Tag: Team

Doing Better Brainstorming: A Business Analyst’s Guide

Written by Noah Rue on June 30, 2022. Posted in Articles.

Instead of a “go with the flow” approach to brainstorming sessions, arm yourself and your team with brainstorming best practices guaranteed to give you results. Business analysts must learn to be intentional in their brainstorming to generate worthwhile, actionable ideas consistently.

Here’s how to lead more productive brainstorming sessions.

Take Care of the Logistics

First, you must take care of the brainstorming session logistics. Sometimes, spontaneous brainstorming sessions are necessary, but they should be few and far between. Instead, you should walk into most of your meetings with a plan.

Determine how long your session is going to last and where you’re going to hold it. Decide who is going to attend. Name your notetaker, facilitator, and timekeeper. Create an agenda or outline to distribute. And be sure everyone has access to and knows how to use the tech tools you’ll be using.

Also, come to every session with a clear purpose.

Come to Every Session With a Purpose

One of the worst things you can do in a brainstorming session is go into it without a clear goal or objective. Instead of developing solutions to problems or tangible ideas, you’ll have a lot of random conversation that ultimately goes nowhere.

Every time your team comes together to brainstorm, there should be a straightforward goal you’re trying to achieve. For example, are you trying to solve a problem? Do you want to determine the next steps at a project’s checkpoint? Are you there to mull over a new direction?

Make your purpose clear to the team, and let that purpose lead your brainstorming session.

Consider the Personalities in Attendance

It’s also wise to consider the personalities of the people you’ve invited to the brainstorming session. How you approach brainstorming with a group of extroverts will be different than how you facilitate brainstorming with a mixed crowd or one made up of reserved individuals.

Equally important is your personality and how you can use your strengths to facilitate a successful session. For instance, let’s say you’re introverted. Introverts are typically laid back and quiet, but can absolutely still be successful team leaders. So, play to your strengths.

Write your main speaking points down on paper so you don’t forget them. Use your exceptional listening skills to absorb everything thrown out in your session. Find opportunities to connect with people one-on-one and empower them.

Encourage Everyone to Participate

Considering everyone’s personality is also a good idea because you can make the brainstorming session more welcoming for each person when you know how they operate. And that, in turn, furthers your effort to encourage everyone to participate.

Set ground rules for brainstorming. It should be a no-judgment zone. Welcome every idea regardless of how crazy or out of the box it may seem. Allow everyone to express their creativity and experiences.

Moreover, everyone should have an opportunity to share. When someone starts dominating the conversation, politely interrupt them and ask others to contribute. You could even use a timer to ensure each person has equal time to express themselves.

Experiment With Tried-and-True Brainstorming Methods

Experimenting with different brainstorming methods can get the creative juices flowing for your team too. There are many tried and true brainstorming strategies to sift through until you find one or a combination that works for the individuals in your session.

Mind-mapping is one brainstorming method to try. You start with a main idea and generate sub-topics surrounding that central subject. Then, you come up with smaller ideas around those sub-topics. Finally, connect your ideas with lines, and you’ve got a mind map.

It’s an incredibly flexible brainstorming technique that allows for a surplus of creativity and idea generation in your session.

Here are a few other brainstorming methods to try:

Modified design sprint
Brainwriting
Stepladder technique
Round-robin brainstorming
Rapid ideation
5 whys analysis

Leave Each Session With an Action Plan

Many people deem brainstorming sessions ineffective because nothing comes out of them. In other words, teams are leaving meetings without an action plan. So, all of the ideas generated in these sessions live out the rest of their days in a file on your computer instead of in the real world.

Each idea or solution your team voted to move forward with in your brainstorming session should be accompanied by an action plan. You, your notetaker, or facilitator can take the lead on creating this action plan.

Document next steps and assign someone to each step. Put a deadline on each step and when you want the action plan completed in its entirety. And don’t forget to follow up on each action plan to ensure it gets done.

Conclusion

Business analysts need brainstorming to excel in their roles. If your sessions have been less than productive so far, use the tips above to elevate them and come out with real results.

Establish Your BA Practice from Scratch

Written by Lawrence Dong on June 15, 2022. Posted in Articles.

I have had the opportunity to establish BA practice within an organization a few times. After first time doing BA practice establishment, I have summarized a toolkit for myself, which in turn helped me setting up BA practice more consistently and effectively. If you are looking to set up your own BA practice, regardless of the organization that you work at, I believe you can benefit from this industry-agnostic BA Practice framework.

Element 1: Streamlined Onboarding

Well began is half done. Onboarding starts when offer is accepted. Trigger IT equipment and system access provision process as early as practical. Consider including any additional productivity equipment, such an as additional monitor, in the IT equipment provision.

The week before new joiner commencement, give them a call to understand their need, questions or concerns regarding onboarding. A phone call, although old-school, will give the new employee a good human-to-human style start. On or prior to day 1, send out all business unit wide email to announce the new starter.

