Author: Giorgos Sioutzos

Giorgos Sioutzos is an experienced business analyst currently working at Netcompany in the social security sector. He holds a BSc in Management Science and Technology from Athens University of Economics and Business and Msc in International Business & Management from ALBA Graduate Business School. Numerus articles about business analysis have been published in most reputable Greek and foreign media. He has created educational videos for IIBA Knowelge Hub. Also he has contributed as an SME for Global Business Analysis Survey creation from IIBA. Certifications: CBAP, PMI-PBA, ITIL, PRINCE2, CPRE Advanced

Developing a “Sense of Purpose” for a Business Analysis Initiative

Written by Giorgos Sioutzos on January 6, 2022. Posted in Articles.

Βusiness analysts can contribute in delivering the sense of purpose and worth concerning a business analysis initiative. This sense of purpose will contribute to the better effectiveness of the work that is performed between the BA team and the different stakeholders. As the business analysts are continuously communicating with different stakeholders and deal directly with their needs, they are the best source to contribute to the capturing and the diffusion of a common purpose that may also serve as a success criterion for the initiative.

The capacity to effectively lead a business analysis initiative is directly related to the pursuit of a worthy purpose. The purpose may be the most powerful link to join people and processes in a common effort. General/ Organizational purpose can be transformed and decomposed into more specific and detailed initiative purposes. The degree to which we pursue an ennobling purpose is the degree to which we attract others.

Purpose attracts and therefore serves as a unifying force. There is unity of effort and energy to the degree of shared purpose. Our level of satisfaction and our level of energy is directly related not only to our understanding of our own purpose but also to whether the organization and specific project to which we contribute, share that same purpose.

Below you can find four considerations for effectively managing the sense of purpose as a business analyst:

Big Picture

Being able to see the things holistically and the long-term value and effects of any task can help you embrace a worthy purpose that will give you energy and motivation but also distribute this sense of purpose to the other stakeholders

Respond to “Why”

In order to successfully spread a sense of purpose, you need to instill a sense of worthy purpose. It is to answer the why question, why should work overtime for this project? Why should I sacrifice? Why should I dedicate my time to achieving high-quality deliverables? The answer has to be something that is worthy, something that is ennobling.

Focus on the Perception

You may feel you have communicated effectively the purpose to the other stakeholders but do the others perceive the purpose as something worthy and important? Perception is reality. What people think they hear is the truth according to them. So, we have to think through our communications in a very deliberate manner, in a planned manner, thinking through how it’s going to be received on the other end and making sure that people are receiving the message that we want them to receive.

Align with the Organization Purpose

The organization’s purpose and the core values of your organization should be aligned with the project-specific purpose. Projects or initiative specific purpose may be derived and be a more detailed and case-specific purpose of your general organization purpose.

Effective execution of business analysis tasks requires convincing key stakeholders (both internal and external) that your analysis and your conclusions are valid so that you can transition from your analysis to implementation. As such, you must be able to summarize your findings in a message that makes a persuasive argument that aligns with the sense of purpose. An argument that mirrors progress towards the realization of this purpose. Therefore, defusing a sense of purpose and then communicating results towards achieving this purpose is an integral part of your effort in any business analysis task you are engaged with. One that is worthy of careful consideration.

5 Characteristics of Effective Business Analysts

Written by Giorgos Sioutzos on December 2, 2021. Posted in Articles.

“Business Analyst” is not just a title. Is not a job. It is a mindset, a concept and a structured process executed by people in different positions inside an organization. It’s more like, an approach of making the things happen from the realization of business need towards the final implementation.

It’s easy to call yourself business analyst but difficult to be a good and effective business analyst. The field can be great fun, and very rewarding, but you need to be prepared. People who take on business analysis roles typically believe they need three things: skills and experience, a bit of marketing, and an interest in working in a variety of environments. However successful business analysts know they need much more than a technical expertise and specific skills. They need a mindset and a specific attitude in order to serve with the best possible and feasibly way their clients business needs.

What is expected from business analysts can vary widely. And what they actually need you to do can be completely different from what they expect. Business analysis is an exciting, dynamic form of work. You can have a positive impact on your clients and be well paid for your effort. But you have to be appropriately equipped.

To be an effective and successful business analysis you need to continuously develop some specific characteristics.

