Tag: Leadership

Women Have a Sixth Sense, Men Are Oblivious

Written by Kupe Kupersmith on May 21, 2013. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Women Have a Sixth Sense, Men Are Oblivious

I am a man, so I am completely qualified to say that men are oblivious. This is first demonstrated at a young age. Men, think back to when you were playing in the school yard and girls were chasing you. You had no clue the girl or girls chasing you liked you. I just witnessed this with my 10-year-old son. It was clear his classmate liked him and he was clueless. For men who have not embraced this quality, please do. That’s all I have to say about men. You all know what I am talking about.

On the other hand, women have a sixth sense. I am not a woman nor do I play one on TV. I do, however, have enough interactions with women that give me the ability to make this declaration. Many, if not all, women have an uncanny ability to read between the lines. Someone says something and they know the true meaning of the comments. Women can read an email and pick up on the subtle meaning of the sentences. Just as men are oblivious and can’t do anything about it, women too cannot control this trait. Someone says something, and they have this mental database of everything ever said by and about this person and form a hunch. The good thing is women are so in tune with your stakeholders and pick up on the smallest verbal inflections and non-verbal cues. (You may not have to read my last blog post.) The bad thing is that there are no clear facts to support their hunch. So sometimes a hunch or assumption is valid; sometimes it is wrong.

This is not to say men don’t pick up on cues or don’t have hunches and make assumptions. We are just genetically disposed to assume it has nothing to do with us. A few weeks ago I said something to a female friend and went on my merry way. The weekend came and went. On Wednesday of the following week we were having a conversation, and she apologized for being mad at me. Mad at me?! I could tell she was not happy, maybe even mad… just not mad at ME. I had no clue: oblivious. It turns out her reading between the lines was slightly off, and she made an assumption and ran with it. In this case her running was away from me because she was pissed.

In your communication with stakeholders, you need both of these traits. Sometimes you need to read between the lines and make assumptions. Other times you need the comfort of being oblivious and ask questions that many don’t ask because they assume they know the answer or assume they should know the answer and don’t want to look dumb.
Men, you need to focus on the subtle cues made by your stakeholders. You need to see when a stakeholder is frustrated, concerned, or not engaged with the project as needed. You then have to validate your assumption and actually consider how it is related to you or your team.

Women, keep it up and form those hunches. Just make sure you validate them and don’t assume a hunch is always accurate. Men have it a little easier—everyone knows we are oblivious. So, when a man asks, “Help me understand something” or “I’m not sure we are all on the same page” no one is surprised.

The situation where the benefit of obliviousness and a sixth sense comes in is when there is an “elephant in the room”. The elephant in the room is a problem that everyone knows is there but no one wants to acknowledge. As a leader on your team you need to expose and address the elephant. To even see there is an elephant in the room, you have to be in tune with your team or situation. But it’s not enough to stop there and assume that someone higher up the food chain will bring it up if it needs to be addressed. I don’t care where you are on the corporate food chain, you are a leader. It is your job to expose the elephant so it will be acknowledged and addressed. Here’s the thing, if you do nothing with the elephant you are viewed in one of two ways: You are really oblivious and don’t even know the elephant is there—not good. Or, you are viewed as too cowardly to address the situation—again, not good.

Be the best you can be by having the right level of obliviousness and a sixth sense.

All the best,

Kupe

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The BA Practice Lead Handbook 4 – So You Want to be a BA Practice Lead? Are You Ready?

Written by Kathleen B. Hass, PMP on February 26, 2013. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on The BA Practice Lead Handbook 4 – So You Want to be a BA Practice Lead? Are You Ready?

In previous articles in this series, we have discussed the need for mature Business Analysis practices, what value key stakeholders can expect from BA, and the need for a holistic approach to implementation of Business Analysis. In this article, we discuss how you as BA Practice Lead/BA Manager can ensure you are ready to lead the effort to implement and sustain a BA Practice.

Diagnose your Leadership Capability

Building a new business process such as Business Analysis is a challenging endeavor. Your initial challenge is to gain executive sponsorship and organizational alignment up front. Do you have the power and influence skills to take a comprehensive view that is aligned with your environment and decision-making practices?

Your Power and Influence

According to D. Bell, author, educator, social media producer: business + politics = power. Make no mistake: organizational politics will influence your BA practice in multiple ways. Politics are defined as the collection of internal structures of an organization that deal with power, influence, and decision making. We all say we hate politics because it is often a negative influence in our lives. Actually, politics is neither good nor bad, it just is. Think of positive politics, positive power and influence. Things happen when politics works. Decisions are made. Projects move forward. Deals are cut. Goals are met. How can that be bad? Your power is directly related to how well you negotiate the politics of your organization.

