Tag: Career

You Don’t Know Jack

Written by Mike Lenz on February 9, 2015. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on You Don’t Know Jack

A healthy respect for the magnitude of what we don’t know

Every time I start to believe I’m building an expertise in something or starting to mature into an experienced “adult”, life has a way of smacking me in the head and reminding me that “I don’t know jack.”

In general, the word “expert” has always stuck out to me. What does that word mean? I’ve always thought of it as “you know everything”. So for me, to be an expert on something is an insane achievement. You know everything? That’s crazy.

I have a hard time even imagining the reality of knowing everything about something. Under that definition, I’m not even close to an expert on anything. Often when browsing Twitter I’m exposed to so many new ideas, new topics, new thoughts that the sheer volume of shit I don’t know can be overwhelming. Even a single topic. Pick one thing. Can you know everything about even that single topic? I don’t know.

But we don’t need to know everything to contribute. Each of us as individuals adds our own unique value from the perspective of our own unique set of knowledge. No one else on the planet has the exact same combination of experience and knowledge, and the pursuit of improving that collection is called Life.

In my opinion, more important than the depth of a person’s knowledge is their self-awareness of what they don’t know. Am I an expert on Digital Marketing Platforms, Content Management Systems, or Adobe Experience Manager implementations? I wouldn’t use the word “expert”.

However, I would happily match myself up against anyone else in terms of ability to lead and execute an enterprise digital marketing platform implementation. I have depth of experience and knowledge on the topic, but more importantly I know what I don’t know. I approach each new engagement with a healthy curiosity and eagerness to find new challenging problems to solve.

The reality that there’s so much still to learn is what makes each day so exciting. So yes, I don’t know shit and neither do you, but that’s what makes life worth living.

So let’s learn something today and remain humble to the reality that there’s always so much more left to learn tomorrow.

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The Entrepreneurial Business Analysis Practitioner

Written by Richard Larson on January 19, 2015. Posted in Articles.

Part 1: What do Business Analysis and Entrepreneurship Have in Common?

Welcome to the first installment of the Entrepreneurial BA series. Given we are both entrepreneurs and BAs it seems logical for to write about this topic. But, why bother? What possibly could be relevant about entrepreneurialism for a business analyst? Well, for starters, it’s a great career option and more and more viable with each passing year. Even if you are not interested in forming a start-up, the principles of entrepreneurship are becoming increasingly important for organizations to innovate and stay competitive.

In this ongoing series, we’ll explore several aspects of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs and what it means for business analysis. My firm belief is that by adopting a more entrepreneurial way of working, BAs will be more effective and organizations will benefit. Let’s get started!

Career choices. If you are a BA, you may be wondering about your career options. To be honest, we all do that, but we tend to hear about career concerns from business analysts more than anyone. Should we aspire to be project managers when we grow up? That used to be the most common next step, and more BAs are saying “no way” to that. What about becoming business architects? That would be a logical move for “logical” people since architects tend to be abstract thinkers and focused on the “big picture.”

In March, 2014, Cathy Brunsting wrote an insightful article called “Beyond the Business Analyst Role: What’s Next?” Besides the above options she mentioned Product Owner, Product Manager, and other managerial roles. To me, the product-oriented roles are the most conducive for a BA to use his or her skills to help their organization grow. Both roles take advantage of business knowledge and/or BA-type skills to define, refine, and steer development of new products.

Wait a second. Designing and developing new products is what entrepreneurs do, isn’t it? There is more to being an entrepreneur, which I’ll cover in another article. But, a critical part of starting a business or line of business is creating a new product or service or one that is better than the market currently has. That is often what business analysts do, and to some extent, project managers too.

