Tag: Learning

Failing for Success

Written by Bob Prentiss on May 18, 2016. Posted in Articles.

Failing never feels good because, well, it feels like failure. Nobody wants to fail. We are driven to be number 1, top dog and the big winner. Nobody has ever said, “Wow! That’s awesome! You failed!” The black and white checkered flag falls, and the winner is ordained. The fear of failure is so strong and painful that it’s amazing how far we will go to avoid it. Fleeing, running, hiding, or avoiding it all together.

We put ourselves into a make-believe world where no mistakes can be made, and we overwork ourselves to the point of exhaustion all in the name of ‘not failing.’ We keep ourselves deluded in the belief that failure isn’t an option, and we are at a loss on how to handle failure.

Being fearful of failure, we create elaborate plans to avoid it but it happens anyway. Systems, processes and people just don’t operate with 100% accuracy. If everything ran perfectly every time, we certainly wouldn’t need a helpdesk or second level support.

But failure isn’t as evil as we make it out to be. How did you learn to walk? You certainly just didn’t jump to your feet and start running a marathon. It took lots of trial and error to learn how to put one foot in front of the other to propel yourself forward. Even crawling took some trial and error! After we get on our feet, we forget that in order to get there, we fell, toppled, and wobbled our way to success. There wasn’t a surefire way to learn to walk. We had to fail in order to learn.

Experimental learning has taught us that failure is the best way to learn. Remember back to the days you first started to learn something new like riding a bike. You didn’t do it perfectly the first time and probably fell a few times. Someone was there to pick you up off the ground and put you back on the bike. You learned by failure – that leaning too far one way or another will cause you to fall off the bike.

The last thing I learned was my home thermostat. It connects to the internet and allows me to control the temperature and fan from anywhere. After successfully setting up the thermostat, I started to play around with it. I failed multiple times trying to figure out some of the features. At one point I simply wiped it clean and started over. In learning how to fix the things, I also figured out some cool new ways I could save energy and use it better. I experimented, failed, and learned.

An interesting experiment was performed by Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz a few years ago for the book “Fail Fast, Fail Often”. This experiment was simple. A group of students was divided into 2 groups. The first group was told, “You have 90 days to create was many clay pots as you can.” This first group or “Volume Group” was told to focus on volume and forget about quality. The other group was told, “You need to make one perfect clay pot.” The second group was the “Quality Group” and was focused entirely on quality and avoided any kind of volume. Both teams were told they were in a contest to see who could make the best looking and functional clay pot.

You would expect that the group focused entirely on the quality of clay pot would have the most well-designed pot because they were entirely focused on the design. Since the volume group was focused so heavily on just making pot after pot, odds are none of their pots would be that well designed.

At the end of the 90 days, both teams put all their pots out for judgment by a panel of clay pot artists and experts. I’m don’t know who these people are, but I will say they have one incredible niche job for judging just clay pottery. Can you even make money at that?

The surprising result was that the volume team that just made as many clay pots as they could won the competition. How is that even possible? Why did volume win out over quality?

The quality team has so focused on quality and creating the perfect design that they didn’t take any time to experiment or play with the clay. The volume team, on the other hand, interacted with the clay constantly. The first few clay pots produced by the volume team were damn ugly, but they continued to play and experiment. The volume team while trying to achieve a greater volume of clay pots actually learned more about creating clay pots and were more comfortable with the clay. So even though the volume team had a lot of failures, they succeeded and won.

Failure can make you stronger and more agile if you choose to learn from it. “That didn’t work – let’s try something different” attitude. This is the whole concept around failing fast. The faster you fail, the more you learn from that failure. Don’t fail just once, fail multiple times.

Failing safe is about creating an environment where experimentation and learning do not cause injury to yourself or your organization. Like in the experiment, an environment needs to be created in which experimentation can occur with wild abandon safely. No one was harmed in the making of clay pottery.

In the technology world, we use the term “prototyping”. Many prototyping situations in technology are severely limited. The environment is too confined or restrained for experimentation, and often very few failures occur to learn from. A better safe environment in on that this not restricted and open for experimentation.