The positive politician uses influence rather than authority or manipulation to achieve tasks or goals. Your ability to act as a positive politician will result in beneficial results for your team, for your organization, and ultimately for you. As a positive politician, start from a solid foundation from which to influence including: status, reputation, credibility, trust, integrity, consistency, knowledge. Business analysts possessing these characteristics emerge as leaders. People want to follow natural leaders.

Devise strategies to negotiate your organization’s politics by building your influence capabilities. Capture the strategies and tasks to achieve the strategies in your Political Management Plan. Your plan might be a simple table like the one below. Strategies may include:

Enlist the help of an executive sponsor
Organize and chair your steering committees
Make yourself an expert, increase your credibility
Promote yourself and Business Analysis
Manage BA benefits (ROI)
Manage virtual alliances
Facilitate, negotiate, and build consensus
Manage conflict
Facilitate consensus and confront issues head on

Your network

To build a positive network of supporters within your organization, identify your customers and stakeholders that: provide budget to your BA practice implementation project, provide oversight, provide requirements, provide input, get output, depend on your deliverables, benefit from your BA Practice success, and/or suffer from its success. For each key customer/stakeholder, capture the following information:

Role
Awareness
Opinion
Importance
Current level of support
Level of support needed
Identify the issues and concerns regarding the BA Practice that are important to each stakeholder
o What’s in it for them?
o What do they need to view the BA Practice positively and actively support it?
What actions will you take to increase the support of your most important stakeholders?
Devise strategies to negotiate your organization’s politics by building and sustaining a strong supportive stakeholder network. Capture the strategies and tasks to achieve the strategies in your Political Management Plan. It might look something like the simple table below.
Devise your strategies to lessen the impact of those who may negatively influence your BA Practice and leverage those who are positive about you and Business Analysis.

Assess the Environment

Lastly, identify organizational and cultural risks to your success, and devise strategies to manage the risks. Update your Political Management Plan accordingly.

Assess the landscape…

Environmental/organizational issues that are constantly at play
The amount of change the organization is undergoing
Political games/maneuvers that are underway; power bases and power struggles
Recent leadership changes and those that are anticipated

…and How Business Analysis fits

Is the business case for your project and/or for a BA Practice solid?
Is implementation politically sensitive?
Are there major political implications?
Is there impact to the core mission?
Do you have a strong executive sponsor?
What are the unspoken expectations?
What is the decision-making process?
What are the cultural norms?
Is the communication and coordination effort challenging?

How can Consultants help?

If they have been where you are, bring in consultants to:

Help assess organizational readiness and support
Review your plans
Do a risk assessment
Coach you through the process
Gain approval and consensus on the way forward
Form a guidance team/steering committee to involve upper management in the effort

Putting it all Together

So what does this mean for the Business Analyst?

If you are trying to implement BA best practices, methodologies, frameworks, and enabling technologies on your project, good for you! The influence capabilities described in this article apply to you as well as to your

BA Practice Lead. Work with the key leaders on your project to examine your collective power and influence, and the landscape within which you are operating, and develop a Political Management Plan.

So what does this mean for the BA Practice Lead?

This article presents the case for a BA Practice Lead to examine political implications including your influence, power, support, and environmental issues. Diagnose your political strengths and gaps. You need strong influence skills to get people to want to support your effort. Develop a Political Management Plan to increase your ability to negotiate the organizational politics and your personal power and influence to achieve your goals.

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The BA Practice Lead Handbook 3 – So You Want To Be a BA Practice Lead? OMG: What Have You Gotten Yourself Into?

Written by Kathleen B. Hass, PMP on February 5, 2013. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on The BA Practice Lead Handbook 3 – So You Want To Be a BA Practice Lead? OMG: What Have You Gotten Yourself Into?

In the previous articles, we discussed the reasons Business Analysis (BA) is emerging as a critical business process, and the value of Enterprise BAs. However, organizations are experiencing lots of challenges attempting to implement an effective BA Practice. In this article, we will examine some of the fundamental building blocks that will enable you to be successful in creating and sustaining a mature BA Practice.

Is Your Organization Ready?

