Tag: Facilitation

Think you’re a Business Analyst (BA) not a Salesperson? Think again…

Written by Lisa Hudson on May 14, 2020. Posted in Articles.

When I began training to be a BA, I never dreamt that I would need to be a salesperson too,

in fact, I’m glad I hadn’t realised that as it may have deterred me from, what is for me, the most suitable and fulfilling career that I could have wished for.

Over the last few months I have worked alongside the CEO, Business Unit Heads and other senior stakeholders to deliver a Competency Framework for 6point6. The framework acts as a blueprint that sets out all the competencies needed per role to establish and run the business successfully on a day to day basis. This project has given me visibility of all the roles, levels and disciplines that make up a prosperous consulting firm and has allowed me to see what skill separates the junior, mid-level and senior roles throughout the organisation. The answer is simply this: the ability to sell. The better you are at selling, the more senior you are likely to become, and this is true across the whole business, it doesn’t just apply to Business Analysts.

Luckily, my first BA role was in the public sector where the idea of making money had a minimal impact on my role, but in recent years, I have been working in two contrasting commercial environments. This is where I realised that in a sales-related role pressures can vary vastly across sectors for BAs.

It’s fair to say that the last few years have been the most challenging for me as an analyst, although I can honestly say that this has been the time in which I have learnt the most about being commercial.

The truth is that the more commercial the environment, the more your analysis and sales skills come under scrutiny. It’s not enough to be a solid analyst in this environment, if you really want your career to excel or even remain buoyant, you need to be able to ‘do sales’ too. To succeed, you need to admit to any deficiencies and awaken a new skill set as an accompaniment to your usual analysis work.

If you’ve found yourself in a similar position, you may wish to explore the concept of selling and how it can impact your role as a BA. The following thoughts are from my experiences and may help you on your own BA sales journey:

How You Need To Adapt

Your attitude always needs to be positive – aim to be helpful and informative, not pushy.

Know that it’s okay to be your genuine self, you don’t have to morph into a different person overnight. You are there as a BA above all else and need to show that you are an experienced analyst and know your stuff. Relax and do what you are best at.

Aim to make a consistently good impression with prospects and clients and make a concerted effort to look sharp and be prepared for every meeting.

Getting Sales Experience

If supporting the sales process is new to you, ask your best salespeople for any tips that may be useful. Perhaps you can ask to shadow them during a sales engagement.

Have a go and learn what you can, don’t be afraid to ask for feedback on your performance. We can always improve and raise our game!

Working Together

Once you have the opportunity to work closely with your salespeople on the front line; understand that they may have different personalities, views and approaches to your own. They will at least have very different objectives, in fact some might say that salespeople bring the jazz hands and you bring the substance when selling, but whatever the analogy, you need to work together with mutual respect to understand how to give your organisation the best chance of selling professional analysis services.

You need to work as a team to target the right markets and organisations, establish how to differentiate your services from the competition, analyse how to solve client pain points and keep leads warm.

The sales team will always be looking for ways to highlight your greatest selling points and you can help them with the following tips:

Do Your Research

As with any project, you need to be well-read but when you’re in a commercial environment you need to do even more on a much grander scale. As soon as a potential sales prospect appears on your radar you need to learn about the organisation, their industry and the competition. Start by researching the business, conduct simple ‘What, why, when analysis’ to understand the basics, locate or map out their organisation chart and use LinkedIn to find out who the key people are that you need to engage with. Understand their business model and critical success factors and find out what you can about their product or service roadmap.

Once you have this information, run an internal session with the sales team and other stakeholders involved in the process to share your findings in preparation for the next engagement.

Employ Sales Techniques

Your sales team will want to ensure that the prospect is worth pursuing before committing resources to any further work. They may do this by employing one of the following sales techniques to qualify and prioritise the deal in relation to other sales leads:

BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs and Timeline) is a sales qualification methodology that helps to determine whether a prospect is a good match for you based on their budget, their ability to buy from you, their need for your product, and the purchase timeline.

CHAMP (Challenges, Authority, Money and Prioritisation) is thought to be a modern version of BANT and describes key questions that need to be answered to better qualify leads and close sales.

SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-Payoff) is an acronym relating to four types of sales questions designed to bring a prospect into interest and through to a sale.

