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Author: Kupe Kupersmith

Book Review for All Business Analysts

Written by Kupe Kupersmith on . Posted in Articles.

bookreview1Start with the art of the one-on-one encounter; add in strategies for interviewing, maximizing meetings and presentations; then finish off with making the most of social interactions. All together you get How to Wow: Proven Strategies for Presenting Your Ideas, Persuading Your Audience, and Perfecting Your Image, a resource to help you succeed in any situation. You can read the book cover to cover (like I did) or jump to the chapters that apply to you. With either approach it is one of those books you’ll keep in your library and reference for some time to come.

In How to Wow, Frances Cole Jones covers some oldies but goodies like reminding us that 7% of your impact comes from the words you say, 38% from your tone and 55% from body language. Jones also packs in a number of invaluable strategies for helping make all meetings and social events successful.  I found one technique priceless – writing a diary entry as if it were tomorrow. If you have an important meeting or event coming up, write down details of the event as if it had already happened. This technique helps you think through potential scenarios and prepare for the meeting or event. This is similar to the Field of Dreams mantra, “If you build it they will come.” If you write it down it will happen.  

Jones’ conversational writing style makes this a fun and easy read. I felt like I was her long time friend and she was just giving me some good sound advice over coffee.  She pulls many of her thoughts from her vast library of experience working with executives preparing for TV and print interviews and large scale company meetings. Although many of her examples may not directly align with your role, you will not find it hard to bridge the gap and find ways to implement her strategies. 

Whether you facilitate meetings or just attend them, host lunch meetings or just get invited to lunch, present to large groups or just one person, you’ll find significant value in reading How to Wow.    

Please share some of the books or other resources that you have found helpful in your BA career.

Happy reading,

Kupe

Don’t forget to leave your comments below

Becoming a Senior Business Analyst

Written by Kupe Kupersmith on . Posted in Articles.

becomingasenior1This is another follow-up to my blog post, The Six Key Characteristics of a Senior Business Analyst. Please take a minute to read that post so you understand the context of my comments on how to become a senior BA.   Some of the readers, @SimonTheBA and @AWhittenberger, commented that it was great to know the characteristics of a senior BA, but were curious about my thoughts on how one becomes a senior BA. This post is good for those who want to become a senior BA or who are helping others become senior BAs.  Please note my definition of what makes someone a senior business analyst may not align with the title “Senior Business Analyst” at the company you work at, or where you want to work.  So, if your goal is to climb the company ladder make sure you look at what the company expects from you to grow.  Even if my list of senior BA characteristics does not completely align with your company’s views, focusing on the steps I outline below will help you become a better BA and, therefore, become more promotable.   It just so happens that my friends Laura Brandenburg and Adriana Beal recently published an eBook collection titled The Promotable Business Analyst.  I recommend you”pick that up as it is a valuable resource.

Find a Coach

One of things I see falling off company’s radars is providing coaching and support for employees.  Many employees, especially junior BAs, are left to fend for themselves.  In the past managers were coaches.  Today I see more and more companies increase the ratio of employees to managers.  This makes it difficult for the manager to focus enough coaching time with each employee.  In the BA space there is another twist.  Is the manager qualified to coach the BAs?  The numbers are not there yet where BAs are becoming managers.  Many BAs are managed by individuals in the IT arena, but may not have the BA skill set.  In major league baseball, this would be like having an all-star third baseman become a pitching coach. They know the game, but don’t know all the mechanics of being a great pitcher. 

In my last post, Four Ways to Best Utilize a Senior Business Analyst, I suggested senior BAs should be used as coaches for the junior analysts.  If you have a coach great, if you don’t…get one.  Just because one is not picked for you, does not mean you can’t find one or more.  Don’t limit your search to your company either.  Get involved in the many online communities like this one or your local IIBA chapter.  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. 

Be honest with your coach about the areas you feel you need to improve on.  Come up with a plan to work on those areas.  Be patient, you won’t become a senior BA overnight. 

