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

To-Do List/Ta-Da List

Written by Christina Lovelock on December 18, 2019. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on To-Do List/Ta-Da List

Being organised is an important aspect of business analysis, and so is personal reflection and maintaining motivation.

How can these aspects relate to each other?

To-do lists, whether mental, physical or digital (or a combination of all three!) form a key part of our strategy for ‘getting things done’, prioritising and feeling ‘on top of things’.

There is a sense of satisfaction in completing a task, and literally checking things off. That good feeling can be very fleeting, as we look with dismay at the many items remaining on the list, and we tend to take no time to reflect on the totality of things that have been checked-off.

A fact of modern life is that you will never reach the end of your to-do list!

Perhaps there is a way to maintain that sense of accomplishment, to create a lasting record of achievements and have somewhere to turn when a boost of motivation is needed.

When something is completed from your to-do list, take a couple of extra seconds to see if this should be moved to your ‘Ta-da’ list.

This may not be the ‘big-ticket’ items we can put on a CV, but the day-to-day activities we are getting through and instantly moving onto the next task. Items on the Ta-da list might include:

The positive things:

That was great
I surprised myself
I enjoyed that
I’m proud of that
I got great feedback.

The challenging things:

I thought it would take ages but it didn’t
I’ve been putting it off
I’ve never done it before
I was dreading it but it was fine
I was outside my comfort-zone, and I had to really push myself
It didn’t work out how I imagined, but I learned something.

The people things:

We worked really well together
I have a good relationship with that person now
I managed to influence that decision
I really helped that person
They really helped me.

The list may not turn out to be things you can easily articulate as achievements to other people (new job/promotion/bonus/award…) but will grow into a record of everyday activities and successes which would have been all too easily forgotten.

Manging to take note of even one item per month will yield a motivating list to look back on.

EXTENSION TO KANBAN

A physical or digital Kanban board gives us a shared record of what has been ‘Done’. This is a neutral list which does not draw attention to the things the team agree are the major achievements, these achievement’s may or may not reflect particularly significant or interesting features. Extending Kanban to include ‘Ta-da’ moments keeps a celebratory list of the hurdles overcome, the good decisions made and the results that are achieved when the team is at its best.

CONCLUSION

In knowledge based and digital roles, it can often feel that all we ‘achieve’ day-to-day is meetings and emails. To keep up our motivation we need to record and reflect on our wins, successes and feel-good moments throughout the year.

As the year comes to a close, and we enter the new year with resolutions and good intentions, consider how you can make personal reflection part of your routine, as high up on your to-do list as being organised.

Further reading: Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before (2016)

Stop Saying Soft Skills

Written by Christina Lovelock on November 26, 2019. Posted in Articles.

This term has always been at best inadequate, and at worst dismissive and belittling, but there has not been a suitable alternative that everyone could use consistently.

Now there is: Core Skills.

We have clearly been searching for a replacement for the phrase, as there are a range of alternatives in use, including:

Personal skills
Interpersonal skills
People skills
Social skills
Behavioural skills
Communication skills.

None of these options manages to convey the ‘fundamental-ness’ of these skills, they still sound like optional/nice to have/the icing on the cake. The core skills are the cake. Technical skills which are (comparatively) much easier to learn and develop are the icing.

Consider these two statements:

“That candidate was great technically, but is lacking in soft skills.”
How this sounds: they have most of what we are looking for, we may still hire them.
“That candidate was great technically, but is lacking the core skills.”
How this sounds: they don’t have what we are looking for, it is unlikely we will hire them.

Hire for attitude and aptitude, develop for technical skills. It saves organisations a fortune in the long run. Or to put this another way:
“Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high.” [Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix]

It is an adage in HR that “We hire for skills and fire for behaviours”. Hiring someone with ‘the right’ experience and great technical ability may seem like a shortcut to success, but if they demonstrate poor core skills the risk outweighs the reward.

That is not to say that having the core skills with no technical business analysis skills or abilities makes you a BA, but over the course of your career you will be a better BA because of your core skills.