Entrepreneur. First, let me define entrepreneur; there are many definitions floating around. Translating from the French, entrepreneurs “undertakes a venture” which involves some risk. A longer and more precise definition from Investopedia (a favorite web site of mine) is the following:

“An individual who, rather than working as an employee, runs a small business and assumes all the risk and reward of a given business venture, idea, or good or service offered for sale. The entrepreneur is commonly seen as a business leader and innovator of new ideas and business processes.”1

Entrepreneurs have been around for quite a while, with the first usage of the term in the early 1700s. Classic examples of tech entrepreneurs are Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg. Coco Chanel was a fashion and perfume innovator and entrepreneur in the 20th century. Levi Strauss created the Levi’s jeans company in the 1800s. James Watt was an 18th century entrepreneur. He didn’t invent the steam engine but he innovated several improvements on it.

Intrapreneur. If you do entrepreneurial work inside an organization, the common term for you is “intrapreneur.” We don’t like the term because if one doesn’t assume risks then how can they be called a “preneur,” or someone who accepts risks? On the other hand, I very much like the concept of people in organizations starting up ventures to launch new products and services. Here is the Investopedia definition of intrapreneur:

“An inside entrepreneur, or an entrepreneur within a large firm, who uses entrepreneurial skills without incurring the risks associated with those activities. Intrapreneurs are usually employees within a company who are assigned a special idea or project, and are instructed to develop the project like an entrepreneur would.”2

Now that we have some definitions in place, let’s move on to comparing business analysis and entrepreneurship.

Product vs. Project vs. Process. Years ago our company put together something we called the “productivity triangle.” Any organization is productive when they create or provide products or services that customers want and need. Creating them is done through projects, and project management is at the core of that, naturally. Re-creating the new product on an ongoing basis is done through processes, which need to be improved or optimized periodically. Process management is central to that and projects may need launching to do the improvement.

Underlying both of these disciplines is product management. The closest parallels to business analysis are the initial requirements and design. Another huge part of product management is developing business cases, which BAs often do at companies. Over time, additional requirements surface and new features are added and can be anywhere from small pieces to large releases. Product management both drives and supports projects and processes, completing the productivity triangle. See Figure 1.

Figure 1

Business Analysis and Entrepreneurship. So, what does all this have to do with BAs being entrepreneurs you may ask? If we view business analysis work as largely product management, BAs can port those skills to creating new products for a startup. Similarly, new product development within an organization can be done in an entrepreneurial way, and business analysis skills are critical. Speaking from experience, formal project management is helpful but not as crucial for a startup. (Scrum methods are more helpful, but that is a separate topic.) Managing processes is the least important for a startup, since it won’t have processes to manage until it starts to “re-create” the products it has built. The other two legs of the triangle are essential for growing a company. Product management skills – which BAs have developed – are essential for starting a company or product.

What do you think? Are there parallels between business analysis and entrepreneurship? Leave your comments below.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

About the Authors:

Richard Larson, PMP, CBAP, PMI-PBA, President and Founder of Watermark Learning, is a successful entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in business analysis, project management, training, and consulting. He has presented workshops and seminars on business analysis and project management topics to over 10,000 participants on five different continents.
Rich is a frequent speaker at Business Analysis and Project Management national conferences and IIBA® and PMI® chapters around the world. He has contributed to the BA Body of Knowledge version 2.0 and 3.0, the PMI BA Practice Guide, and the PM Body of Knowledge, 4th edition. He and his wife Elizabeth Larson have co-authored three books, The Influencing Formula, CBAP Certification Study Guide, and Practitioners’ Guide to Requirements Management.

Elizabeth Larson, PMP, CBAP, CSM, PMI-PBA is Co-Principal and CEO of Watermark Learning and has over 30 years of experience in project management and business analysis. Elizabeth’s speaking history includes repeat presentations for national and international conferences on five continents.
Elizabeth has co-authored three books: The Practitioner’s Guide to Requirements Management, CBAP Certification Study Guide, and The Influencing Formula. She has also co-authored chapters published in four separate books.
Elizabeth was a lead author on the PMBOK® Guide – Fourth and Fifth Editions, PMI’s Business Analysis for Practitioners – A Practice Guide, and the BABOK® Guide 2.0, as well as an expert reviewer on BABBOK® Guide 3.0.

