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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.

 

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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_Aug29_2024

Three Keys to Building a Strong Process Management Foundation

Effective process management is not something that can be built overnight but is critical to the success of process management programs. Recent research by APQC indicates that only 52% of organizations feel their process management programs are somewhat effective, and only 11% feel they are very effective. However, the survey findings also point out three opportunities for growth:

 

  1. Align process programs with organizational strategy
  2. Measure process performance
  3. Ensure a strong focus on process governance

 

Organizations looking to leverage opportunities for growth and to build their process program on a strong foundation should consider the points outlined in this article.

First, the structure.

Organizations can structure their process team in a variety of ways; and most often, the same way won’t work best for every organization. According to APQC’s research, most organizations (44%) have centralized process teams, 29% have federated teams, 14% have decentralized teams, and 13% follow an ad hoc approach.

 

While organizations will favor the structure that works best with their organization’s overall structure; there are pros and cons to consider with each structure.

 

Next, align to strategy.

Process work has traditionally involved teams driving efficiencies in cost, cycle time, and throughput. However, over the last few years, process teams are shifting these tactical objectives under broader organizational drivers. ​

While some organizations are not aligning to strategy as well as they should, 49% of organizations do align their process efforts to organizational strategy.

 

Strategy and process management activities should intertwine and inform each other. The following best practices lead to greater alignment of strategy with the work of the rest of the organization:

  1. Planning – Do not limit strategic planning processes to the corporate level, and make sure that the planning process is constantly evolving with business needs and forecasts. Continuous improvement is a best-practice mantra.
  2. Measurement – Use qualitative data in addition to carefully selected quantitative data points to set strategic plans but remember that financial numbers only tell part of the story. Qualitative information can provide the context needed to make valid decisions.
  3. Organizational structure, communication, and culture – Strategic plans should include processes for communicating strategy. The organization will never be aligned if strategy is not clearly and consistently communicated and discussed. Embed strategic planning into people’s roles, driving employees to feel motivated to contribute and feel that their time is valued.
  4. Process design – Integrate the strategic planning process with quality processes. Be sure that quality and strategy inform each other and enable enterprise success.

 

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Lastly, measure process performance.

Once organizations have selected their team structure and defined their strategy, it’s time to consider how they will measure the performance of their process efforts. When organizations were asked how they use measures in managing process performance, 30% of organizations only use ad hoc measures, and 16% have no process measures at all.

 

Measurement enables decision making at all levels in the organization. Without measuring, leaders manage and make changes in the dark, without a clear view of which changes need to be made and where.

Determining which measures align with strategic goals is the first step. Once the organization selects the initial sets of measures for the different audiences (e.g., executives, business units, departments, managers, frontline workers), those measures can be tracked over time and tweaked as necessary. When an organization can look at its performance on a granular level and see how those pieces roll up into high-level metrics, it can begin to adjust in the places where they will make the biggest difference.

Don’t forget about process governance.

Organizations can have the best process program strategies, linked to organizational objectives and with smart measures in place; however, if the right governance is not in place, those plans can fail.

Governance encompasses all the structural elements that help process management function and often dictates the efficiency and speed at which an organization implements and embeds process management into its practices. Appropriate governance ensures that the right changes are made to processes and that policies surrounding process design and management are clear and relevant to the entire enterprise.

 

According to APQC’s survey, 75% of organizations have process owners present in their organization and 57% have process improvement specialists. Only 38% of organizations have champions or steering committees, which vitally provide oversight and governance for process work, help to prioritize opportunities, and align processes and process work with organizational strategy and objectives. Thankfully, the number of process sponsors and champions at organizations has improved since the last time this survey was conducted in 2020, showing the increased importance organizations have placed on these more strategic process roles.

Process management programs are not built overnight, and they all follow a different path. Starting with the key topics outlined in this article can help organizations get off on the right foot.

 

BATimes_Aug28_2024

Navigating Multiple ‘Right’ Answers in Business Analysis

We’ve probably all experienced situations where there are multiple ‘right’ answers to a question. This is particularly true with questions that appear straightforward, but actually hide significant nuance. Let’s take a seemingly simple question;

“Who released the song ‘The Boys of Summer’?”

