Skip to main content

Author: Christina Lovelock

Christina is an experienced BA leader, has built BA teams ranging in size from 5 to 120 Business Analysts and champions entry level BA roles. She is active in the BA professional community, attending and regularly speaking at events. Christina is an examiner for the International Diploma in Business Analysis and is also a director of the UK BA Manager Forum. She has co-authored the 2019 book, Delivering Business Analysis: The BA Service Handbook, which shares insights and findings from research into Business Analysis, practical guidance for BA leaders, and case studies from across the professional community. https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-lovelock

Workshop to crack every nut

Are you using a workshop to crack every nut?

As the saying goes – if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Are business analysts falling into this trap by using a workshop for every situation?

Benefits of workshops

Getting all of the right people in the right place at the same time can move projects and initiatives forward at an accelerated rate. We have different perspectives represented, we can fact-check and enable constructive challenge. We can build on great ideas and identify clear problems with others. Workshops that are well facilitated can be motivating, build trust in the product/ project and deepen working relationships. We can co-create outputs using collaborative approaches and get real buy-in from all attendees. So, it’s easy to see why workshops are an attractive choice.

But if we ONLY use workshops…

They become stale, people stop coming, they are no longer motivating, and we can end up wasting time. Some people do not make their best contribution ‘on the spot’ or in a large group, so we also need to consider whose perspective and input we might be missing by relying only on this approach. Some teams cannot release people for long periods, and may become systemically unrepresented in discussions and decisions. We end up with the group of people who have the time or inclination to attend workshops, not the group we actually need.

Bias towards workshops

Workshops can too easily become the default action. From the perspective of the stakeholder, it can be very difficult to suggest alternatives to a proposed workshop. As an invited workshop attendee, it can feel that if you are not in the room, you will lose the ability to influence. This creates a situation where no one can propose a suitable alternative to workshops, and people only attend due to FOMO!

High visibility

Workshops are very visible. They often exist as a big chunk of time booked in lots of people’s diaries, often weeks or months in advance. During the workshop, business analysis becomes very visible, in the central role of the facilitator and the choice of analytical and collaborative techniques.

Perhaps we have a bias towards workshops precisely because they are so visible. It’s a way to remind stakeholders who we are and why we are useful. The outputs are often very visual, flip charts, post-it notes and colourful virtual whiteboards. Many days or weeks of effort of business analysis sometimes has very little to ‘show’ for it… but workshops scream: here we are! We did this! We have agreed stuff!

The time cost of workshops

It is easy to convince ourselves that workshops are the most efficient way of engaging with a group. And often workshops do ‘save time’ in the long run, but let’s look in detail at the question “How long does a workshop take?”

Let’s say we have allocated 3 hours for a workshop (W = 3).

A good rule for facilitators is that the workshop will take 5 times the length of the workshop to prepare PER facilitator (Prep = 5W x F). This is everything from identifying attendees, sending invites, logistics, planning purpose, designing exercises, creating slides etc.

And actions after the workshop will require 2 times the length of the workshop, again per facilitator (After = 2W x F). This will range from tiding a room, to creating outputs and doing follow up actions.

It might seem like all attendees have to do is show up, but they may have to do some thinking/ reading/ speaking to others. They may also have to share information about the workshop, or carry out follow-up actions. Their multiplying factor is 1.5 times the length of the workshop per attendee.

(If travel time is also required, this is likely an underestimate).

So we have

Prep for facilitators: 5W x F

Plus the actual workshop time for facilitators: W x F

Plus the workshop time for attendees: 1.5W x A

Plus the follow up after for facilitators: 2W x F

Total = W x(8F +1.5A)

Where W is workshop length, F is number of facilitators and A is number of attendees.

So a 3 hour workshop with 2 facilitators, and 20 attendees requires a total of

3 hrs x (8 x 2   +   1.5 x 20)  = 90 hrs

A workshop may still be the best way to move forward, but at least we are not kidding ourselves that “it’s only 3 hrs”!

Types of workshop

It’s useful to consider there are 3 main types of workshop.

Strategic – vision, alignment, big picture, new ideas, changing direction, transformation

Operational – how does this work? What do you need? efficiency, consistency, continuous improvement

Educational – a learning opportunity. This could be two-way, with both participants and facilitators learning something, or primarily one-way, it is mostly a learning opportunity for participants.

The type of workshop will significantly impact the time needed AND understanding the type will help to answer whether a workshop is the right approach to the situation at hand.