References:
1. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/entrepreneur.asp
2. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/intrapreneur.asp

2015 Trends in Business Analysis and Project Management

Written by Elizabeth Larson on January 12, 2015. Posted in Articles.

Each year we like to reflect on what’s happened in the business analysis, project management, and Agile professions and make our predictions for the upcoming year.

To summarize the trends we saw in 2014:

Continued excitement about Agile projects with more informal communications and documentation and use of modeling tools to get from high-level user stories to detail needed to estimate and build them
Focus on Design
Cloud computing
Greater interest in business analysis by project managers.

Below are the seven new trends we see in the Project Management and Business Analysis fields for 2015.

Making Agile work for organizations. As the Agile bandwagon continues to grow, some organizations, previously reluctant to jump aboard, are running to catch up. Sometimes, though, Agile is implemented without much thought to unintended consequences of not having enough organizational commitment when adopting Agile. Although such things as not having dedicated teams, a dedicated business product owner, or extending time boxes to fit more work into an iteration sometimes works, there are often related issues, such as:
1. 1. Team burnout
  2. Less work being implemented
  3. Unmet customer expectations
We predict that organizations will find a way to make Agile work for them by becoming more purposeful in how they choose to adopt it. As a related trend, we think that some of the Agile purists will become more flexible, softening the “my way or the highway” approach in favor of one that is more collaborative. It means that organizations will have to articulate the business problem they are trying to solve by adopting Agile. In addition, those coaches who are accustomed to dictating what must be done will need to seek more organizational input.
Distributed leadership. Leadership will become more distributed and will be increasingly as much about tapping into the leadership of those around us as it is about a single visionary, decision-maker, and communicator. This idea isn’t new, but as organizations and project teams struggle with the adoption of Agile, coming to terms with what it means to be a self-organizing team will highlight the value of everyone stepping up to the role of leader.
In addition, the idea of leading for the purpose of developing relationships is going to be the focus of team building. Leadership is more than getting people to perform for the benefit of the bottom line. It’s about the people and connecting with them. Leaders are selected, recognized, and evaluated for their ability to sincerely tap into the human experiences their people represent. The intrinsic value of understanding others in order to establish meaningful relationships among team members, particularly those who are often physically distant, will be emphasized.
Innovation and entrepreneurship on the rise, and morphing. One can’t help but see books, articles, and blog posts about innovation these days. Not only our own industry outlets, but other media seem to have discovered the innovation “bug.” Many organizations will innovate through process improvement, and in some cases there is not much difference.
To go beyond mere process improvement, organizations will need to become more entrepreneurial. Innovation centers and hubs are on the increase, and companies are investing in their own incubators away from their main operations to help spur the creative process. Smaller, more isolated teams of “intrapreneurs” will provide the kind of “disruptive” break-throughs needed for true innovation and market leadership to take place. Savvy business analysts and project managers will step up to take on these entrepreneurial roles in organizations.
Business analysis as design work. As we mentioned in last year’s trends, the upcoming release of the BABOK Guide version 3.0 will awaken the “inner designer” in people doing business analysis work. There has long existed a gap between requirements and physical design. Organizations who start providing “logical design” outputs as part of building apps and business processes will shrink that gap and create better products faster. They will realize less rework by using standard models such as business process maps, use case models, prototypes and wireframes, state-transition, and sequence diagrams to name a few.
We have been promoting “logical modeling” for years and have been surprised that many organizations have not supported the design capabilities of business analysis. We see hope in the new BABOK and predict that organizations will at least consider changing their development processes to encompass more logical design. Smart companies will actually embrace the new design paradigm.
Struggle between centralized and distributed project governance. Organizations will continue to struggle to find balance between the extremes of project chaos and centralized project governance. We predict that in the near future organizations will continue to adopt an “all or none” approach to project governance. We see the era of centralized project governance, such as PMOs and Centers of Excellence, giving way to a more distributed governance, with some organizations letting individual project teams decide how much governance to employ. However, we know that when organizations move to one extreme to solve their problems, others are created. We predict that in the future organizations will take a more balanced approach and apply more governance for certain types of projects and less for others.
Schizophrenic approach to BA and PM credentials. We predict that both the trend to become certified and the trend to reject certifications will play out in 2015. With the increased popularity in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), some from prestigious universities like Harvard and University of Michigan, learning about new topics and acquiring new skills at a low or no cost will appeal to many BAs, PMs and their organizations. To the extent that these new learning channels provide “just-in-time training,” they will reinforce the notion among some BAs and PMs that certifications and professional designations like PMP and CBAP are not an indication of competency and therefore not worth having.
At the same time, however, many PMs, BAs, and their organizations around the globe recognize that these credentials show knowledge gained and are an example of the initiative and hard work needed to get certified. We have seen large numbers of BAs eagerly awaiting the release of IIBA’s BABOK v.3, and many others are racing to be certified under the current release before the exam changes. In the PM space, we have seen a rise in the number of PMs interested in business analysis. PMI’s PBA as well as their ACP certifications are generating lots of interest that we think will continue to grow. Finally, there seems to be no slowing of interest in Agile certifications such as the CSM.
Team-based Agile training. Agile training will be geared toward entire teams rather than individuals. Agile is going to drive organizations to seek more effective ways to generate a change in project practice. The notion of sending an individual to training to become the internal evangelist is too much for a single person to do when it comes to the far-reaching culture changes required to implement A. Plugging into existing processes, tools, and infrastructure after traditional PM training is entirely different than expecting someone to come back from training and single-handedly explain and implement the why, what, and how of Agile. Expect more interest in generating internal momentum for change by sending teams to training who learn the why and how of self-organization. Training for entire intact teams is how organizations will get out of the gate and it’s more likely to be augmented by coaching and a follow-up with on-site presence to help as organizations figure out how to make Agile work for them.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