The best business analysts value and continue to develop their core skills.
How do they do this? By:

seeking feedback
identifying role models
practicing self-reflection
increasing self-awareness
attending events, training and conferences
reading and personal research
setting goals
engaging a coach.

Conclusion

Soft skills is no longer a useful term for the modern digital workplace. We can each make the decision to stop using it. This is completely achievable, if you are in any doubt, try to recall the last time you heard the phrase ‘information super-high-way’!
It’s time to adopt a phrase which recognises these skills for the importance they have on effective relationships, team performance and organisational success.

BEWARE: Analysis Kills Empathy

Written by Christina Lovelock on October 30, 2019. Posted in Articles.

‘When the analytic network is engaged, our ability to appreciate the human cost of our action is repressed.’ [1]

Neurological studies have shown that our brains have two completely separate networks that deal with ‘analytical thinking’ and ‘empathetic and social thinking’, and that these are mutually exclusive processes within the brain. To engage one, we must switch off the other.

Analysts often say things like:

“That decision doesn’t make sense…”, “But they are not being rational…”, There is no logic behind it…” and “If you look at it objectively…”. These are things that are important to us, and many of us believe it’s what we are being paid to do for our organisations, but are we missing something?

Knowing that we are biologically unable to engage problem solving and empathetic mental processes at the same time gives us a significant opportunity to ensure we switch perspectives and consider both the ‘logical’ and ‘human’ view-points.

BAs need to use tools as checklists to remind us to properly explore the human side of IT, digital transformation and organisational change. There are some useful techniques which allow us to do this is a structured way such as:

Empathy mapping
SARAH curve
POPIT™ Model
Persona analysis
User journey mapping
Impact mapping
Force field analysis.

Empathy mapping can be used to great effect, not just in the context of business change, customer experience or system implementation, but as a mental checklist in our day to day interactions with others.

Empathy is fundamental to building good working relationships, and to ensure the human impact of our analytical decisions is properly appreciated.

This adapted empathy model allows us to explore a particular person/ relationship in depth, and is especially useful for what we might label as our ‘difficult stakeholders’, where the relationship is not working well.

Sees & Hears

How does this situation appear to the other person? What are they hearing from me? (not the same as what I think I’m saying). Are they getting different messages from others? What do they hear about me/this situation from others? What outputs or deliverables do they see from me? What behaviour do they see from me? What is the impact of my actions on them?

Says & Does

What are their activities and deliverables? How do these relate to what I do? What do they say to me and about me? How do they behave towards me/towards others? Is there a difference? What do I observe in their body language, facial expression and tone?

Thinks & Feels

What might they be thinking about this situation/this relationship? Do they think it’s a difficult relationship? How might our relationship ‘difficulties’ be impacting them? What can I observe that helps me infer their feelings? How do they express their feelings? (choice of words, tone, volume, non-verbal cues, frequency of our interactions, methods of communication).

Pain & Gain

What are their priorities? What do they want to achieve? What are their frustrations and blockers? How am I contributing to these? How can I help them? What would be the benefits of a better relationship with me?

As is always the case with empathy mapping, there is a limit to what can be learned through observation and assumption. At some point we have to speak directly to the person we are trying to understand better, but asking ourselves these questions should help us to empathise and may improve a difficult relationship significantly.

Conclusion

Logical. Methodological. Problem solver.

Many BAs identify with these skills to the point that we see them as personality traits, but we need to understand the warning this research has given us. BAs need to hone our empathy skills to be able to truly understand and represent different perspectives, and to build our working relationships.

‘Empathy is like a muscle: It has to be trained and exercised to become stronger.’ [2]

When we have finished our logical analysis, we need to remember to switch on our empathetic analysis.

References

[1] Empathy represses analytic thought, and vice versa: Brain physiology limits simultaneous use of both networks.(2012)

[2] State of workplace empathy: Executive Summary (2018)

Retrospect Yourself!

Written by Christina Lovelock on September 20, 2019. Posted in Articles.

‘At regular intervals, do you reflect on how to become more effective, then tune and adjust your behaviour accordingly?’