Playing and changing everything in a production environment where your customer experiences your experiments has a tendency to make your customers unhappy. Build an environment where you can play without consequence. You may have to start over from scratch and rebuild the environment after a wild night of experimentation. Plan on creating a way to rebuild your safe environment quickly so that experimentation isn’t slowed down.

Create other safe and soft landing environments where you can bounce your ideas of others. Maybe your environment isn’t about a physical space or system but a room filled with flip charts and whiteboards.

Pulling together a group of colleagues to idea share, collaborate and innovate creates a safe environment as long as ground rules and expectations are set ahead of time. Set the expectations that experimenting and innovating is the goal. The more ideas, the better. We are not driving for perfection. It’s like a brainstorming meeting on steroids. Encourage crazy ideas and actually try it out. There are no judgments and the wildest crazy ideas are always welcomed.

Another tactic is to experiment with screen or report design by having multiple variations mocked up. The key is not just to focus on one mockup but to have many mockups. This allows the group to “riff” off each other by taking elements of different mockups and combining them together in new exciting ways.

One of my favorite tactics is user experience development and testing space. User experience folks will tell you it’s a preferred tactic to have users just play with your interface (screen or report) and watch how they use it. Gather a group and invite them to play or experiment with a design. The designers in the room are silently watching actual users interact with their design. The designers learn from watching the group play and experiment with the design. Designers then change the interface based on their observations. Rinse and repeat. One session is usually not enough. They key here is not to tell the user how to use the interface but to let them play and experiment freely in a safe environment.

A badass professional can open themselves up to new experiences so they can learn. They understand that failure can happen and work to create safe environments in which to play and experiment. Our culture needs to change the way we see failure. We must start seeing failure as an opportunity to innovate and not as something bad.

To succeed without learning is a failure. There are many instances in my life where I have executed a task perfectly the first time only to fail the second time miserably. Beginners luck can be a curse because you miss the opportunity to learn from failure. Only through failing do we truly learn.

A badass professional is reflective in their failure but not to the point of obsession. Look back and determine if there was a lesson to be learned. What went well? What didn’t go so well? What still baffles me? What if I did something different instead? Then get up off the warm fuzzy safe pillow in your safe environment and try it again. Remember you didn’t learn to walk without falling first.

Take the example of switching jobs. You prepare that killer resume and get in the door for an interview. You did your homework on the company and prepared yourself for the usual interview questions. It seems like everything went well but you didn’t get the job. Learning from failure requires being reflective or thinking about it. This shouldn’t be an all-day marathon conversation going around in your head. Jot down a few things you thought you could do better. Follow-up and get some feedback from the interviewer if you can or a colleague on interviewing better. You failed to get the job, but you succeeded in learning how to do it better next time.

Let’s build a strategy together on how to help your organization fail in a safely and fail faster so they can learn and drive innovative new solutions and approaches.

5 Things the Legendary Musician and Artist Prince Can Teach Us

Written by Angela Wick on May 2, 2016. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on 5 Things the Legendary Musician and Artist Prince Can Teach Us

When I sat down in a Canadian hotel room to write this article for BATimes, I had a completely different topic in mind—a rant about the length of TSA pre-check lines and how bad processes make life miserable for users. But as I was writing, I became more and more distracted by the news of Prince’s death. Social media started blowing up with Prince memories, pictures of buildings and monuments bathed in purple lights, and videos of spontaneous tribute parties in front of Prince’s Paisley Park headquarters and First Ave, one of Prince’s favorite clubs in Minneapolis.

As a legendary musician and artist, Prince influenced my life in many ways.

Minneapolis is my hometown, and it’s where Prince grew up and lived most of his life. When I was a kid, purple was my favorite color. Raspberry Beret was like a theme song for recess in elementary school—I sang it non-stop with friends on the playground. Purple Rain was one of the first movies I saw in a theater, and I grew up wondering what 1999 would be like.