Regardless of the method used, if the opportunity is not worth pursuing at this stage, you may still wish to leave the door open for something more fruitful later. Now that you’ve had the chance to understand their business you can use that knowledge to suggest analysis opportunities in the future and set up regular check-ins to keep in touch.

Understand The Two Sales Personas

In sales there are two personas: Hunters and Farmers. Hunters chase brand new sales leads and aim to close as many deals as quickly as possible, whereas farmers look to source more business from existing clients and do this through the development of long-term client relationships. A strong sales team will no doubt utilise and balance both approaches, and as a BA you will be able to help both scenarios in the following ways:

Hunting:

Look out for opportunities on procurement websites
Use your industry contacts to look for new work and tell everyone what your company does
When an opportunity has been identified, help the initial bid process by writing ITT (Invitation to Tender) / RFP (Request for Proposal) responses to detail why you are the best supplier for the job
Where an RFP response has been successful; lead on all analysis elements for the bid presentation, create bid content and use case studies (only where you are free from client Non-Disclosure Agreements) to show how you have previously delivered what they are asking for and detail how you would approach and satisfy their personal requirements

Farming:

Develop relationships with your clients on every project and act as their trusted advisor
Understand their business; the risks, how they make a profit, what they need to succeed and so on
Identify other opportunities where analysis could help to solve their business problems

Pre-Sales Analysis Workshops

You often only have one chance to make the right impression with a new prospect, even with new faces from existing clients. This adds a lot of pressure; you need to ensure that your workshops are engaging and fill the audience with confidence in your ability to understand, analyse and deliver quality outputs, you don’t want to deter people from buying from your organisation. If you have ever read the book ‘Pitch Anything’ by Oren Klaff, you will understand what I mean by this. You need to hook people into what you are selling, help them to relax enough to let their guard down and clearly demonstrate how your offerings can be used to resolve their issues. You need to do all this while remaining calm, humorous and professional. Sounds easy right? It isn’t necessarily easy for everyone, but solid preparation is the key to successful workshops.

At the end of the workshop, ensure that you have summarised pertinent points from the session and your next steps clearly, try and leave your prospect with something of value and follow up with professional documentation from the session:

Documentation

Any documentation you share externally needs to be of an excellent standard, look professional and be error free, tidy and consistent. This advice applies equally to internal clients but is of paramount importance when you are trying to sell your services externally. The following points act as a checklist for all of us but may be particularly helpful for entry level BAs who are bravely diving into the pre-sales process:

When choosing techniques and models, select the ones that emphasise the points you are trying to make. All models and diagrams should be neatly documented, well-aligned and symmetrical if appropriate. Each diagram should be referenced with a figure number and description.
Adopt an organisational document style with consistent sections, fonts, font sizes, colours, line spacing, headers, footers and page numbering.
Begin the document with a front sheet showing your organisation’s logo and your prospect / client logo.
Provide a Table of Contents that can be auto-updated during the creation of the document. Remember to update one final time just before sharing the document.
Section headers could include: Introduction and background, Engagement details, a problem section which aims to describe the understanding of the problem that you can help with, a solution section, conclusions and recommendations, follow up information, contact details with team names and roles.
Approach cost modelling with caution, you may wish to add costs into full documentation and leave them out of presentation slides so you can choose your moment to touch on this sensitive topic. Always discuss costs with your salespeople to ensure that the right price is quoted for the work and relationship. For example, your organisation may feel it appropriate to offer a discounted rate now in exchange for the possibility of gaining a long-term client.
Clearly thank the reader for their time during the engagement to date and state that you would be delighted to support them further if they wish to proceed.
Make sure your documents are audience appropriate and pitched at the correct level. For example, senior executives are less likely to be interested in exhaustive detail, they are more likely to want an overview of your offering, and similarly, end users will want to delve into the detail and really understand how their lives may be impacted by any proposed changes.
Once you are happy with the document, take the time to finesse it before sending it out for review. Double check the points above and ensure that references to ‘we’ relate to your organisation and references to ‘you’ relate to your sales prospect.
Request proofreading from someone who has no stake in the sales proposal who can concentrate on grammar and spelling. Once revised, schedule peer reviews by a salesperson and / or senior manager who can focus on the content and make sure that the document is in an impressive shape before you share it. You need to impress your managers and fill them with confidence in your consulting skills too!
This advice also applies to any accompanying or attached documents and a top tip is to always open and double check any email attachments prior to pressing send!