Don’t be Afraid to Fail

Now that you have a plan in place with your coach, start executing.  This is easier said than done.  To become a senior BA you need to have breadth and depth of knowledge and experience.  You need to have experience with multiple project types and involvement in multiple business areas.  The only way to get there is to take some chances.  If you have a coach this is a little easier.  You have someone to rely on and be your safety net.  The best way to learn is by doing.  And when you take action, failure is going to happen.  Learn from that failure and move forward. 

Be Persistent

You have to be willing to take chances. You also need your management to be willing to allow you to stretch beyond what you do well.  Many of you will find risk adverse managers.  Keep pushing to be given opportunities in new business areas, to try new techniques or to be part of a project that will meet your growth goals. Get creative!  You may even have to offer to take on tasks on your own time.  A client of mine just hired a person who had little to no BA experience.  This person wanted to be a BA and worked every Saturday for months with my client, for free, to learn.  Once a position opened up she was hired.  

I had a senior BA moment because I was persistent. I wanted in on a project I heard about using some cool technology and in a new business area for me.  I was denied access for six months.  Every month I would ask about the status of the project and almost beg to be part of the team.  I think my manager finally gave in because he wanted me to stop asking or just felt sorry for me.  Whatever it takes. Right?  I’ll admit I was nervous and a little unsure how I would perform since the business area was new and I did not know any of the stakeholders.  I came out with flying colors and it helped my confidence level with future endeavors.

Instill a Feedback System

You need to be open to feedback to really grow.  We do this for projects, why don’t do it for yourself. For projects we instill retrospectives to determine what went well, what didn’t and how the team can improve.  You should set-up a feedback system for your improvement with those you work with. 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? You may not know unless you ask.  Here is a quick system you can put in place to continually get the feedback you need to improve.

  1. Ask for feedback. You may never get it if you don’t ask.
  2. Thank the person for their feedback. Don’t get defensive and try to explain why they are wrong.
  3. Implement the feedback into your work. Think through how you can take that feedback and make changes.  
  4. Provide updates to the ones giving you feedback on how you have changed based on their feedback.  This one is important.  By updating people they know you are listening to them and they will continue to give feedback.  One of my pet peeves is when people ask my opinion and never do anything with it or always do the opposite (maybe that’s a sign!). I tend to not freely give feedback to those people. 

Remember this does not happen overnight.  Keep building those skills and your confidence will grow.  As your confidence grows you will begin to get closer to your goal.  Before you know it you’ll be there.

Bu the way, I’m taking a little time off, so I might be slow responding to your comments. Please bear with me. Thanks.

Kupe

Don’t forget to leave your comments below

Four Ways to Best Utilize a Senior Business Analyst

Written by Kupe Kupersmith on . Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Four Ways to Best Utilize a Senior Business Analyst

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.

kupe-bamanager

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!

Fire, Sliced Bread, and Now This!

Written by Kupe Kupersmith on . Posted in Articles.

The business environment we live in requires us to do everything better, faster, cheaper.  As a business analyst we accomplish this edict by being more efficient with our BA planning, elicitation, analysis, and communication.  We do things for less by spending less time on our daily activities because even as employees we have an hourly rate attached to us.  In today’s post I give you a tool to help you work faster, better, cheaper.  And by tools I really do mean technology.

When we think of tools to help us do our business analysis work, many of us think about requirements management tools or requirements definition tools.  If implemented correctly these tools do help teams of BAs be more efficient.  Often the ROI is gained over time for larger groups.  The tool I want to share with you will give you ROI immediately. As you pass on the word within your team, the return will grow exponentially.  Are you excited yet?

I think it is safe to say email is still the number one way we communicate with others personally and professionally.  Have you ever sat at your desk asking something like:

  • Where is that email from Steven?
  • Where is that attachment Mary wanted me to read before our meeting?
  • I wish I could connect with Jane on LinkedIn, who just sent me an email?