 

If you know the answer, you might instinctively reply “Don Henly”. However, if you said The Ataris, or DJ Sammy, you’d also be correct, all of these bands/artists have released the song. Depending on when you were born and the type of music you listen to, you might be familiar with one, many or none of those tracks. You might even know of other versions!

Equally, you might have interpreted the question ‘who released this song’ as relating to the record label or promoter. So you equally might have responded “Geffen” or “Universal Music Group”, and you’d have been correct…

If it’s hard to get a single ‘right’ answer to a seemingly simple question like the one mentioned above, what hope do we have when undertaking requirements elicitation? We might be seeking to understand how a particular process works today, how things could be improved, or perhaps we’re wanting to understand potential requirements for an IT system. People are naturally going to have different opinions and experiences.

Yet if different people have different ways of undertaking the work, or if there are different views on what ‘good’ would look like, what do we do? How do we avoid missing (or misunderstanding) crucial information?

 

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Avoiding Elicitation Woes

There’s no silver bullet, but three key considerations are specificity, multi-sourcing and modeling.

Firstly, it’s worth thinking about the specificity of any elicitation activity. By this I mean what level of granularity are we seeking. If we are at the very beginning of an initiative, we might be seeking answers to very big, macro-level questions. These will help us determine what direction we should take and where we should follow up. By their nature, these questions are big and fluffy, and there can be a tolerance for error in the answers. “Do you think the claims process works well?” is a big, broad, question. If the answer is “no” then it gives us something to follow up on.

 

Equally, as we get closer to granular requirements, we ought to be seeking very specific information. It’s crucial to actively seek to understand key terminology and probe into specific areas. We might probe into particular areas where improvements are necessary, and this is likely to require uncovering more and more detail. Feeling empowered to ask “what do you mean by that?” is a must.

Specifying contextual information such as the timeframe or situation is key. “In 2003, which band released ‘The boys of summer’ from their album ‘So Long, Astoria’” is a more specific question than the one mentioned at the beginning of this article. Equally “once a potential insurance claim has been reported by a policyholder by phone, what determines what happens next? What rules or decision logic are applied, and how?” is a more specific question than simply asking “what happens with claims?”.

 

Embrace Multiple Sources

However much specificity we gain, rarely will one person (or team) have a full view of a situation or process. Seeking multiple sources of the ‘truth’ is important. How a procurement process works, and whether it is efficient or not, will depend on who you ask. A procurement team might think its processes are very efficient, but managers from other departments trying to procure services might disagree as they feel procuring a product or service takes too long. External service providers might have a different view, particularly if their invoices aren’t paid on time!

Understanding different stakeholders’ perspectives will help to gain a 360 degree view. This helps avoid situations where an improvement is implemented that works very well for one group, but makes life much harder for others.

 

Modeling for Validation

Elicitation and modeling are sometimes seen as separate activities, and I have never understood why. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has sat with a stakeholder and sketched out a process, then quickly shown my sketch and said “is that what you mean?”.

Creating informal models is a great way of ensuring that everyone is on the same page, and also a great way to spot gaps. It might identify that there are different teams undertaking a process in different ways—and one way of improving the situation might be to unify this.

Not only this, but having some kind of model to point at ensures that areas of agreement/disagreement can be clearly highlighted. Creating a shared model, whether that’s an ‘as is’ or a ‘to be’ model, ensures that people are on the same page. It helps avoid situations where everyone appears to agree, but different stakeholders have slightly different views on what should be done.

 

The Power of Perspectives

All of this highlights the power of perspectives. Typically different stakeholder groups each know a bit about a particular situation or process. The art is to get enough coverage, enough variety, sufficient perspectives, to see a feasible and desirable way forward.

Doing so will ensure that the end solution or product is one that the stakeholders actually want to use!

BATimes_Aug21_2024

Best of: 10 Soft Skills You’ll Need To Be A Successful Business Analyst

You might already know the technical skills you’ll need to be a great Business Analyst (BA) but do you know the essential soft skills? The role of a BA is deeply rooted in working with people. You’ll often be coordinating with stakeholders, running workshops, or presenting documentation to teams. To be a successful BA you’ll need the following soft skills to compliment the technical ones.