Get More Involved In Marketing

As you progress through your BA career you may find yourself in a leadership position. This will naturally involve a greater focus on selling BA services.

You will need to work closely with the marketing team to put together BA offerings and create Go-to-Market strategies. It will help to understand how much money your BA function is currently turning over each year in comparison to targets defined by your CFO. You will need to identify value propositions for your offerings and align them to your identified target markets.

Conclusion

Selling may not be for every BA, but even if you can improve your sales technique a little it has the power to enhance your career exponentially.

It would be a mistake to assume that you don’t need to worry about sales as a commercial BA but ultimately, there is nothing wrong with letting your genius shine through your solid analysis work either. It just helps if you can sell or at least apply some commercial acumen.

The Remote BA

Written by Jenny Quillian on May 6, 2020. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on The Remote BA

The purpose of this article is to offer suggestions to the Business Analysts working remotely from your team and your stakeholders.

This article is an extension to my previous article which encourages the Active BA. With today’s technology and your initiative it is possible to remain a strong and active BA without the face to face engagements which used to dig into requirements and resolve issues.

My key suggestions are below. I encourage readers to add comments below with their own ideas.

Use all the technology available to you.
Be proactive at reaching out to your team and stakeholders.
Enhance your online meetings with online presence and visual aids.

Long distance teams are quite common in today’s IT projects, and there are a number of offerings for team collaboration. Use them all. If the dev team has a Slack channel, then join it and monitor it every day. If the PMs are using Microsoft Teams then sign on and learn that too. You may need to install multiple web and video conferencing tools because one stakeholder group uses Go To Meeting and another uses Amazon Chime. Become proficient in both so that you are a proactive attendee.

Proficiency in communication tools is essential to 1) keep up the flow of ideas, discussions and feedback, and 2) maintain the soft skill of Presence when conducting meetings.

The role of Business Analyst is to provide the bridge between business and technology teams. Much of this occurs during hallway chats and office drop-ins. You pass the PM’s desk and stop to say Hi. They have a small issue that you help with by reaching out to the stakeholder immediately with a quick question. It is essential to replace these informal communications by being comfortable with all tools to the extent you can casually reach out across the ether. Replace the office walk-by with a brief daily update to each of your contacts in whatever mode they are working in. Keep the bridge together by proactively reaching out to teams and stakeholders.

Conducting successful requirements sessions over collaboration tools starts with the same basics as your on-site meetings – Preparation and Presence.

Preparation was covered in my earlier article, The Active BA. The concept applies to on-site and n-line meetings. The soft skill of Presence requires new approaches for on-line meetings.

Rule #1 – use a web camera. Maintaining the illusion of face to face communication is essential to make the remote connection and prevent audience drift. Use the tool function to keep the attendees visible during all screen shares.

Rule #2 – use visual aids as much as possible. Use screen shares with a powerpoint or other visual display to keep focus on today’s agenda and current topic. If the purpose of the meeting is just a daily catch up, then a screen of just faces is fine, but if the purpose of the meeting is to provide deliverables – answers, ideas, input – then do not allow your audience to talk to a blank screen.

Speak with strength when talking to your audience. The screen is now your stage and your role is still “Powerful BA”. Carry the same confidence that you use in a meeting room. If you like to walk the room while presenting in meetings, then get Bluetooth connectors and step back from your desk. Set up a white board in your home office. Practice and film your presentations for play back and review.

If the meeting is a daily stand-up – then feel free to stand up.

One final observation – check the background clutter in your home office or whatever room you are working from. Remove all distracting items. Align the camera to display your certificates and not your personal photos.

5 Business Process Modeling Tips for Digital Transformation

Written by Edmund Metera on March 19, 2020. Posted in Articles.

Business analysts should bring more than an ad-hoc or experience-based business process modeling competence to digital transformation projects. This article will explain why and practically, how.

Many enterprises are on digital transformation journeys.

They are optimizing operating costs, improving capacity, security, scalability, and availability by moving their existing applications onto private or public cloud infrastructures. They are adopting best practices and gaining operational efficiencies by adopting best-of-breed enterprise applications in the cloud. They are integrating technologies like mobility, the internet of things, data analytics and machine learning, robotic process automation, biometrics and more. All in the cloud. This is commonly referred to as digital transformation.