For decades businesses that are dependent on complex projects for their success have been challenged to deliver. They primarily focused on requirements for IT solutions and managing (aka, limiting) changes to those requirements, (mostly thought of as scope creep). Finally, the relatively new discipline of Business Analysis changes the project focus from IT to the business. After all is said and done, it is about the business value brought about by new IT solutions, not about the technology.

While there are some world-class BA Practices in existence, far too many attempts to implement a Business Analysis Practice have been only marginally successful. Too often the improvements to BA have been driven exclusively from the bottom up. While support is needed from all levels of the organization, grassroots efforts tend to be project specific, and disappear gradually as project teams are disbanded.

BA Practice Implementation and Sustainability

To implement and institutionalize an enterprise-wide BA Practice, the business value that is promised from a mature BA Practice needs to be fully understood across the organization, and BA benefits need to be continually demonstrated through measurement and communication programs. Leadership and sponsorship of the effort should emanate from the top of the organization, and flow down to all levels. A holistic and methodical implementation approach and framework is essential for success and sustainability. Mature BA Practices have several components: a capable BA team, organizational support, executive leadership and sponsorship, and an implementation and sustainability framework.

Typically, a BA Practice is supported by a number of integrated elements that comprise a holistic framework. To deal with the significant amount of change required by all project stakeholders, the BA Practice implementation should be managed in phases. The value of the BA Practice needs to be demonstrated and communicated during every phase.

Initial Readiness Phase

Answers the question, “Is our organization ready?”

Business Case
Executive Sponsor
Steering Committee

Subsequent Implementation Phase

Answers the question, “How do we build the BA Practice?”

The BA Center of Excellence (BACOE)
Capable BA Team
BA Practice Standards

Ongoing Sustainability Phase

Answers the question, “How do we institutionalize and continue to improve BA practices?”

Maturity and Capability Assessments and Continuous Improvements
Measurement and Communication Programs

The BA Practice Framework

A brief description of the elements of the framework is provided below. Future articles will explore each element in detail.

The Business Case for a mature BA Practice

There are many elements that must be in place for you to declare your readiness to begin to implement a BA Practice. As we discussed in the previous article in this series, (Why Business Analysis? What’s in it for me?)

The most important tool in the Business Analysts’ arsenal is the Business Case. The life of every important change initiative begins and ends with a Business Case. Unless a change initiative (project) results in business benefits in terms of value to the customer and/or wealth to the bottom line, it is a failed venture – even if it is delivered on time and on budget. It is in the Business Case that the expected costs and business benefits are outlined. Without it, you are engaged in steering a rudderless vessel. Yet, in far too many projects, a Business Case does not exist. If it does exist, it is often unconvincing and used only to get funding for a project. The value of the Business Analyst is realized through execution and management of the Business Case….

Implementation of a new business process such as Business Analysis is a major change initiative. You will not get the organizational support you need unless you have a convincing Business Case. So, your first phase of the project is to engage a small but influential team of business and technical experts to work with you to build the Business Case for a Business Analysis Practice. It is imperative that you do not build the Business Case in isolation. Involving experts who are important leaders in the organization is critical. By involving experts, you will be building your team of high-level supporters.

You need to lead the group of experts to develop what is often referred to as a “Brilliant Business Case”. This is essentially an R&D, creative endeavor. The effort requires adequate time, a skilled facilitator (the BA Practice Lead), a strategic focus, and creative expert resources. The effort needs to be driven by you. The Business Case is owned by the BA Practice Lead; that is to say she authors and maintains the Business Case in collaboration with business and technology thought leaders. And subsequently, she must report against the cost and benefit projections contained in the Business Case. Be sure to capture the names and titles of the experts engaged to create the Business Case. This lends reliability and credibility to the proposal. If you would like to see a sample or rough draft of a Business Case to create an effective Business Analysis Practice, please send an email to [email protected].

The Executive Sponsor

Once you have developed the Business Case to implement a BA Practice, you should enlist an Executive Sponsor to guide the effort, to own the budget for the BA Practice, and to commit to the cost and benefit projections. Usually, the executive sponsor is a very senior-level executive, such as the CIO or CSO (Chief Strategy Officer).

The Executive Steering Committee

It is ideal to secure the approval of the experts who helped build the Business Case to serve on a BA Practice Steering Committee. The Steering Committee, facilitated by the BA Practice Lead and chaired by the Executive Sponsor, will provide political cover, decision support, budget, and legitimacy to the BA Practice initiative.