It may seem like a stretch to use Prince’s approach to music and life as a metaphor for business analysis, but creative genius is universal and can inform our approach to all areas of life, including project work.

So, in tribute to Prince, here are five things BAs (and all people?) can learn from Prince’s legacy.

1) Be unique in expressing your talent, blaze a trail!

Prince blazed a trail of creativity and innovation. He released 39 albums in his 37-year career and is rumored to have several hundred additional songs in his Paisley Park vault. At the same time, he lived in Minnesota, not California. He didn’t swear. He wore heels. He was often seen riding a bicycle through his neighborhood and enjoyed ping-pong.

What would the BA equivalent of this career path look like? How could BAs use their analytical, creative, empathetic, and relationship-oriented talents to generate volumes of innovative work in an authentic way?

We have this awesome role we provide to organizations that can be uniquely executed and performed in our own individual style and personality with success! Embrace it, go with it! Know your mission as a BA and live it!

2) Unleash creativity.

Prince was a master of unleashing creativity in himself and others. He was passionate about collaborating with others to discover new sounds and create new music.

As BAs, we are called to model creativity in our approach and to inspire others to be creative as well. Creativity takes many forms in our work including:

Building strong relationships with stakeholders.
Identifying and applying the right technique to elicit effective requirements.
Utilizing techniques that create a collaborative culture that encourages good dialogue from all perspectives.
Using advanced facilitation skills to help others find innovative solutions to problems.
Mastering analysis techniques that help others make good decisions.

3) Create for everyone!

Just as Prince’s music resonated with multiple types of audiences, so should our requirements. Our work as BAs requires us to create and facilitate for multiple audiences and diverse stakeholders. We are masters of catering to multiple audiences:

introverts and extroverts
technical and non-technical
leaders and subject matter experts

4) Surrender to your art.

The sheer volume and variety of work Prince produced indicates an all-consuming passion and commitment to his craft.

What would our BA work look like if we approached it as an art? What would it mean to surrender to our art as BAs? Perhaps we would:

Be more confident in our role and mission.
Advocate for the strategic importance of our role.
Define a unique approach for each project/situation rather than complying with cultural norms or taking direction that might not benefit the organization or the end customers.
We would hone our craft by finding mentors and collaborating with peers to learn new skills and techniques.

5) Experiment.

Remember the vault with hundreds of unreleased songs? Prince never stopped experimenting. Prince hosted surprise concerts all the time. He would just jam and experiment, inviting others to participate and react.

Experimenting with technique is critical to mastering our BA craft as well. We experiment to learn. We try new things to see how they feel and to see how our stakeholders react. We apply new techniques to deliver and drive value to our organization and its customers. We try new things even though we might fail and we learn and adapt when our experiments don’t yield expected results.

Prince inspires by being himself and bringing so many together. How has Prince inspired you? Please leave your comments below.

Fill Your Business Analyst Toolbox

Written by Janet Walker on April 26, 2016. Posted in Articles.

Every good mechanic has a toolbox, and that toolbox literally gives the mechanic the confidence and capability to do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Here’s an example. The mechanic gets a call during business hours, sometimes on weekends, from a customer requesting a need or want. What is the first thing the mechanic does? The mechanic asks questions about what’s broken, what isn’t working as expected, or what the customer wants and why. The mechanic needs to get to the bottom of the challenge before offering a solution. This diligence is, in fact, the most important tool the mechanic has – the skill to dive deeply and fully understand what is needed.

Related Article: Business Analyst Experience: Pay it Forward

The next thing the mechanic might do is ask to see what is wrong. The mechanic pulls the offending auto into the shop, or if the request is for something new, the mechanic might see how the manual process is being completed today.
Observation is the mechanic’s second most important tool. Not everyone has the skill to look around at all the moving pieces, check things out, put it up on a hoist, and look at what connects to what.