It easy to suggest process improvements, and changes that other people need to make to enable a team to be more effective. It is much harder to really reflect on ourselves and our contribution, and consider how that can be improved.

We need to be mindful of four areas which are key to personal effectiveness: relationships, emotions, behaviours and outputs. There are a variety of retrospective techniques which are useful to explore these areas.

Relationships: The Weather Report

Which relationships could be better? The way we view the ‘work’ part of being at work is usually driven by the quality of our interactions and relationships. Getting better at your ‘work’ means investing in and improving your relationships.

SUNNY: What do you need to do to maintain and enhance your best relationships? It is easy to neglect people who we know we work well with. We need to remember to make time to meet with close colleagues for a coffee, to catch up and exchange ideas. This can provide a much needed energy boost. How can you show your appreciation or acknowledge the value of the relationship? What opportunities are there for you to work closely together or support each other?

PARTIAL SUN: Which relationships are emerging? Who would you like to know better? Who have you had a better relationship with in the past? How can you invest in that relationship again?

GREY CLOUD: Who do you ‘co-exist’ with? Is there someone whose name is really all you know about them? Can you make a new team member feel welcome? Can you reach out to someone who often works alone?

STORMY: Which relationships contain conflict? Who do you avoid? Whose emails make your heart sink? Finding a way to build these relationships may have the most drastic impact on your working life, but are likely to need the most courage and commitment to address.

Outputs: The 4-Ls

How can your outputs be improved?

LIKED: What did you enjoy doing and why? how can you do more of that in future? When did you feel pride in your work? Do you know what your strengths are? Where do you get the opportunity to use them?

LACKED: What information did you need to access that you couldn’t find? Whose time and input did you need that you couldn’t get? What resources would have been useful? What seemed particularly difficult to accomplish and why? What skills do you need to develop?

LEARNED: What did you learn about yourself, your organisation and your stakeholders? What new skills or techniques have you learned? How will you store, share or re-use knowledge you gained?

LONGED FOR: Which techniques would you really like to try? What ideas do you want to put into practice? What skills do you particularly want to develop? Who would you like to work with? What opportunities do you want explore?

Emotions: Mad, Sad, Glad

What made you feel that way an why?

MAD: What feelings of anger and resentment are you harbouring? What mistakes did you make that made you mad with yourself? How is anger impacting your effectiveness? Was the anger justified?

SAD: What opportunities were missed? Did anything make you feel disappointed? Do you have feeling of loss associated with something ending or someone leaving?

GLAD: What brought you feelings of enjoyment, happiness and pride? Who do you feel grateful towards? How did you celebrate milestones and achievements?

Behaviours: The Sail Boat

Do you like how you behave at work? How do your behaviours impact your relationships and effectiveness? Are you avoiding common bad behaviours?

ANCHORS: Which behaviours are holding you back and dragging you down? They keep you in a fixed mindset, damage relationships, make you fearful of change and prevent you from learning.

WIND: What puts wind in your sails? What do people compliment you on? What behaviours do you display when you are ‘having a good day’? How do you keep going even when it feels difficult?

Conclusion

The purpose of this retrospective is to become more self-aware, to learn and to facilitate personal improvement, NOT to create a list of reasons to be hard on ourselves. To paraphrase the Prime Directive for retrospectives, by Norm Kerth:

“Regardless of what I discover, I understand and truly believe that I did the best job I could, given what I knew at the time, my skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”

We must practise self-reflection with self-compassion.

When BAs go Bad

Written by Christina Lovelock on August 28, 2019. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on When BAs go Bad

‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools’.

To really live by this statement, we need to monitor our own behaviours, seek to improve our relationships with others and our interpersonal skills. But how much time do we spend analysing and reflecting on our own behaviour?
There are some common behaviour traps that Business Analysts can fall into, that we all need to be aware of.

Pedantic

We all know that as BAs we can be pedantic. In the past we may have even celebrated this behaviour, but if we are seen to be taking enjoyment from the fact that other people have made mistakes, it’s not helpful and people will avoid involving us.