Other approaches BAs should be considering

Before we start arranging the inevitable workshop, we need to really consider if this is the best approach, and what else could be achieved given the same amount of time and effort.

We should consider:

  • One to one interviews
  • Small group discussions
  • Attending existing meetings
  • Surveys
  • Pro-Formas
  • Observation
  • Work shadowing
  • Focus groups
  • Prototyping
  • Document analysis
  • Competitor analysis

We may want to use one or more of these methods to supplement workshops, and perhaps doing so will allow us to reduce the duration of the workshop or the number of attendees.

Conclusion

Workshops can be great – but they are not the only tool in your BA toolkit. If we over-rely on workshops, people can start to disengage and loose trust. Workshops take a lot of time and can lead to the idea that the only way to get anything done or agreed is via a workshop. Don’t organise a workshop as the default option. Consider all possible approaches and select the most appropriate for the situation.

 

Further reading

Planning workshops using the 7Ps technique, BA Times (2021)

Business Analysis Techniques: 123 essential tools for success Cadle, Paul et al (2021)

Cultivating Curiosity

Cultivating Curiosity

Curiosity is the BA superpower. But is it a trait we are born with or a skill we can cultivate?

Benefits of curiosity

Bringing genuine curiosity to our discussions helps to foster deeper connections. It improves our understanding of situations and creates empathy with those involved. Curiosity leads to better solutions to problems. Being curious stops us from using mental short cuts, making assumptions and applying biases.

There are several studies showing that:

  • There are positive correlations between curiosity and wellbeing
  • Openness to new experience predicts levels of life-satisfaction
  • Greater levels of curiosity are associated with greater resilience.

Curiosity also protects us from poor decision making and jumping to judgement.

Curiosity versus judgement

When we rush to judgment, it closes our eyes to different perspectives and different possibilities.

Remaining curious for just a little longer, before formulating judgements helps us to keep an open mind with our stakeholders, projects and products.

Curiosity is really the opposite of judgement as it is incredibly difficult to be judgemental if we are truly curious about a situation or person.

Barriers to curiosity

What can get in the way of applying an appropriate level of curiosity in our work?

  • “Time” (which really means “priorities”)
  • Too much domain/ subject matter knowledge
  • Bias towards action
  • JFDI culture
  • Lacking tools, support or willingness
  • Worry about asking a stupid question
  • Feeling inadequate, intimidated or afraid

There are lots of things which can prevent us from being curious, or from acting on our curiosity. If that happens our organisations will make the same mistakes, fall into the same traps and fail to learn and innovate.

Curiosity, experience and aging

Children a naturally inquisitive, but most of us lose this attribute as we age, because we have found many answers and now have frames of reference for so many situations. Curiosity can be seen as analogous to naivety, which is not the same at all! Gaining experience does not replace the need for curiosity. Curiosity is the route to increasing our knowledge and experience. As we age, we must be more conscious of the need for curiosity and build it into our approach. Research from the University of Reading (2018) suggests that “While curiosity seems to decline with advancing age, it can also be a proxy for maintaining cognitive functioning, mental health, and physical health in older adults, thus serving as a conduit for “successful aging.”. It seems that maintaining curiosity is good for us.

Techniques for encouraging and enabling curiosity

There are a number of ways we can bring more curiosity into our lives, and in particular our professional practices. Including:

  • Brainstorming for questions about a topic  before we start asking for suggestions and answers.
  • Adopting “Learn it to teach it” – set learning tasks with a view to sharing that knowledge with others
  • Leveraging existing interests – encourage people to share existing skills and knowledge (which may or may not be work-related) as a “skills exchange”.
  • Applying active listening techniques – giving our full focus, using probing to get more depth and summarising to confirm understanding.
  • Praising curiosity – when we see people around us being inquisitive, asking good questions and identifying assumptions, draw attention to these positive behaviours.
  • Encourage work-shadowing – experience processes and challenges from another perspective and discover unknown unknowns!
  • Using the 6 Thinking Hats – to encourage different perspectives to be taken
  • Experimenting defining and testing assumptions and hypotheses, using pilot programmes and adopting a proof-of-concept approach.
  • Role modelling curiosity – demonstrate it is OK not to know, and that if you don’t know, it’s OK to ask!

 

Simply talking more about the expectation of curiosity creates the permission and reminder that some people need. There can be no improvement and certainly no innovation without curiosity.