The first is technical depth. It’s critical that you have the technical background to satisfy your clients’ needs. This means you have experience in a variety of environments. The more breadth of experience you have in your technical area, the easier it will be to apply your skill as a business analyst.

Second, effective business analysts need to understand quickly and accurately what’s happening in their client’s environment. Your power of observation needs to be well tuned. Being able to listen carefully and patiently, observe the behavior of your clients, and make sense of what is happening is very important.

Third, effective business analyst care about the welfare of their client’s business and the clients themselves. You need to be able to put yourself in your client’s shoes and appreciate the difficulties they may be facing or have faced. While what you do may seem routine to you, it probably isn’t routine for your client. You need to appreciate that fact and behave accordingly.

Another important characteristic is emotional intelligence. Often clients will engage you because they’ve had substantial difficulties. They may have a skill shortage, or they may not be sure how to manage what you’ve been asked to deliver. All these conditions create stress. On top of that, you’ll be striving to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can, so you’ll be under stress as well. Dealing with all that requires personal emotional maturity and the ability to assess and deal with the emotional state of your client.

Also, you have to develop the observation and effective listening as a personal characteristic, make recommendations based on sound business judgment, and be patient. As trust builds, the direction your client provides will likely become more reasonable. Work out your contract. Understand your client’s needs and desires, and establish a good relationship with your contract manager, and you could put on your superhero costume to celebrate your success. Observation helps towards a really robust problem definition statement. So as you look at your problem-solving, and you’re getting ready to start pursuing that initial set of ideas, you need to go through that prioritization and pick the highest value one that’s going to have the biggest impact on your overall solution.

Business analysis is performed on a variety of initiatives within an enterprise. Initiatives may be strategic, tactical, or operational. Business analysis may be performed within the boundaries of a project or throughout enterprise evolution and continuous improvement. No matter their job title or organizational role business analysts are responsible for discovering, synthesizing, and analyzing information in order the best solutions to be derived and the clients’ needs to be accommodated in the best possible way.

Critical Thinking – The Skill of Doubting With a Cause

Written by Giorgos Sioutzos on November 24, 2021. Posted in Articles.

As a business analyst, you will have lots of information from different sources. Your successful journey in the business analysis field heavily depends on continuous try to increase the quality of your thinking.

A critical thinking mindset will enable you to examine the information and determine the best way to move forward by knowing exactly how to assess the information you can trust. You need to access information quality and relevance. Critical thinking is a judge of what to believe. Socrates who introduced the idea of questioning beliefs, questioning authority, seeking evidence, and striving to live an examined life.

During different task, you will perform as a business analyst in your day-to-day work like requirements negotiation and solutions proposal do not underestimate the following points.

Recognize Confirmation & Cognitive Biases

When you’re trying to figure out what to believe without deceiving yourself or ignoring evidence you are in a path of recognizing your bias. Try to recognize beliefs, busting assumptions, and undoubtable truths that may have a detrimental effect on how you assess and evaluate information. Confirmation bias causes us to dismiss evidence that causes doubt and search for evidence that dispels doubt, regardless of the quality of evidence. Cognitive biases aren’t totally bad because their mental simplifier helping us process things quickly and easily however is common to leave us susceptible to poor judgment.

Benefit of Doubt

Believing something without any attempt to get closing to the truth can lead to bad decisions. Being comfortable with doubt but avoiding overthinking can have positive impact on your decisions. Reflective skepticism helps a team ask a series of questions, and then discuss how each could determine a critical thinking error. Asking better questions and creatively dispute helps foster critical thinking skills, boosts self-confidence, enhances your creativity, and improves your problem-solving skills. By asking better questions that derive through doubt, you guide the conversation in the direction you want it to go, eliminating confusion.

Slow Down

Fast pace probably means that sometimes you feel too busy to think. In a continuously running business reality, the time is not always right to analyze and to think deep. You are forced to execute. Fast-paced business can be a critical thinking killer. However trying to “pause” certain times during the day, protecting your focus time slots, and instead of instantly responding and executing, thing and ask, is a habit toward improving critical thinking skills.

Avoid Willful blindness

Although this is a term used in law to describe a situation in which a person seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability it can be also applied for the lack of the person to try to find different aspects for a matter that is going to take a decision. Losing the holistic view and intentionally ignoring ideas, concerns etc. can affect detrimental the success of your business analysis tasks.