Digital transformation projects differ from process management and regulatory compliance projects. They aim to disrupt by creating new business processes and services rather than improving what exists. They aim to get to market quickly by adopting and integrating existing technologies, systems and services, along with their processes, rather than inventing them. Their business processes are enabled by systems and services that are off-premise, in the cloud.

Disruption – Digital transformation projects typically seek to achieve leapfrog operational improvements rather than incremental ones. They achieve efficiencies and standardization objectives by adopting the processes of already proven, best-of-breed business systems and services. For example, adopting a human resource management system in the cloud will disrupt by altogether abandoning current processes and adopting and standardizing on the best-of-breed processes of the cloud solution.

Pace – Many digital transformation projects have aggressive timelines to deploy their technologies, to keep pace with business competitors or to gain market share. Already-invented and proven software services hosted in the cloud can be subscribed to and deployed relatively quickly. The time and effort spent on deploying business applications may be shortened. The effort shifts to tailoring, integrating, testing integrated components software and adopting change within business operations.

Technology – Technologies such as virtual machines, software as a service, mobile devices, the Internet of Things, biometrics, machine learning and the internet itself are all part of the digital transformation landscape. Virtual servers in the cloud are highly scalable and cost-effective. The range of existing, proven systems and services ready to be subscribed to, adopted and integrated in the cloud continues to grow. The cloud’s systems and services collaborate as a network of event-triggered and outcome-oriented services.

As with other information technology projects, digital transformation projects come with delivery and operational risks. They can have heightened vendor risk, people risk, change management risk, and ultimately business process failure risk. They rely on external vendors’ consultants, or third party consultants who are temporary and outside the direct control of the organization who owns the transformation. The organization’s people who will maintain the newly transformed services when a digital transformation project ends may be left with a knowledge gap in their capability to support the new product or service. The people whose day-to-day operations are affected might not initially be well-enough prepared to use the digitally transformed systems and processes. These can ultimately contribute to business process failure risk. The risk of failure to achieve the expected operational benefits due to poorly designed or executed business processes.

This is why any digital transformation project’s lifecycle may call for a business analyst to prepare conceptual or logical business process models. The models will be used for the same reasons that process models are used in process improvement or regulatory compliance projects: to communicate among the processes’ stakeholders. By communicating the required or designed processes among the digital transformation project’s owners, its suppliers and to people in the organization whose processes are changing

So What?

According to the IIBA, process modeling is one of a business analysts’ competencies. Although most business analysts are good enough communicators and have a well-rounded knowledge of their enterprises’ operations, they only have an ad-hoc or repeatable degree of business process modeling competence. They prepare business process models very infrequently. Some can recollect and repeat the process modeling techniques of their previous process improvement, regulatory compliance or IT projects. If they do, they are used to perceiving business processes as sequential procedures of tasks. There is generally room for improvement.

A business analyst should be able to confidently and efficiently elicit, perceive, model and communicate how a business process or activity is or will be implemented by a digital transformation project. Among their elicitation, subject matter and communication skills, a business analyst should be capable of perceiving any business process or activity as it is or will be implemented in the cloud, as a network of event and message triggered collaborating services.

5 Business Process Modeling Tips for Digital Transformation:

Here are 5 ways to improve your business process modeling competence and become better prepared for producing high-quality business process models that serve digital transformation projects.

1. Come Prepared
2. Get Event and Outcome Oriented
3. Know Your Mission
4. Have Agendas
5. Take Advantage of BPMN

Come Prepared.

Have a defined and proven process modeling competence and tailor it for each digital transformation project.

Start with a defined level of business process modeling competence instead of taking an ad-hoc approach or simply relying on past process improvement or regulatory compliance project experiences. Be able to clearly describe what steps and activities you will take to elicit and document the business process model. Have established elicitation techniques, agendas and modeling patterns that you can use to elicit and model basic business process flows. Be able to predict what modeling steps you will take in developing the business process model. Also, be able to predict what elicitation techniques work well for you. Have clear, concise elicitation agendas. Be prepared to intentionally tailor your approach, elicitation techniques, elicitation agendas and model configuration to the needs of each digital transformation project’s methodology.

Get Event and Outcome Oriented.

Perceive, normalize and define all business processes or activities as event-driven and outcome-oriented services.