Conclusion

Curiosity is closely linked to a growth mindset, reminding us that there is always more to learn. As individuals and as business analysts, we are never finished products. Our capacity for curiosity isn’t fixed; it’s a skill we can nurture through deliberate practice. There are many ways to encourage and enable curiosity within our teams. By embedding curiosity into the workplace culture, we can create an environment where information is freely shared, knowledge is continually generated, and innovation is actually achievable.

 

Further reading

Curiosity in old age: a possible key to achieving adaptive aging,  Yagi, A. and Murayama, K. (2018)

Leveraging do Bonos Six Thinking Hats, BA Times (2011)

 

Active Listening

What is active listening? (it’s not just nodding)

Most people know the phrase ‘active listening’, but if you ask them to define it, we get a range of vague descriptions, often involving adopting a concerned expression and nodding occasionally. What is the ‘active’ element that makes us a participant rather than a passive recipient?

What is Active Listening?

 It means listening for total meaning, providing unwavering attention and being a positive participant in the interaction.

“Active listening is more than ‘hearing’ someone’s words. It means fully attuning to the feelings and views of the speaker.

(Nelson-Jones, 2014)

“Active listening is a technique that aids effective communication and is a skill that business analysts need to possess.”

(Paul and Lovelock, 2019)

Active Listening Behaviours

OK – so there might be some nodding, but that is not the extent of genuine active listening behaviours! We need to be conscious of our facial expressions. For example, do we need to be encouraging and get people to provide more details? Do we need to be appreciative that they have made time to speak with us? Think about the emotional response the speaker needs or expects from you, and it will be much easier to find the matching facial expression. Note this may change during the conversation, so it is important to stay attuned to the speakers’ changes in tone and expression as well as the words they use. Slanting our heads is often interpreted as a sign of empathy and willingness to learn more. Online engagement means we have more opportunities to notice and learn from our own facial expressions and the impact they have on the speaker.

 

The difference between speaking to someone you feel is genuinely listening to you and someone who is multi-tasking is immense. The absolutely critical element of active listening is to give the other person your full attention. There is sometimes a decision to make about note-taking and active listening. Some people feel that if they are giving their time and knowledge, the other person should be making notes. This is particularly relevant for stakeholder interviews, for example. There may be other ways to take notes without splitting your attention from the speaker, such as having someone else take notes, using transcription, noting down keywords only or making notes after the session. Multi-tasking while listening can prevent us from making the appropriate level of eye contact. Continuous eye contact can be difficult to maintain and disconcerting, but a complete lack of eye contact can leave the speaker feeling unheard.

 

The role of the active listener is not to be silent, and we have a number of ways we can contribute to a better interaction through the use of these active listening behaviours:

  • Question – ask thoughtful, open questions
  • Probe – ask follow-up questions designed to elicit more detail
  • Clarify – check your understanding, clarify particular aspects
  • Paraphrase – play the information back using your own words
  • Summarise – relate the highlights of what you have heard, and ask if you have missed anything key.

Listening Modes

There are multiple listening modes that we can adopt, and many of us have a default mode.

  • Task-orientated listener – key focus on getting to actions and focusing on the most ‘important’ information.
  • Analytical listener – trying to understand and simultaneously analyse the content of the conversation.
  • Relational listener – focused on building connection and understanding emotions.
  • Critical listener – focused on making judgments about the content of the conversation and the speaker.

Being aware of our natural style or mode can help us be more aware of our behaviours and the impact on others.

Remember – those who are curious and analytical can often spot many ways something can be improved. If we voice all of these, it can come across as overly negative!

Avoiding Judgment

 If we are busy with our own thought processes trying to evaluate what the other person is saying, we are not giving our full attention to listening and understanding. Judgment can take up a great deal of brain space and mental energy. In many conversations, it is better to suspend or defer judgment to keep us in the moment so we can reflect and evaluate what the person has said later.

 Avoid Deflection Back to Self

 To really understand and listen to the other person, we want to keep the focus on them and what they are saying. This means avoiding bringing the focus of the interaction back to our own experiences and knowledge. It is very tempting to tell a ‘related story’ or share a ‘similar experience’ when what the other person has said brings it to mind. We have to be restrained and decide if it is in the best interest of the interaction to switch the focus to ourselves or keep the focus on them and draw out more details of their experiences.