 

Rapport Building

You’ll need to build rapport with your stakeholders early in a project which you can do in many ways. While you’re waiting for a meeting to start ask your stakeholders questions like, “how is your day going?”, “what are you doing in the weekend?”. I’ve been in meetings where everyone is silent until the workshop begins. Take advantage of this time to build rapport by finding common interests, showing empathy or complimenting them on something such as a tie, a picture in the background of the Zoom or their promptness. This may seem trivial, but it will set you up to succeed as the project rolls out. Your stakeholders will be more likely to attend meetings/workshops, feel more comfortable contributing and start to champion the project and the changes you’re making within the organization.

Empathy

The Oxford Dictionary defines Empathy as ‘The ability to understand and share the feelings of another’. This is an important soft skill for a BA because we need to put ourselves in our stakeholders’ shoes to understand the problems we are trying to solve. To have empathy means to understand the pain points within the organizations Current State which is essential when we’re trying to fix them. Try to imagine how frustrating it must feel to have outdated, manual process at work when the technology we use at home is so advanced these days. Use empathy to speak to these pain points and get stakeholder buy in and drive user adoption.

Enthusiasm

Depending on the scope of your project Stakeholders may be attending a lot of workshops and meetings so it’s important to be enthusiastic and positive about what you’re doing. Let’s be honest there’s nothing worse than a dull or dry workshop consisting of people talking at you with slides of written content. To get people to come along for the journey we need to engage them and be enthusiastic about what we’re doing. Speak positively about the benefits and outcomes of your project, show visual diagrams and ask questions to get people involved. Having a positive and bright disposition will pick people up when they engage with you, help them focus on the content and be more likely to contribute.

BATimes_May24_2022

Active listening

When we’re working on current state or establishing things like user journeys, user personas, use cases or processes a key soft skill you’ll need is Active Listening. Active listening is a pattern of listening that means listening to verbal and non-verbal cues without judging or jumping to conclusions. When you’re active listening you’re not thinking about what to say next you are completely focused on the person communicating. Don’t interrupt them or propose solutions at this stage, instead paraphrase and reflect what you’ve heard back to the person. This will ensure you don’t miss anything, don’t misinterpret anything and help you understand the paint points your users are experiencing in more depth.

Creativity

When making changes to the organization such as processes, we need to find solutions that work for everyone. For this we will need to think outside the box because realistically we may not be able to meet everyone’s needs, or some people may just be averse to the changes. To facilitate the transition, we can use creative visualizations to get everyone on board the journey; Miro, Figma and Visio are great tools for creating visual diagrams. You can do role plays during workshops, online or in person to outline the steps of a new process. Be creative and use your imagination to make it fun and engaging for your stakeholders.

 

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Adaptability

As a BA you may find yourself on new projects for new businesses often and every situation will be unique. You will need to assess each business’s unique culture, ways of working and environment. Some businesses may be very formal and highly governed while others may be casual and more agile in their approach. To be successful in all these environments you need to be able to adapt, this means finding the right language, terminology, pace, document structure and hierarchy. Recently I worked on a project for a very successful company that still had a startup mentality. They embraced agile ways of working and feared having their autonomy taken away, because of this the word ‘Governance’ was a trigger for many of the staff. We had to adapt our language to suit the client and instead of ‘Governance’ we used ‘Guidelines’. Be adaptable and understand the culture you are working in, don’t work against it, work with it.

Communication

Clear and concise communication is important to be successful as a BA. When working with people things can get lost in translation, its our jobs as BAs to ensure they don’t get lost! Be willing to speak up and ask for more detail if you don’t understand something or when you notice others aren’t understanding it either. At times you may need to control the pace of a discussion, to speed it up to keep people engaged or to slow it down if it is moving too fast. There are times when you will need to paraphrase what someone has said to communicate it more effectively to the broader audience. You can use terms like “what I’m hearing is…” or “To put that another way might be…”. Utilizing your communication skills will ensure workshops and meetings stay on topic and you get what you need out of them.

Patience

You may find yourself in a situation where you already know the journey ahead for your stakeholders for example a company is implementing an out-of-the-box solution. You’ll need patience to assess their current state to find gaps and bring the stakeholders along for the journey so they can get excited about their new technology and processes, even though you already know the outcome. Another example of using patience is in workshops where different participants repeat information to you, you need to actively listen so they feel heard, but it could get a little boring for you. Lastly, not everyone you encounter is going to be a great communicator, some people talk for too long, some people get off topic, some people are hard to understand, and you need to listen to these stakeholders trying to communicate ineffectively and decipher what they’re saying, this takes patience.