Developing a critical thinking mindset isn’t easy. It is totally doable, especially when you practice by integrating critical thinking into your daily life. Remember that simple truths do not tell the whole story

4 Tips for Running Effective Workshops

Written by Giorgos Sioutzos on June 24, 2021. Posted in Articles.

Business Analysis has to do with understanding clients’ needs and trying to offer value through the products you deliver to them. Customer is the final judge and the more the product we develop for them is fulfilling his needs the more he will be happy.

Workshops are a common method for requirements gathering and elicitation. It’s one of the best ways to ensure effective and bidirectional communication between stakeholders and reach consensus on a topic. However common pitfalls can prevent from having the results you want.

Four tips are presented:

Have a specific agenda

You have to define the specific purpose of the workshop. May the purpose varies from a high level capturing of needs to a specific finalization of an integration. After clarifying the purpose then you have to develop specific expected outcomes per area. As time constraints exist is crucial to have the answers you want at specific questions you have. Having a logical sequential discussion flow will prevent from limitless philosophical discussions without any conclusion at the end.

Get the right people involved

Identify the key stakeholders that have knowledge on the area of interest, decision making authority and influence. Try to have a list of participants knowing what every participant can contribute. The right mixture of participants is the one that will lead to final conclusions that are approved and will close as much open points as possible.

Pose the right questions

Making the right questions at the right time is crucial. A specific question may clarify things out, give to the customer another perspective that has not think about and contribute to having specific agreed points at the end of the workshop and reduce open points.

Have evaluation criteria

Workshop results has to be agreed and confirmed by every participant. Before having something finalized in the workshop results make a quick evaluation using predefined acceptance criteria. Technical feasibility, usability and cost are some common evaluation criteria

Facilitating a successful workshop for sure needs experience and may be challenging. However the proper preparation, the clear scope and purpose. Lacking of previous insightful preparation of a workshop can lead to its derailment in the sense of giving space to expression of wishful thoughts that are neither specific nor feasible. On the other hand, dogmatic obsession with the narrow capabilities of the system can prevent the development of potential functions and features that are easy to implement and provide value.

Business Analysis in the times of COVID-19

Written by Giorgos Sioutzos on February 10, 2021. Posted in Articles.

Business needs that are linked closely with customer needs change dramatically during crises. During lock-down periods the way companies interact with customers has changed.

New technology solutions, methods of delivery and processes change are emerging. Diachronically companies strive to protect their sustainability and survival. A crisis may be an opportunity to evaluate if they are in the correct path towards this. A strong a call for understanding the long-term strategic needs of the organization and the immediate needs of customers signifies the need for high effective business analysis methods and practices.

Business Analysis has as a core activity the elicitation of genuine needs conducting needs assessment and the contribution in maximizing value for the internal and external environment with a viable and effective solution recommendation. Defining accurate the evolving needs and understanding the value will be transmitted via a solution is more critical than ever especially in times of uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity. We have to keep in mind that Business Analyst’s responsibility is to solve the problem, and get that product into the business environment.

A crisis affect certain aspects of BA everyday routine. Business Analysis approach has to be suitable for the specific conditions. Iterative planning may be used as long-term planning is rendered ineffective by rapid change and great uncertainty: the next step in the plan is based on the latest learning. The need for effective solutions delivered with speed and quality is unadaptable during this health crisis. The methods of eliciting requirements has to be tailored to the context’s special characteristics. For example a workshop or a focus group has to be performed via digital tools. Also volatile nature of needs that will be interpreted as requirements result to the need of change, speed and proactive approach. Many iterative cycles of requirement elicitation may be necessary during the shrink projects lifecycle.

Agile Business Analysis may be a response

The pandemic of the coronavirus has pointed the benefits of agile mindset. As per Agile Extension to the BABOKv2® Guide, Agile Business Analysis is the practice of business analysis in an agile context with an agile mindset. Agile Business Analysis can provide a competitive advantage in fast-paced and complex environments.

Agility is not only about fast. It’s about going effectively in order not to waste unnecessary assets in the route to complete your project. Agile in no case means to surpass planning but it gives certain levels of flexibility to adjust planning in order to aim to the highest value with the lowest costs.

Some questions to answer before proceeding with an agile approach:

1. Find if agile techniques are appropriate for the specific type of project.
2. Does the organizational and industry standards allow an agile approach?
3. Are the people aligned with the agile methodology that will be used?
4. Are you fully aware of the final products stakeholders’ aspirations?