After the mechanic fully understands what the customer wants or thinks they need, sees what the customer is doing today or can’t do anymore, the mechanic is now ready to begin. The mechanic rummages through those stored items in the toolbox that can resolve, highlight, measure, clarify, explain, visualize, assist, poke holes, slice, or make things run smoothly. The toolbox might start out kind of light, but as the mechanic becomes more experienced, the toolbox get heavier and more valuable with the tools needed to get the job done.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Now, the business analyst gets the call – “I need, I want, I can’t, I wish.” You pull out the first tool from your toolbox. OK, virtual toolbox. This is the beginning of the deep dive.

You want to know everything about the situation, and can’t stop or move on until you have all the details and know exactly what your client is so concerned or excited about. This particular tool doesn’t ever wear out though. Notice that? It actually gets stronger and more accurate the more it is used. Business analysts are lucky this way.

Next, you need to see the challenge or your client in action. Your second tool helps you here as you’re confident about taking things apart, holding them up to standards, checking out metrics, and evaluating performance. You understand any systems that are impacted or needed, can copy down to lower testing environments, and your sign-ons are still active. You have the investigative tools that you need.

Ready to make a difference? Let’s pull out some other tools of the business analyst trade.

Most business analysts need to know how to use the desktop applications in their toolbox, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Visio. Being able to use these tools comes in handy when it’s time to document notes and findings. This is the toolbox tray where you find your test plans, and the names and numbers of every Subject Matter Expert (SME) you will ever need. That process flow you just figured out is here for anyone who asks, and when you have to explain how you are going to fix something, that PowerPoint you had the skill to do is going to get you through.

Can we have too many computer skills in our BA toolbox? I think not, so we’ll discuss a wide variety of computer skills in another article; they will fit into your toolbox nicely.

Another set of tools you want in your toolbox (and kept sharpened) are those that let you schedule, call meetings, and get everyone on the same page. Sure, the whole BA package (BA 360!) is far more than being a requirements gatherer and meeting caller, but being able to get the right people together, show them your plans, and organize the conversation in a room is critical.

Here are some ideas regarding meetings:

1. Whether the meeting requires a conference room or call-in number, you don’t want to fumble around when you can finally get the right people in the room or on a call. Have the call-in number saved where you can find it quickly; and make yourself comfortable with Meeting Planner, Reservation Maker, or plain old Outlook for meeting requests.

2. I mentioned getting the right people in the room. Being able to figure this out is a key skill to have, and from my experience, it can be a challenge. I still get half way through a meeting and wish I had invited someone. (I even get half way through a meeting and wish I hadn’t invited someone.) Now that you have mad meeting-scheduling skills in your toolbox (right?), you can spend time thinking about who the players are for your task or analysis.

a. What process is downstream and will be impacted?
b. What upstream process has expectations?
c. Who asked for the change or new functionality?

I personally don’t like the “mass-meeting,” but if you are up to herding these cats, go for it. I prefer a room of SMEs. They don’t want their time wasted, and neither do I. Plus, they have all the information you need.

3. Another skill I believe needs to be included in our BA toolbox is whiteboarding. Don’t underestimate the skill it takes to draw straight lines and print legibly! Once you see a BA show amazing whiteboarding skills, you may never want to write on a wall or poster board again due to pure embarrassment. Seriously, try holding a marker over your head, writing the alphabet, and drawing tic tac toe boards. The attendees may not say it out loud, but everyone appreciates whiteboard talents.

There a lot more tools to talk about and we can do that another day, but now, are you ready to list what you have in your BA toolbox? You’ll be surprised at how much you know!

Find some tools missing? Sign up for an in-house training, ask the business analyst sitting next to you to teach you, or, of course, there is the Internet.

Nothing missing? Then now is the time to refresh your old skills using new technology, or challenge yourself and take on a task that requires you to dust off those old skills.

Even virtual tools can get rusty.