Being given the opportunity to contribute to something is really important. As BAs we need to cultivate a culture where people want to discuss things with us, they want to share early drafts of their work, they trust us to encourage them and collaborate with them and not pick holes in their work.

Maverick

Some BAs will resist any attempt to constrain and standardise business analysis. They won’t use templates, they are vague about the BA deliverables the are producing, they won’t share things for peer review and are not interested in the development of the BA practice.

Despite this, maverick BAs are often well regarded by their project team. They are seen as helpful and flexible and the project doesn’t care too much about use of BA templates and development of standards!

Maverick BAs really damage the profession as they are not promoting a consistent view of what the BA role is about. They do what they want, however they want to do it.

We need to put aside our maverick tendencies, and believe that by contributing to the development of the profession, we will elevate the standard of business analysis in our organisations.

Superior

Sometimes we regard other project roles with contempt, (“The PM is an idiot”; “Users don’t know what they want”; “The developers don’t listen”….) and sometimes BAs make no effort to conceal this contempt! These situations provide a good opportunity to practice our empathy skills:

Why don’t users know what they want? They have probably never had the luxury of stepping outside their day jobs to really think about it.

Why does it appear that Devs don’t listen? They are often pressed for time and have to make assumptions based on their knowledge and previous experience.

Why do project managers seem like idiots? They are juggling 100 priorities and it’s not their job to know the detail like we do.

The BA role is incredibly useful, but we are part of team, and if the team fails we all fail, however good our individual contribution.

Just a BA

Many BAs feel that their culture of their organisation means the BA role is not valued, and they feel like the bottom of the pile. If well tell ourselves we are bottom of the pile, and tell our colleagues we are “just BAs” we have a long road of dissatisfaction ahead of us.

It is true that many people do not have a clear understanding of what a BA does, but that’s something we need to tackle on every project, with every stakeholder. Understanding of the BA role is not going to happen by osmosis we need to make it happen.

We need to feel proud of the role we have and work we do – but just no so proud that we accidentally become superior!

I told you so

We can appear to use the project risk register as the “I told you so log”.

This sometimes comes from feeling genuinely frustrated, that if we had been listed to this problem could have been avoided. This is our way of trying to remind people that we had a good idea, or useful insight that was ignored at the time and it could have helped.

But “I told you so” never helps situations and it definitely doesn’t help relationships. We need to work on our influencing skills, and acknowledge that ‘bombard with detail’ is not the only way to influence.

Us and Them

There are lots of divisions that can arise, between BAs and project managers, between project staff and our business colleagues, between our organisation and the supplier.

It is really easy to hide behind these real or perceived boundaries, and generalise everyone on the other side of the divide. As BAs we have a responsibility to avoid silos, encourage collaborative working and be the people who are willing to work across boundaries.

Negative

We can be seen as very negative. Some BAs want to say no to everything, and as it is our JOB to analyse things, we can usually come up with five good reasons something won’t work before the other person has even finished explaining the idea.

A simple swap of “yes, but…” to “yes, and..” attempts to build on an idea and help people think their way out of problems rather than list off all the flaws in the idea.

Stepping Stone

There is a small subset of people who are using analysis as a stepping stone in their career, and they are often not too subtle about it!

Often they aren’t trying to learn all they can about business analysis – mastering the tools and techniques as transferable skills for their next role, and while they are busy setting themselves up for their next move, not much actual business analysis is getting done! It fuels the idea that business analysis isn’t a career and that BAs grow up to become PMs.

Business Analysis may not be a long term career for everyone, and some organisation structures don’t support the idea of progressing your career as a BA; but while you are a member of this profession, be in it, be committed, be the best BA you can be.

Conclusion

These Bad BA behaviours were discussed at the BA Conference Europe 2018. Over 100 BAs from all over the world considered these behaviours. The behaviours were recognised, both in ourselves and our BA colleagues. 78% said they had seen BAs being negative, and this was also identified as the worst of the bad behaviours that BAs regularly display.

If we want others to see value in the BA role, and increase our level of influence, we need to break out of our bad behaviours. We can start by noticing our behaviours and by being positive, being hopeful and (trying) to always look on the bright side.