Well then, Xobni (zob-nee) is your answer.  Xobni is “inbox” spelled backwards and is an unbelievable plug-in for Microsoft Outlook.  Like other applications there is a free version and an upgradeable version for a fee. To date I have been happy with the free version. They also advertise an enterprise version and Xobni for the Blackberry. 

 fire-slicedbread

Shown here is the Xobni UI with Kupe’s information.
This is an example of what you would see of your contacts 

As BAs we are trained to focus on the problem or business need prior to jumping to the solution.  Well, I am guilty of throwing all my training out the door when it came to Xobni.  From the time I saw a demo of Xobni, it was installed on my PC within 10 minutes. 

Xobni has decreased the time it takes me to find emails, attachments, and contact information.  Without Xobni there are many clicks and multiple page views to see all this information.  With Xobni’s well thought out user interface the standard Outlook features just can’t compete.  In addition to email and contact information, Xobni pulls in some social network information for your contacts.  When viewing a contact you can see their LinkedIn, Facebook, Hoover’s, and Twitter feeds.  For LinkedIn it allows you to message people you are connected to or invite new contacts to join your network.  Xobni is the closest thing to date that is a one-stop shop for staying connected with those you care about.

So stop asking where is that email or attachment from Billy or wishing you could see the latest tweets from Joe.  Download Xobni and start increasing your productivity. 

One word of caution.  I have heard reports of earlier versions slowing down Outlook, and I had to reboot once because Outlook hung-up. Besides that it has worked flawlessly for me over the last three months. 

If you are using Xobni today share your experiences.  Do you have a tool that you feel has increased your productivity?  Please leave a comment so we can all benefit.

Kupe

We Don’t Need BAs!

Written by Kupe Kupersmith on . Posted in Articles.

Since you are reading this post I assume you are most likely a business analyst, want to be a BA, or have BAs working for you.  At the end of this post I think you’ll all agree that we do not need BAs. I think it is also safe to say there is nothing positive about a BA.

Let me first define what I mean by “BA”.  I do not mean a Business Analyst.  I am referring to a Bad Attitude. I am a firm believer that we need business analysis, but we do not need business analysts with bad attitudes.  Our profession is still young, and bad attitudes will seriously impede our ability to positively impact organizations around the world.

I recently went to a store to make a purchase.  When I was next in line the cashier said, “Can I help the next person?”  Her words were fine, but the tone was terrible.  Her body language and lack of enthusiasm said “I don’t really want to help the next person in line, but that is what I get paid to say.” I knew this was going to be a bad experience, but I tried to approach it with an open mind.  Unfortunately it only got worse.  Here is an example of how I was treated. I had two items to pay for so I handed the cashier both.  I quickly learned she was not happy about that move. She yelled, “One thing at a time!”  I really like the store, but I had a really bad experience because of one person’s bad attitude.

In situations like this I normally don’t complain.  I will just never spend my money at that establishment in the future. There are too many options out there.  I don’t feel like trying to give feedback and help resolve the issue when I can just go down the street to the competition. 

As a business analyst do you have a bad attitude?  Let’s find out with this short quiz.

Answer the three questions below by choosing the answer that you most closely can relate.

  1. When you are eliciting requirements for a specific process and your stakeholder starts talking about another process do you respond by saying something like:
    a. “One thing at a time!”
    or
    b. “This is a great conversation, but we have time scheduled to discuss that process tomorrow. Can this wait until then or should do we need to explore this process before continuing?”
  2. When your project manager asks for your status do you respond by saying something like:
    a. “I’m working on it. I would be done if you didn’t keep asking me my status.”
    or
    b. “Things are looking good. I have a few more meetings this week. I’ll give you an update Friday.”
  3. When your QA Analyst asks about a requirement for the third time do you respond by saying something like:
    a. “I already explained this to you twice; I doubt a third time will help.”
    or
    b. “Let me see if I can explain this better…”

If you answered “B” to all of these most likely you have a positive attitude and are viewed as a team player and contributor.  If you answered “A” to any of the above you may have a bad attitude.  Think about why you answered “A” and you may want to make some adjustments.

Similar to my response at the store, the people you work with may not give you critical feedback about the impact of your attitude.  They may choose to not work with you and decide to work with another BA without a BA (bad attitude).

Positively yours,

Kupe