Strategy Spotlight: 4 Parts Of The Strategic Analysis Process

Written by Richard Lannon on April 12, 2016. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Strategy Spotlight: 4 Parts Of The Strategic Analysis Process

Some time ago I wrote a blog about the five terms in the planning process that every business leader and professional should know. It was part of filling in the strategic blank and getting to know the strategic planning process. With the word strategic, and by adding the word analysis, planning, leadership, management and implementation you get the perfect adjective-adverb combination. The terms are defined in my other article (5 Terms in the Planning Process).

That got me thinking about taking a deep dive into each term separately to see what can be revealed. In this feature I will tackle strategic analysis. I suspect it might be a book in and of itself.

I defined strategic analysis as having a simple definition. It is the process of developing strategy for a business by researching the business and the environment in which it operates. Often it requires the knowledge and use of various tools to prepare business strategies by evaluating the opportunities and challenges faced by the company as it moves forward. It takes into consideration internal and external factors that would be impacting the organization.

The key part of strategic analysis is having a good tool belt and know how and when to use the tools. This can be the role of the business analyst.

Often strategic analysis has four fundamental parts: present state, future state, risk, and transitional analysis.

Present State Analysis

Also referred to as current state analysis and is part of situational analysis. Present state analysis is used to understand the internal and external current affairs of a business.

Often when doing a present state you use a combination of high-level environmental scan and tools to dig deeper into your initial assessment. An environmental scan could include:

A review of current mission, vision, values, and guiding principles, stakeholder analysis to understand key relationships
A review existing organizational structure and mandate
A review of past strategic plans, reports, and other relevant materials, interviews with key stakeholders
A review of pre-analysis questionnaires
Profiling people and their impact
Preparing for planning sessions
A SWOT, PEST or SOAR analysis

or using other tools or techniques that are more appropriate. This is all done to grasp an understanding on the NOW of the business and becomes the benchmark for future comparison.

Future State Analysis

It is great to get the current state but even more fun to create a future state situation taking into consideration all the factored revealed in your present state analysis.

Future state comes from your discussion with team members from imagining the vision of success and future of the organization, the key strategic agenda items, the strategic initiatives that will help you achieve the desired future state and the work elements that will get you to where you need to go.

Future state is often forged through dialogue and decisions made about key business impact zones and the solutions needed to leverage opportunity and solve challenges. Often you need to ensure your goals and objectives are set that will satisfy the business needs.

Future state analysis helps create a bridge from the existing situation to the future situations with consideration for strategic, tactical and operational commitments and reality.

Risk Analysis

In risk analysis, I have always likened it to predict the outcome of a game and whether you are dealing with positive risk (opportunity) or negative risk (challenge). There are always the known-known, the known-unknown and the unknown-unknown (look it up). Either way, you need to understand the levels of risks and what is acceptable. Every organization has its own risk culture that will need to be satisfied.

During your initial analysis, risk should have been identified in your initial situational analysis with consideration for economic factors, market factors, competition, technology, suppliers, process, labour markets and business rules to name a few. If you are going from a present situation to a future state of change and transition, then the gap would need to be analyzed to understand the uncertainties around the change and the actions to take to overcome the risk. Always fun.

Transitional Analysis

Also referred to as change analysis, this is where the rubber meets the road. A full gap analysis would be performed to ensure that the recommended solutions can be done and what needs to happen to make sure the change can be implemented. I consider transition, change, and implementation analysis all part of the transformation requirements process.

Things to consider are the context of the change, alternatives, justification, investment, resources, solution value, stakeholder reviews, and decision points and the business state on the road ahead.

In transitional analysis, key business artifacts would be used or created that could include a strategy map and/or a roadmap, work-plans and communication plans. The key is to go the distance.

Strategic analysis is a great adjective/adverb combination. It is the umbrella of a powerhouse of professional work requirements, approaches, and tools and techniques that must be completed to fully understand the business problem or opportunity, the potential solutions, the implementation requirements and the measurements of success from the present state to a new future state. Strategic analysis is an important overarching part and component of the strategic process. All good plans and change start with great strategic analysis and a little imagination (just needed to throw that in).