Benefits of Active Listening

 Giving someone the time and space to really listen to them in our busy world is a rarity. Investing this time and effort can help to build trust and rapport, increase our depth of understanding, and increase the amount of information we will actually retain from the interaction. This can help to save time, as it avoids assumptions being made and revisiting the same areas.

Conclusion

Active listening can be extremely valuable for business analysts in a variety of situations. Consciously deciding to keep the focus on the other person helps to build a sense of connection and deepens our understanding of the information given to us. Active listening is a key skill for high-performing teams and individuals and is an area we can all improve by investing a little more effort.

Further reading

The Myth of Multi-Tasking, C Lovelock, (BA Times, 2024)

Delivering Business Analysis: The BA Service Handbook, Paul and Lovelock (BCS, 2019)

What is Active Listening A Gallo (HBR, 2024)

 

 

BATimes_Sep05_2024

The Myth of Multi-Tasking

So, you think you are good at multi-tasking. Perhaps you even list it on your CV. Multi-tasking seems like a “must have” skill in this busy world we live in, but instead of helping you get-ahead, is it actually holding you back?

 

Multiple projects/ multiple priorities

Everything is high priority, and everything is urgent. The Eisenhower Matrix is great in theory, but most of us have no-one to actually delegate anything to! The urgent drowns out the important, but everything on our list ‘must be done’.

Many BAs work across multiple teams or projects, which can be great, as it gives us variety in our work, different challenges, different stakeholders and plenty of opportunity to learn.

HOWEVER! The reality of working in this way is that your stakeholders don’t know or care that you are spinning many plates and expect outputs and answers at the same speed.

 

Notifications

Email. Teams. Slack. Chat. We have messages and notifications flowing in from multiple channels, and they often cause us to stop what we were doing/ thinking/ saying to instantly investigate. Most of these do not really need instantaneous action. Remote working has normalized being in meetings, whilst ‘simultaneously’ checking emails and responding to messages via many channels.

The instant message fallacy: just because a message arrives instantly, does not mean it needs an instant response.

Notifications are impacting the quality of our attention, our creativity and productivity.

 

Context Switching

Allowing ourselves to be distracted (or ‘notified’) seriously disrupts our ability to think, plan and decide. Moving between different apps, topics, tasks and projects requires time for our mind to adjust to the change and ‘tune in’ to the new activity. We typically underestimate how long this mental adjustment takes.

The cost of context switching is significant. We can lose a massive chunk of our day by trying to multi-task. “Each task switch might waste only 1/10th of a second, but if you do a lot of switching in a day it can add up to a loss of 40% of your productivity” (Psychology Today, 2012).

Moving between different levels of detail is particularly taxing for our brains. This is something BAs are doing regularly. We might move from a kick-off meeting for a new piece of work, which requires strategic thinking and creativity, to a clarification session looking in detail at requirements and issues, which involves recall, lateral thinking and problem solving. Wondering why you are feeling so exhausted when you have just sat still all day? We are firing up many parts of our brain, using different cognitive functions and not allowing ourselves any time to recover and recharge.

 

Advertisement

 

Flow

There is a brilliant video by Henrik Kniberg, which contains everything you need to know about:

  • work in progress
  • productivity
  • saying no (or not yet)
  • context switching
  • multi-tasking.

It emphasizes the need to get things done, before you start doing something else. It’s better for you, and it’s better for all the stakeholders you are trying to keep happy (yes – even the ones who have to ‘wait’).

 

Accomplishment

Constant interruption and inching forward affects how we see ourselves, our levels of motivation and our sense of accomplishment. Counter-intuitively, getting stuff done gives us the energy to get more stuff done. Failing to make real progress saps our energy and makes it harder to be motivated and effective. We all get a sense of satisfaction from completing tasks on our to-do list. The more attention we give each task, the more tasks we can achieve. We can still have multiple tasks on the list, or multiple projects on the books at the same time, but we need to manage our time across these activities and avoid unnecessary switching (of both projects and levels of detail).

 

Conclusion

Given the complexity of most projects, in terms of interdependencies, stakeholder relationships and technical challenges, we really need to be paying attention to the task in hand.

Research from Stanford University shows that trying to talk, read, process and respond using multiple channels (i.e. meetings, emails and messages) actually lowers our IQ!

Simple steps can make a big difference. Protect chunks of time. Turn off notifications. Manage your diary to avoid unnecessary context switches. Take a lunch break.

We all need to comprehend that the once prized skill of “multi-tasking” is actually a sophisticated and covert form of procrastination, and it’s making us less intelligent and effective.