The BA Center of Excellence

The BA Practice needs a home, a department that is accountable and responsible for building and sustaining an effective BA Practice. This center should be small (too large is deadly), and is authorized to manage the BA team, the business case process, organizational BA standards and frameworks, methods, training, tools, templates, techniques and BA metrics and communication.

Capable BA Team

Today, BAs are mostly project focused, creating and managing requirement artifacts. However, to become a valuable corporate asset, BAs need to become strategically focused, concentrating on innovative solutions to complex business problems.

BA Practice Standards

In days gone by, we always followed the maxim, process first, then tools. The good news is that BA tools have grown up. Good BA standards are now embedded in integrated requirements management tools. So the tool helps educate BAs on the best practices, integrate and manage the requirements knowledge and artifacts, and helps forward engineer information into BA artifacts.

The bad news is most BAs still use desk top tools that are difficult to maintain and are disintegrated. As a result, the BA is burdened with creating, maintaining, integrating, and synchronizing all of the business strategies, goals, models, documents, matrices, use cases, user stories, test cases, etc. Adopt sophisticated tools to maintain reusable requirement artifacts, impose standards and enable education.

Maturity and Capability Assessments and Continuous Improvements

It is often said: we don’t need to do a maturity assessment, because we know our capabilities are immature. The problem is, just knowing your capabilities are immature is not actionable. Assessments provide useful information about strengths, and gaps that need immediate improvement to grow to the next level of maturity. Assessments shed light on exactly where you are, provide a step-by-step improvement roadmap, and facilitate continuous improvements based on proven maturity models.

Measurement and Communication Programs

Measurement and communication are key components of any change initiative. Make no mistake; implementing a mature BA Practice is no small endeavor. The effort is fraught with challenges. Targeted communications tailored to the needs of each stakeholder group is essential. The messages need to demonstrate the real business value brought about by improvement BA practices.

Putting it all Together

So what does this mean for the Business Analyst?

If you are trying to implement BA best practices, methodologies, frameworks, and enabling technologies on your project, good for you! Don’t get discouraged by realizing these may die on the vine when your project is completed. Collaborate with others outside of your project to expand your reach and build lasting momentum.

So what does this mean for the BA Practice Lead?

This article presents the case for a BA framework to implement an enterprise-wide mature BA Practice that is strategically focused. In the next article, we will focus on you, the BA Practice Lead: are you ready?

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Want to Improve? Don’t Make Resolutions. Play Games and Keep Score!

Written by Steve Blais on January 29, 2013. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Want to Improve? Don’t Make Resolutions. Play Games and Keep Score!

It’s the New Year. And everybody decides to start a new year with resolutions, resolving to change their behavior for the better. They are going to lose weight and exercise more. They’re going to spend more time with their family, instead of work; they’re going to read more and watch less television; and so forth. And as we find every year: we just can’t keep to our resolutions. Here’s an idea to help you achieve the behavior you would like: instead of making resolutions, play games and keep score.

Playing the Game

Last year I had a couple of engagements in Phoenix, Arizona with the same company at the end of June and early July and talked to two different groups of business analysts, software developers, testers, and so forth. In the first session, a young man asked how he could become “spontaneous”. I asked what that meant, and he said that he wanted to be able to contribute in meetings and gatherings instead of remaining quiet and in the background. He wanted to be able to give voice to his thoughts and opinions. In the second meeting, a young fellow asked how he could become less “shy” in business settings. What they wanted was some kind of magic phrase from me or timeless advice that would change their perspective and suddenly make them more loquacious and outgoing. Unfortunately I didn’t have such a magic phrase.

What I did have was a program of practice. I thought up a game they could play that would do the trick painlessly. I suggested that they make a commitment to making one statement and asking one question in each meeting they attend. Any question and any statement would be acceptable. A question such as “would you mind repeating that, I didn’t hear you?”, and a statement such as “I agree with that” would be allowed. I told them to create a spreadsheet, and keep score of the number of times they made a statement and asked the question in a meeting. The spreadsheet is for keeping score: the Rows would be the meetings and the columns would say how many questions they asked and how many statements they made. “Do this for about three months,” I told each of them, “and if you find that you are routinely meeting your quota of questions and statements, increase your quota”.

Why it Works

The magic of this particular game is twofold. First of all, of course, they would overcome their fear of speaking in front of a group and give them the mindset that what they have to say is just as important and interesting as what anyone else has to say. The second bit of magic is that over time, there will be natural positive feedback from others in the groups or meetings. People might say “yes, I’m glad you asked that; I didn’t hear either”, or “thank you for agreeing with me”. Even a nod or smile will serve as positive feedback and help overcome the fear (the fear that is based on rejection or disapproval from others) so that the game player will be encouraged to do more.