Strategy Spotlight: 4 Common Skills Needed to Embrace Strategic Thinking in Your Business

Written by Richard Lannon on March 29, 2016. Posted in Articles.

Recently I was asked to do a keynote on strategic thinking for a large audience in the retail sector. The audience was mostly business owners who needed to improve their strategic thinking abilities.

As I used my business analysis skills in gathering and documenting requirements to create the presentation and to understand the challenges and opportunities, I realized maybe there is a lack of understanding around what strategic thinking means and the common skills required.

Most strategic experts would agree that strategic thinking is a process that incorporates innovation, creativity, planning, leadership, management and implementation. To think and act strategically means you need to answer the ‘what and the why’ questions within the strategic planning process. It incorporates the way people see their world, analyze their surroundings, and create their preferred future.

Often strategic thinking includes the insights of internal and external stakeholders (like the voice of the customer or employee, financial institution and CFO or accountant, vendor feedback) to ensure a complete understanding of the business. Strategic planning brings you from strategic thinking (what and why) into tactical thinking (who, how, when, how much) but at a higher level. That is why you build strategic roadmaps.

There are common skills that need to be present for strategic thinking to grab hold. They include:

Left Brain/Right Brain Thinking

Years ago I worked with a company that embraced left/right brain thinking, and I became part of their creative teams. Left brain thinking is considered logical and right brain thinking is considered creative.

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When engaging in strategic thinking, it is a good idea to have a team that is well balanced. Some people are far more logical, and others are far more creative. The creative people are great at future envisioning and seeing the importance of future think. At the right moment left brain people are great at the logic of the business. If brought together and facilitated correctly the combination becomes a powerful strategic force.

Avoid the mistake of having all the same people doing strategic thinking. It does not work well.

Envisioning the Future

Strategic thinking requires that you see the future and what you need and want to create. It also requires the ability to take the vision and put it into definable goals and objectives. These goals and objectives need to be further divided into strategic initiatives, elements of work, and timelines with assigned resources. But it all starts with answering a simple question. If you were to receive an invitation to your preferred future, what would that invitation be and what would it look like? Then you need to answer, why is that future so important? If you can answer those questions, then it is a matter of accepting the RSVP.

Calling a Time Out

Calling and taking a time out is something a lot of business leaders and professionals miss the opportunity to do in their business or career. I understand why, we are too busy, we have no time. That thinking is a mistake. The great strategic thinkers of the world take time out to think. When Richard Branson made the decision between his music empire and the airlines he took time out to think. When President Clinton left the Whitehouse, he was asked what he was going to do next. He said he was going to take time off to decompress and think. Strategic thinkers do the same thing. Teams need to leave their surroundings, turn off their distractions (that means smart devices) and connections to their outside world to think. As part of the time out to think, create a perfect brainstorm in your mind and with the minds of others without over analyzing thoughts or ideas. You move your thinking away from the operational to the creative space of innovation and idealized thoughts for the future. You may have a big idea that can radically change your world. Or maybe you make the critical decision on that item that has been in the back of your mind. You just never know.

Coming Back to Reality

Everything needs to land back into reality. This is where you need to balance creativity with reality. Often business leaders and professionals over plan and front load what it is they want to achieve. I have advised countless client organizations to shift their plan timelines or reshuffle their planning deck so they can achieve what it is they are out to achieve.
Don’t make the big mistake of thinking you can achieve everything at once. You can’t. No company I know has endless amounts of resources, time or money. So avoid making the mistake of trying to do everything at once. Listen to the left brain people. This could be analytic type people in your business.

Strategic thinking is about the long game. Unfortunately, many business leaders and professionals engage in short-term thinking either due to the pressure cooker of their lives, thinking of their bonus or present investment return, their jobs and not getting fired, or plugging holes to keep their projects on track and their department or business afloat. We all know that there are times when that is the reality you have to contend with. But to truly have a strategic thinking organization, teams or individuals you need to embrace and support the development of skills that step outside the norm of the everyday business world to create a preferred tomorrow. That means strategic thinkers. Good luck with that.