About the Authors:

Andrea Brockmeier, PMP, CSM, PMI-ACP, is the Client Solutions Director for Project Management at Watermark Learning. She has 20+ years of experience in project management practice and training. She writes and teaches courses in project management, including PMP® certification, as well as influencing skills. She has long been involved with the PMI® chapter in Minnesota where she was a member of the certification team for over eight years. She has a master’s degree in cultural anthropology and is particularly interested in the impact of social media and new technologies on organizations and projects.

About the Authors

Elizabeth has co-authored five books on business analysis and certification preparation. She has also co-authored chapters published in four separate books. Elizabeth was a lead author on several standards including the PMBOK® Guide, BABOK® Guide, and PMI’s Business Analysis for Practitioners – A Practice Guide.

Richard Larson, PMP, CBAP, PMI-PBA, President and Founder of Watermark Learning, is a successful entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in business analysis, project management, training, and consulting. He has presented workshops and seminars on business analysis and project management topics to over 10,000 participants on five different continents.

Rich loves to combine industry best practices with a practical approach and has contributed to those practices through numerous speaking sessions around the world. He has also worked on the BA Body of Knowledge versions 1.6-3.0, the PMI BA Practice Guide, and the PM Body of Knowledge, 4th edition. He and his wife Elizabeth Larson have co-authored five books on business analysis and certification preparation.

Don’t Be a Victim, Break the Rules

Written by Charles Gallagher on December 22, 2014. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Don’t Be a Victim, Break the Rules

“You are remembered for the rules you break.”
Douglas MacArthur

Anyone who has studied the history of medicine will notice that some of our biggest breakthroughs have been the result of a single scientist breaking the rules. History tells us these are the same people who have also effectively changed a conventional paradigm. For example, the world is flat, wash your hands, earth revolves around the sun. Often times, the rule-breaking scientist pays a considerable price for being a change agent. The pain of change forces an outlandish idea to become a piece of conventional wisdom.

Even in the social sciences, we often see rule breaking as a means to progress and enlightenment. Just look at Rosa Parks and others like her during the Civil Rights Movement. Nelson Mandela in the face of Apartheid. Ronald Reagan challenge to Gorbachev to tear the wall down.