BATimes_May24_2022

Improvisation

You will find yourself in meetings with technical people, non-technical people and people from all different units of the business. Analogies are a great way to explain complex strategies or technology to people that don’t understand what you’re talking about. If someone doesn’t understand something a great way to describe it to them in terms they can understand may be using analogies. You can improvise and tell them about “One time I went to the supermarket and at the checkout this happened…. Which is like this technology system that does this…”. You will get better at this over time and come to understand what works for stakeholders from different Business Units.

Conflict Resolution

Often our stakeholders may disagree on things like current state or how future state should be. We need to manage both points of view and bring the team to a consensus where possible. Consensus may not be possible in all situations, but we still need to handle the conversations constructively so that everyone agrees upon the next steps.  Some pointers for conflict resolutions are

  • Defuse Anger and facilitate communication
  • Separate people from problems
  • Listen first, talk second
  • Set out the facts
  • Explore options together

Using these tips, we can find a way to move forward together and keep the project on track.

People Process and Tooling (The PPT framework) is a great way to approach IT changes within an organization. I believe the most important aspect in this framework is people because the technology and processes are no good if the people within the organization don’t use them. You can use these soft skills as a BA’s when engaging people to ensure organizational changes are adopted and in turn, you will be successful too.

BATimes_Aug15_2024

The Deadline Dilemma: Unpacking the Reality of Arbitrary Timelines

Perhaps I’ve been doing this job so long that I’ve become a little cynical, but I have a theory. I suspect that 80% (or more) of deadlines that are given are completely arbitrary. They are either based on ‘finger in the air’ guesstimates of when something is needed, or (in some cases) they are just plucked out of thin air. What is particularly difficult is when the person setting the deadline has no real idea of what the work is or how long the work will take.

 

An Example: The Deadline That Creeps Up

In a previous role, a long time ago, I was working on what I believed to be a very time critical deliverable. Once it was complete a senior executive would be using it, and I was told that the deadline was non-negotiable. The project manager was very clear: the work has to be completed, there can be no slippage. Initially, it looked just about achievable, so I set off doing my work.

 

As is so often the case, the work turned out to be more complex than anyone had realized. I escalated, and explained things were likely to take longer than anyone had assumed, and was told that there’s no chance of extending the deadline. Since I was enjoying the work and the deadline seemed so important I was happy to put in some late nights. Towards the end, I worked some weekends too, and just about got it over the line in time. I was tired, but it felt good as I uploaded the final version and emailed the senior stakeholder.

 

However, that feel-good factor soon faded when I immediately got a response: an automated ‘out of office’ explaining that the stakeholder was on vacation for a week. Investigating further, I find that yes, this person is on vacation, and this had been planned for a long time (they hadn’t taken emergency leave at short notice).

 

The deliverable wouldn’t be utilized for a week. There was actually a week of ‘slack’ built into the plan, but nobody told me. I could have slept more and I needn’t have worked the weekend…

 

My Bad: Not Asking “What Is The Implication Of This…”

It would be easy to blame the project manager or senior stakeholder in this story, but I don’t. In fact, it taught me something really important about deadlines. When a deadline is tight, it’s important to ask questions to understand how ‘hard’ and constrained it is. Ultimately here, we’re testing the constraints. Questions include:

 

 

There are many other questions too, and the intention here is to understand what is a real, immovable constraint and what isn’t.

 

Being Clear on Estimates

Equally, alongside asking questions, it is important to drive analysis deadlines on analysis estimates, rather than accepting arbitrary deadlines. There is often uncertainty, and if it is necessary to have a detailed plan up front, then the schedule ought to be based on a practitioner’s assessment of how long the work will take. If a deadline is found to be arbitrary or malleable, then planning forward and explaining what is possible in a particular timeframe can be a useful approach. Whatever approach is taken, getting regular feedback, updating estimates and pivoting accordingly is important, as is managing expectations.

 

In summary: understanding what is a real constraint and what isn’t is crucial. This can be achieved by asking provocative but important questions.