Initiating events and expected outcomes are critical to the way that business processes and services collaborate in the cloud. Any business process or activity is a repeatable collection of work activities, initiated by a business event that achieves an expected outcome, for a customer.

Observe and recognize how business events and expected outcomes are implemented as cloud services. For example, you know that whenever you’ve made a credit card purchase online, the credit card authorization service started by receiving a request from an online business process in which you made your purchase. This was its initiating event. Once initiated by that event, the credit card authorization service completed related work tasks, like negotiating with the credit company and a bank. It achieved its expected outcome by sending a response that the payment was accepted or declined. That was the expected outcome and that outcome was consumed by its customer: the site that made the credit card authorization request in the first place.

Use this framework to conceptually and logically frame any business process that you model in a digital transformation project, before spending valuable time and effort eliciting all the other process information that may come up: e.g. who owns it, how it is or will be implemented, what is its service level, how efficient it is, etc.. Not much of all the other logical details matter if the basic framework of the digitized business process or service itself is not well framed: To you, it must have an initiating event and one or more related activities that lead to its expected outcome, for a customer.

Know Your Mission.

Determine the purpose of a business process model in each digital transformation project’s lifecycle.

The scopes, objectives and delivery methodologies of digital transformation projects vary widely. Get clear about what the business process model will be used for, and know who will use it. Determine the tense and the required degree of abstraction that will best suit the model’s intended use. Establish these mission parameters at the start of your elicitation and modeling efforts so that you focus the forthcoming time and modeling efforts on the right types of conceptual or logical refinements for that project and you are in alignment with the mission parameters when you validate your model’s quality.

Have Agendas. It’s not nearly as important to ask a lot of questions as it is to ask the right questions.

Have clear, concise elicitation agendas to elicit basic business process flow and each of the most common logical business process flow refinements. These are the few but key questions you will doggedly elicit the answers to as you are eliciting your process model’s content. Understand why you need to ask and answer those questions. Prepare and communicate your elicitation agenda in advance of engaging key stakeholders in elicitation events like workshops or interviews.

Take Advantage of BPMN.

Take advantage of BPMN to illustrate event and outcome-oriented business process structures and modeling patterns.

Use BPMN’s icons that are specifically intended to illustrate event-driven, outcome-oriented process flows and logical refinements. Use modeling patterns that employ BPMN start events, message flows, intermediate events, and end events, to illustrate modeling patterns such as basic business process flow, external stakeholder interactions, interruptions, delays and exceptions, and expected outcomes.

Know the conceptual and logical process elements and patterns that are relevant to systems in the cloud. Have elicitation agendas and modeling patterns (using BPMN) that you will use to elicit, model and communicate them. Be able to elicit and model the events that start, interrupt, and finish processes and services. Use messages to illustrate collaborations among business processes and services

Establish or Improve Your Process Modeling Competence for Digital Transformation

The Universal Process Modeling Procedure is a step-by-step guide for producing a business process model that will meet its project’s intended purpose. It guides a business analyst or process analyst to establish a clear mission for every process model. It provides you clear elicitation agendas so that you can be asking the right questions at the right times in your model’s development. It tells you what to look for and how to accurately and unambiguously identify, normalise and define any business process and or activity. It includes a validation step with comprehensive and tailorable process model quality criteria. It informs you about key process model stakeholders and how to engage them in the model’s development. It also includes reusable BPMN modeling patterns for the most common types of process model refinements.

Learn more …

About business process modeling competence at www.ProcessModelingAdvisor.com.

Find the book Universal Process Modeling Procedure – The Practical Guide to High Quality Business Process Models Using BPMN at Amazon Books.

The Active BA

Written by Jenny Quillian on January 16, 2020. Posted in Articles.

The purpose of this article is to encourage Business Analysts to be active in your role.

On some teams the BA is a project management support role rather than a leader. While PMs always need our assistance, all projects benefit from having a strong BA with a focus on delivering the business needs. I extend the concept to include proactive and reactive

Be Active. Don’t be a passive member of the project team. Be active in meetings, in proposing ideas, and contributing to the discussions
Be ProActive. Create and present a business analysis plan and BA methodologies to the project team
Be ReActive. Be ready to react quickly when new information, technology or needs are introduced

Be Active

Be active in meetings, in proposing ideas, and contributing to the discussions.