 

Further reading

Notification fatigue is tanking productivity: HR Dive, 2022
Multiple WIP vs One Piece Flow Example: Henrik Kniberg, 2020
Context switching is killing your productivity: Asana, 2024
Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows: Stanford Report, 2009
BATimes_Feb15_2024

What’s The Point of Peer Review?

When time is tight and the pressure is on, it feels like ‘peer’ review is a luxury we cannot afford, but what’s the cost of this decision?

 

What Is Peer Review?

Sharing our analysis outputs (whether this is documents, models, presentation slides or feature tickets) with other business analysts before they are shared with any other stakeholders is the essence of peer review. BA peer reviewers should be able to share useful observations and insights about the output, whether or not they have specific business domain knowledge.  If something is not clear to a fellow BA, there is a good chance it will not be understood by customers, suppliers, stakeholders and other recipients.

 

 

Why is Peer Review Valuable?

Many business analysts have a tendency towards perfectionism, and the longer we work on something without feedback, the more disappointing it is to receive any feedback, however constructive. It is much harder to accept and incorporate feedback on a polished final draft than an early rough draft. We need to share our work early in the process to be able to influence our own thinking and approach, and prevent us making significant errors or omissions.

 

Why is Peer Review Valuable?

Peer review is valuable from multiple perspectives.

 

#1 The producer

The person who created the output. We all bring assumptions to our work, whether this is a single piece of acceptance criteria, complex model or large document. The producer gets the benefits of a fresh perspective and the opportunity to catch errors and drive out assumptions. A peer review should be a way to improve quality without any worry of reputational or relationship risk. It also provides the opportunity for increased consistency across BA products and to learn lessons from other business areas.

 

#2 The peer reviewer

There is always something to gain from seeing how someone else works, whether they have more or less experience than us, and wherever they sit in the organisational hierarchy. So as well as making a valuable contribution to our colleague’s work we are likely to learn something through peer reviewing.

 

#3 Stakeholders

Any business, dev team or project stakeholders that will also be asked to review/validate/approve the deliverable will benefit greatly if a peer review has already taken place. Some errors and ambiguities will have been addressed, saving them time and increasing their confidence in the quality of the output.

 

The Review Triangle

This model reminds us that the highest number of errors should be spotted and rectified by the person creating the output, as part of a specific review phase.

 

 

Advertisement

 

Self-Review

The model emphasises the need for self-review, which is a separate activity to creating the analysis output, and involves:

  • Standards check (adherences to templates, branding and guidelines)
  • Assumptions check (provide key, glossary etc.)
  • Accessibility check (e.g. readability, compatibility with assistive tech, alt text for pictures)
  • Sense check
  • Error check
  • Spelling and grammar check.

 

Moving from a ‘creating’ to ‘reviewing’ mindset can be achieved by taking a break, and switching to reviewing when we return, or moving to a different device as this often forces us to look at something differently.

 

Peer Review

Peer review is also about adherence to standards, and is valuable even when the reviewer does not have relevant subject matter knowledge. They should be able to identify and challenge assumptions made, spot logic knots and highlight the use of acronyms and jargon. They can also share insights and observations from their own experience, such as level of detail and formats preferred by different internal audiences.

 

Stakeholder Review

Stakeholders should not be faced with errors that we could have easily caught through self or peer review. This does not mean we should only share perfect  and complete outputs, but that we give stakeholders the best chance of spotting significant gaps and fundamental errors by removing low level distractions.

Many stakeholders find it difficult to simply ‘ignore’ spelling and other small errors. This level of error can undermine their confidence in our analysis.

Depending on the number of stakeholders and the complexity of the output, it is often better to do a group review exercise (synchronous) rather than a comments based (asynchronous) review. This is for several reasons:

  • Confidence everyone has actually seen what is being reviewed/validated/agreed
  • Prevents multiple stakeholders making the same (or conflicting) observations
  • Changes can be discussed and agreed.

 

Conclusion

The benefits of peer review, to individual BAs, the internal BA community and to our stakeholders and customers is significant. Attempting to ‘save time’ by avoiding this activity is a false economy. Organisations that aspire to be a truly ‘learning organisation’ encourage and enable effective peer reviews. Where organisations don’t place emphasis on this, BAs can choose to role model this commitment to quality and learning, and lead by example.

 

Further reading

Delivering Business Analysis: The BA Service Handbook, D Paul & C Lovelock, 2019