One of the fellows, the second one, wrote me an email in August telling me that it was working. He found it much easier and comfortable even to talk in front of a group of people and he mentioned anecdotally that it gave him confidence he didn’t know he had which was helping in other aspects of his life as well.

The reason this game works is misdirection. Your focus in the game is not on learning how to talk in crowds or overcoming fears; your focus is on getting your quota per meeting. As you look at your spreadsheet and see zeros you will resolve to eliminate those zeros in the next meetings simply to win the game. It becomes more of a scorekeeping exercise than a behavior modification exercise. Can I go for three months coming up with at least one thing to say and one question asked in each meeting, business or social? Without being aware of it, you will find that whatever the behavior you wish to change – whether it is to add a new behavior, alter an existing behavior, or remove a behavior you’d rather do without – will be changed and new habits developed. And usually, you won’t even know it happened until you look back at where you were when you started the game.

Another Good Example

Late last year a fellow down in Austin, Texas, by the name of Jia Jiang, decided to overcome his fear of rejection and his emotional and even physical reaction to rejection. He decided to play a game in which every day he would purposefully make a request of someone for something which he knew would be rejected once a day for one hundred days. He videotaped each encounter. He asked an editor at Bloomberg BusinessWeek if he could write articles for the magazine even though he had no experience; he asked a professor at the University of Texas in Austin if he could teach one of the professor’s classes; he asked the flight attendant on a Southwest Airline flight if he could give the preflight safety announcements; he asked a Domino’s employee if he could deliver pizzas. He asked a stranger to lend him $100, and another stranger online for a Black Friday sales event if he could cut in front of him. He received negative responses in all cases. In the beginning it was difficult, even when he knew he was going to be told, “No”. As he proceeded through his hundred days, he found it becoming easier and easier to accept rejection. And as usually happens with games of this type, when the targeted specific behavior changes other behaviors also change. In the case of Jia, he found that he was more able to ask for even preposterous things. His confidence increased to such a degree that an increasing number of requests toward the end of his hundred days, the person being asked did not say “No”.

How it’s done

So what does that mean to you? As with anything a business analyst does, you first understand the as-is situation which means an honest self-appraisal and self-assessment. You may not need one, but it’s good to do one anyway. You can do this in a number of different ways. The least painful is to identify people that you would wish to emulate, people you admire –people who are alive now, people who have lived sometime in history, people you know, people you don’t know, even fictitious people. Then identify the characteristics of those people that you admire. For example, if you want to be a better business analyst look around to those who seem in your eyes to have it together as a business analyst: people in your organization, people in your professional groups, people you know only online or through conferences. Define why you think they are a top business analyst. (Note that there is no finite definition of a top business analyst. What we are talking about is what you think the characteristics of a top business analyst are).

Once you have determined those characteristics that you find admirable and that you wish to emulate, make a list of them, prioritize them and pick one, just one, of the characteristics, or behaviors. Then make a game of challenging yourself to do something that will overcome whatever obstacle you have to achieving that behavior or characteristic. Set a timetable for performing the game and the important thing is to keep score. Without the scorekeeping and the daily revisiting of the score pad to update the score, the behavior modification becomes a simple matter of willpower and that does not always work. Keeping score gives us a constant reminder and places us in a competitive situation and that will provide the motivation to keep you true to your goal.

The Hard Part

The hard part isn’t really doing the assessment, although some will people find it difficult, and the hard part isn’t really deciding on which characteristic of behavior you would like to adopt. In the end it really makes no difference because when you have adopted one behavior you go back to the list and pick the next one until you are satisfied that you are a top business analyst or whatever you want to be. The hard part is coming up with a relatively nonintrusive, challenging, and achievable game for which you can keep score. But there usually is at least one game for every behavior you would like to modify. To back up that statement I will offer the following: if you determine behavior you want to change and cannot come up with a game to play, drop me a line and likely I can give you one. And I’d love to hear about your successes.

So play the game, keep the score, change your behaviors without pain, and as the U S military outfit says, in 2013, “be the best you can be”.

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Innovation and Business Analysis

Written by David Morris on January 22, 2013. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on Innovation and Business Analysis

How can I use the concepts of ‘innovation’ and ‘business analysis’ in the same phrase?