Project meetings can be a lot of fun. The exchange of ideas among technology experts can be uplifting and inspirational. Requirements gathering meetings can also be lively and productive as stakeholders share their knowledge and ideas. But sometimes meeting can be dull and they can be frustrating, especially when participants go off track or monopolize the discussion. Whatever the situation, the active BA is leading or contributing to the discussion. There are two techniques that can help – Preparation and Presence.

Preparation means know your subject.

Within the project team we are the conduit between the technology teams and the business they are supporting. We can bring to the project team an understanding of the user needs and of management’s expectations of how the technology product / output will benefit their organization. It is not necessary to be a Subject Matter Expert in the technology or in the user’s business domain, but you should have sufficient knowledge of both to be an effective liaison between the customer and the development team. Stay current with the technologies of your architecture and your business. Be active in offering your ideas. It is especially important to offer your thoughts in project meetings on requirements that are implied in discussions. Clarify early and often.

The BA Times article Mind Maps for Business Analysis shows how to use the 5W Mind Map to present requirements and anchor team members during project meetings.

Before the first requirements gathering session make sure that you have some understanding of the organization and business of your stakeholders. In large organizations it may be necessary to create your own org chart to place the stakeholders and at least recognize where there may be differing expectations. Talk to a few individuals to get a sense of direction. Think of this as you would a vacation trip to a new country, where research and talking to others who have been there helps get the best out of your days once there.

For all requirements meetings ensure that you have a powerpoint or other visual display to keep focus on today’s agenda and current topic, with an appendix readily at hand of all requirements and decisions previously confirmed. To run a good meeting, be prepared with 1) visual clues and 2) the ability to steer discussion back to the subject of your choice. The latter requires presence.

Presence means having the ability to focus the audience on you and your line of discussion.

There are many tricks and tips for controlling meetings. Agendas, time boxed discussions and parking lots all help, but even with these a facilitator with no Presence can lose an audience.

Entertainers have presence. They move around the stage and engage their audience. Elton John played a piano, but he jumped around that piano to keep the audience eyes on him. When it’s time to focus the audience, stand up and move around as you speak. Use hand movements and point to the presentation as needed. Write comments on the wall boards while you continue the dialog. When you have made your point and want member discussion, sit down and allow the focus to move back to them.

Speak with strength when talking to your audience. I have an accent which goes down well with my local audience, but that alone would not keep their attention if I mumbled. The meeting room is your stage and your role is “Powerful BA”.

Another lesson from the entertainment business is practice. Strong speaking skills can be developed with practice. If your organization has a BA work group, then use this to present a topic to your peers. If you are part of a local IIBA Chapter then volunteer to make a presentation.

Be ProActive

Create and present a business analysis plan and BA methodologies to the project team.

The proactive BA starts with a business analysis plan and BA methodologies, then presents the plan to the project team during a kick off meeting so that they understand and support it. The plan should include roles and responsibilities with regard to requirements analysis, In a great project team, and especially in scrum teams, there is a degree of this analysis conducted by technical members. The business analysis plan will set boundaries for the team to understand who is responsible for getting requirements to a level of specificity so that can be ingested by the developers.

The BA operates in a continuous change environment, so continuous learning is an essential part of the Active BA career. Learning should include development of BA skills as well as staying current with technology. One of my recent projects was migrating apps to AWS cloud, so I spent time learning the vocabulary and cloud concepts to increase my effectiveness in the team. See BA Times article Add BA value to your AWS cloud Project.

Be ReActive

The third branch of the active BA is to be reactive to change. Be prepared and act quickly when new information, technology, or needs are introduced. Reaction times are faster for the active BA with preparation and continuous learning in place, and the ability to ignore sunk costs.

Sunk Costs is an Economic principle that costs already incurred have no part in decisions on future expenditure. For a BA this means that time and effort spent to date sometimes have to be wiped out when requirements change mid-project. Forget the hours spent defining the module that will now be outsourced. Let Finance worry about the dollars and cents of wasted time. The BA should immediately pivot to new requirements and how this change affects existing requirements.

The same assessment applies to the backlog and deliverables on Agile projects, but with regular adjustments from sprint feedback, and strategy changes can still occur during a delivery phase that wipe out existing work. An Agile BA is Active, Proactive and Reactive.

Stop Saying Soft Skills

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

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

Now there is: Core Skills.

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

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

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

Consider these two statements:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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