We face outlandish ideas (rules) in the work place all the time. One popular one is “this is the way we have always done it.” How many times have we heard that? Breaking this single rule can often yield great rewards in professional wisdom and in productivity. In our often over-stimulated, over-technical workplace environment, we often find ourselves powerless in the face of bureaucratic electronic fences and complexity. It is easy to get overwhelmed, easy to submit to the way we have always done things. I have found in my career that people often follow rules simply because of inertia or because no one is measuring outcomes in a meaningful way.

When we measure our outcomes and keep score during our work it becomes increasingly more difficult to utilize flawed logic or to cling to the way we have always done it. It forces us to break the rules. It forces us to stop being victims to the mindless way in which we often work.

Often when we are executing projects the biggest operating constraints are the rules established by the firm. Many times these rules are really just old habits and typically they have no logical, timely or relevant basis other than “this how we have always done it.” Many firms cannot let go of their stodgy industrial mindsets and cultures (even though most of them have been hard at work in a knowledge economy for quite a long time now). The firms brave enough to break the rules are truly emerging and re-emerging, boosting productivity, increasing effectiveness and accelerating execution speed.

This week examine your daily routine and ask yourself what rules could I break? When running a project, challenge yourself to play the curious anthropologist— ask why you do what you do. The movie Office Space was infamous for outlining the ludicrousness of the TPS reports. My guess is that you have your own TPS reports in your organization. The bottom line is simple: If the rule is not adding value or making life better for someone it probably should be broken.

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Take Your Own Device: Mobile Workers and Mobile Strategies

Written by Curt Finch on December 1, 2014. Posted in Articles.

More and more workers are bringing their own devices to work, often to the chagrin of IT types who will then have to manage numerous devices running often divergent operating systems. However, there is another category of employee that relies on accessibility and simplicity from his work tools: the mobile worker. This is essentially anyone who regularly travels for a job, and has moved beyond the realm of keeping life on a laptop. These days, it is more convenient to compartmentalize aspects of work and distribute that workload to the devices that best handle it. According to a recent article from the Huffington Post, “ninety two percent of workers believe their smartphones should be enabled for both work and personal use”. This is up a 2012 report showing the average American knowledge-worker carrying roughly 3.5 devices at any given time.

This reveals several compelling trends regarding the devices that workers carry with them. Obviously, items like tablets are a staple of the mobile worker’s repertoire, but more interesting is the fact that workers are not consolidating their devices. Rather, they recognize inherent strengths and weaknesses of the various platforms, and instead of sacrificing functionality, they sacrifice the convenience of only carrying one device.

So, what does this mean for businesses? To begin, it is important to recognize this desire for increased functionality from mobile workers. In a way, this segmentation helps to refute the argument that mobile devices are a distraction, because if that was the case it would be unnecessary to carry multiple devices for functionality. It also means that businesses need to recognize the comparative benefits of software, communication, and any internal business tools commonly used by their mobile workers as they relate to specific devices.

For instance, many workers might consider the laptop as a “home base” device that will be set up in a hotel room and left there until the evening after a big tradeshow when it’s time to write a report on the day’s activities. If a company communicates primarily through an instant message platform that is incompatible with a smartphone, the company will have limited ability to collaborate with a worker, or will inconvenience the worker as he fidgets with multiple devices.

It is important to consider what these various devices mean for necessary company data programs that might require updating on the road with a requirement for accuracy and ease of entry. For instance, Microsoft Dynamics AX provides a mobile solution for sales people who may need to update a database after a customer visit or while at a conference meeting with prospects. This can significantly reduce entry errors as users can input data directly to the program rather than metaphorically “jotting it down on a napkin” and updating a database later.

A little foresight when selecting and implementing tools will allow mobile workers to serve the company more effectively. Enabling and encouraging the use of devices that increase productivity, especially in the case of mobile workers, offers numerous benefits for the business as a whole. They have chosen functionality over convenience, and it is time for companies to make the same choice.

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