While, to some, this might sound oxymoronic (like the term ‘deafening silence’), or at least moronic (and those who know me would expect nothing less); I would argue that innovation contributes to business analysis, and business analysis contributes to innovation.

What does this mean and how do we make it happen?

We don’t need to be innovative, though, do we?
Business analysis practitioners can provide an excellent service as we work through the project process, asking questions, applying techniques, creating documents and presentations, and clarifying how to implement the approved solution. Like any discipline involved in business change, done well, business analysis can make the difference between a successful and a struggling project.

Where we can add real value, is in providing creative analysis – enabling stakeholders to think outside the box, encouraging them to behave like their project was their own business so that they care about the outcomes, and providing thought leadership from the project space to the organisation.

How innovation contributes to effective business analysis
An essential purpose of business analysis is to “recommend solutions that enable the organisation to achieve its goals” (p3, BABOK v2, 2009). Sometimes this will involve helping organisations to ‘invent’ something new, although more often it will be to ‘innovate’ – to improve something already in use.

However, with business analysis typically practiced within the confines of a project, under the direction of a project manager, we risk adopting convergent thinking approaches. By following the ‘correct’ process to document requirements for sign-off, we can be seen to add little value in the process – that is, we become a requirements clerk gathering requirements.

Of course, we are more effective where we plan and manage our own business analysis activities, identifying the stakeholders and negotiating the scope, so that we can elicit, analyse, document, and communicate what is needed.

We add even more value where we apply divergent thinking too; this is where innovation is key to business analysis.

What does this mean? We need to push our stakeholders outside their comfort zones, to think laterally, to challenge them beyond an assumed solution and find out why they want something – so that we can be clear about what they really need and guide them to selecting the optimum solution, not just the one they first thought of; that is, let’s not make a bad process faster, let’s design the right process and work out how that needs to be supported.

How do we do this? At its simplest, this requires two things: to develop our underlying competencies (in areas like creative thinking, problem solving, and facilitation), and to have the courage to push back (suggesting that there could be alternative solutions, challenging to ensure that the underlying causes or needs are identified).

How business analysis contributes to effective innovation
Business analysis also has much to offer to how an organisation approaches its innovation processes, that is, well before there is a project.

Innovation in the pre-project stage
Most organisations will go through some form of scoping and business case stage before a project is initiated. While this is often undertaken by a project manager; mature organisations and PMOs recognise that it is a better fit for the BA to build the case for a project, or at least support the business owner in doing that. (Indeed, some would argue that you cannot assign a project manager until you have a project to manage, however there is always business to analyse).

Now, you might contend that building a business case is not showing innovation, it is simply taking the information that is available then researching and analysing it enough to understand the likely costs, revenue, duration, return on investment, risks, etc.

However, to develop a strong business case, we are required to explore alternatives, and can often uncover unexpected options or combinations that were not in the mind of the customer or requestor. More examples of divergent thinking.

How do we do this? If BAs in your organisation do not currently work at this level, find a small project that cannot yet proceed because it needs a business case, then volunteer to ‘have a go’. Even if it still doesn’t get the go ahead, you can learn from the experience and interact with stakeholders in a slightly different role.

Innovation in ideation
Further upstream (in the new product development process), before an idea has even been approved to be scoped and have a business case developed, business owners are busy working with sales performance data, customer satisfaction feedback, market research, and blue-sky thinking – divining answers that will result in a new or improved product, give a jolt to sales, or eventually withdraw a product from the market.

Equipped with our divergent, lateral-thinking, and facilitation skills, we can really enable an organisation to make the most of smaller investments to determine if an idea makes sense, before anyone even thinks of writing a business case. Working at this fuzzy front-end is also very rewarding; as well as being very focused on good business outcomes, you definitely get a sense of play, and interact with senior management.

How do we do this? Opportunities for these sorts of roles are rare, and are often promoted internally rather than advertised. The best way to attract these is to be seen to perform well in the pre-project space, and if there are ever any moves to revise the solution delivery lifecycle, governance, and/or new product development process, volunteer to be involved – from there you can agitate for a role like this and position yourself as the ideal candidate.

Conclusion
I’ve shown that irrespective of where we work in an organisation, and the development process stage, business analysis has much to offer in terms of helping foster innovation in our organisations. Do you agree?

I’ve said it’s rare for us to work outside the project space. Is this your experience?

What steps can we take to convince our organisations to allow us to play in this more creative space?

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.