ukulele playing will always be restricted by my lack of music theory, someone who picks up a template without understanding why the template was created that way and what techniques can potentially accompany it will likely run into issues.

An Example: “BRD for the Financial Services Industry”

Let’s take an entirely fictional example and imagine that somebody produces a Business Requirements Document for the Financial Services Industry. It is pitched as a document that will likely be used in a waterfall or incremental delivery environment, and includes a context diagram, use case diagram, scenarios, functional requirements, non-functional requirements and so on.

It’s hard to criticize any of those sections, there will be times when all of those are useful. But what if the person picking it up doesn’t know what a context diagram is? Even if they do, the whole act of eliciting information to construct a context diagram is an artform in itself.

Or, what about if you’re making a tiny change to the label on a single field? Are you really going to fill in all of those sections? You might, in some circumstances, but in all probability something more lightweight would be appropriate. In fact, a prototype alone might suffice…

Of course, this is a deliberately provocative example, but I’m sure you see the point. There really is no ‘one size fits all’ in business analysis. So much is down to context, and understanding the context is key.

However: Templates Can Be Useful

It is worth clarifying here that I am absolutely not arguing against templates, nor am I arguing against the appropriate sharing of templates on social media. They are extremely useful, when used appropriately by skilled practitioners. They can even act as a guide to less-experienced practitioners providing this is accompanied by a desire to learn the underlying theory and techniques.

However, templates are also most useful when they are flexible. What works in one situation won’t work in all, so cut a section, or add a section! It’s important to think about the purpose of the artifact, its consumers and how persistent it is (i.e. how long it is expected to remain current for).

Like so much in change, pragmatic and intelligent application is what matters.

Connecting the Dots: The Crucial Role of Synthesis

Written by Adrian Reed on February 28, 2024. Posted in Articles.

A few years ago, I was working in a fast-paced environment where we very quickly needed to achieve a shared understanding of a particular problem that existed, and then elicit and analyze requirements for improving things.

I’d spent a couple of days speaking to some of the key people, largely in back-to-back meetings, and I was working really late in the office, energized by the conversations I’d been having. I’d managed to find an empty meeting room where I could spread my notes over a large table to think things through. Over the past couple of days I’d had countless conversations, been given documents to read, been shown IT systems, processes and more… It was a lot to take in! Plus of course not everyone necessarily agreed on the nature of the problem, or even what a desirable solution would look like. So my thoughts went to “what next… how do I arrange and make sense of all of this ‘stuff’?”

Luckily, the meeting room had a whiteboard. I instinctively started drawing the ‘problem’ that had been described to me. I drew people, IT systems, data and information flow, customer interactions, bottlenecks, problems. It was a messy drawing that wasn’t intended for anyone but me. If you’re familiar with the idea of a rich picture, it was very much like that. Crucially, it helped me make connections between pieces of information that different stakeholders had told me. This act of synthesis—bringing things together—helped gain a more holistic picture of what was going on.

I was midway through pondering whether two concepts were related to each other, when a very senior stakeholder walked through the door. He asked what I was drawing, and I talked him through my messy diagram. He started instinctively adding things to it, not only adding his perspective to the mix but also highlighting things I’d missed (or misunderstood). Even though this happened years ago, I can still remember parts of the diagram now….

Analysis Needs Synthesis

Of course, that drawing on a whiteboard was really just an interim work product. It wasn’t a deliverable, and although I recorded it by taking a photo, it wasn’t ever intended to form part of any user stories or requirements documentation. It was really just an exploration of the problem domain and the connections within it. It helped me to get my own head around the situation, so that I could ask better questions and know which areas to examine further. It also helped me to understand which areas and perspectives I was missing.

This highlights the importance of synthesis as well as analysis. Synthesis is described by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary as:

“…the composition or combination of parts or elements so as to form a whole…”

There are of course other definitions too, but this sentence is particularly useful for us as BAs. It’s very easy to think that our job is elicitation and analysis, capturing different viewpoints and pieces of information about a situation. Yet without synthesis, those different pieces of information are of limited use! There will likely be contradiction, conflict, different views and more. We all instinctively know this, but it is worth highlighting how important synthesis is in what we do.

Synthesis Techniques

Ironically, many of the techniques that we use on a day-to-day basis have synthesis, as well as analysis, built at their core. I have already mentioned a rich picture, but many other techniques (when used with synthesis in mind) can help in bringing together different pieces of information and viewpoints. Here are just a few examples:

Concept model and glossary: Bringing together (and reconciling) different terms, and the connections between terms
Process model: Creating a view on how the work should take place, taking into account a number of stakeholder’s viewpoints
Prototype: Bringing together and testing assumptions made, or a set of requirements assembled from varying stakeholders,.
Multiple Cause Diagram: After conducting ‘5 whys’ with different stakeholders, creating a combined diagram and presenting it back and saying “what else?” and “what’s wrong here?”
Workshops: Bringing people together to synthesis and discuss their views
… and many more besides

The Importance and Relevance

To do our jobs well as BAs, we need to consider synthesis as well as analysis, and this means making time for it. In my opening example, I mentioned I was working late in the office, drawing on a whiteboard. I was working late that night mainly because I was energized and excited about the project but also because time was so short and I’d focussed on planning the elicitation but less so the synthesis of the information I’d gleaned.

When you’ve conducted a whole number of interviews, read documents, seen processes and systems as they are operated, there are so many sources of information. It’s easy to just jump on to the next elicitation activity, or jump straight to writing a problem statement (or user story) or whatever. Yet, doing so robs us of the opportunity to see the bigger picture.

Building in time for synthesis—the sort that allows us to see connections—will help ensure we don’t implement a change in one area that inadvertently makes things much worse elsewhere. Of course, time is always tight… but if we don’t make time for synthesis, we might end up having to make time for rework. And that’s definitely best avoided!