Schedule one-on-one “causal catch up” at the start time on day 1, and project introduction meetings right after, to make new starter feel welcome and cared into new environment.

Make sure you do everything above in a remote-friendly way. Remote working is here to stay.

Element 2: 90-Days Action Plan

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Planning is always the best quality assurance. Set up a 90-day plan with the employee and you both stick to it. Focus on both performance and professional development. Regularly review progress with your new starter.

Element 3: Scheduled Communications

“A manager in need is a manager indeed.” (by Lawrence Dong). To avoid the situation that you are too busy to attend to your employees’ needs, schedule communications in advance so that you will have time for this important matter. Apart from the performance review conversations, the most obvious communications opportunities include:

Manager/Employee 1:1
Regular team meetings

Set them up in an appropriate and recurring way.

Element 4: BA Skill Matrix and Career Levelling

Business Analyst, like most other jobs, can and should be measured at work. For all the right reasons, it is critical to provide a fair and equal path to everyone. In order to give a chance to everyone’s career progression, it is fundamental for the manager to acknowledge the existence of different career levels and skill levels among their employees.

An example of career levelling could be:

Junior BA
Intermediate BA
Senior BA
Lead BA
Etc.

And an example of skill matrix could be:

Requirements gathering (1 out of 3)
Process mapping (2 out of 3)
Stakeholder management (3 out of 3)
Etc.

It is worthwhile to mention that the entry criteria of a particular career level may consist of more than skills and deliverables. Behaviors and collaboration are equally important, if not more.

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Element 5: Templates and Processes

Consistency is key to high quality customer experience. With BA templates and processes put in place, effectively there is less room for confusion in “what should be delivered and how”. Just make them easily accessible to the team.

Element 6: BA Services Catalogue

Business analysis work is sometimes dynamic and self-evolving. From a SDLC perspective, BA’s may benefit more than other from a well-defined BA Services Catalogue, whenever there are questions about the boundary of their roles and responsibilities.

Element 7: Knowledge Sharing

Sharing is caring. A regular knowledge sharing forum is a great addition to the regular team meetings, where team members can have the podium and be empowered. When a team member feels empowered, they will be more creative, and everyone involved will feel the positive chemistry.

Element 8: Coaching and Mentoring

“Coaching” and “mentoring” look similar, but a lot of people understand the obvious difference. Coaching is quite performance driven and short-term based, while mentoring is more development driven and long-term aimed. What’s subtle is that mentoring requires a none conflict of interest communication, which means people managers are least appropriate mentors to their direct reports. However, a great support people managers can to is to encourage and even help their employees find a good mentor.

Element 9: Training and Education

It is somehow a “moral contract” between permanent employees (and the likes) and the employer that training and education will be made available when and if required.

Therefore, it is the manager’s role to identify the required training and education opportunities that will strengthen the skills of individual employees.

I hope you have got some inspirations now to use the industry-agnostic BA Practice framework to guide your future team and capability management. If you demonstrate commitment to your employees by building a mutually beneficial BA Practice, consistency will be created, and employee engagement will be elevated. Win-win.

Don’t. Step. Back.

Written by Christina Lovelock on May 26, 2022. Posted in Articles.

‘We need to take a step back’ is a common phrase amongst BAs, and while the intention is understandable, this entreaty simply isn’t helping.

You know the feeling.

The project is already running away with itself.
Stakeholders have identified a solution before articulating the problem.
This great new idea does not align to strategy or objectives.
The CEO wants to implement a system they’ve seen work elsewhere without understanding our context and challenges.

You know we need to calm down, think logically, act rationally. In every meeting, you want to say things like:

We need to slow down
What about the bigger picture?
Let’s go back a step.

But no one wants to hear that.

The start of initiatives are about energy, motivation and enthusiasm. BAs can be seen as blockers. What we think is pragmatism can be interpreted as negativity.

Restraining Language

When BAs are constantly using language which is perceived as holding back progress, stakeholders begin to avoid us, work around us, and don’t include us in discussions where we could offer a valuable perspective. BAs then become increasingly worried and frustrated, and our warnings become more dire and more persistent.

It can look like our input is focused on restraining the initiative and identifying additional work.

Is it possible deliver the same information in a more impactful way?

Examine Our Role

BAs often feel we are the conscience of a project, and our job is to protect stakeholders and the organization from poor decisions. Is that a reasonable expectation to set for ourselves?

Trying to reign-in a project which has senior backing, forward momentum and is moving at pace is perhaps not the best way to expend our energy. It’s OK to be on board with an idea and to be enthusiastic. We don’t have to ensure every ‘lesson is learned’. It’s more important that the project benefits from an engaged BA that is consulted at the appropriate time and is seen as someone who is contributing to moving the initiative forward.

Enabling Language

Swapping our restraining language for forward-focused language may not be as difficult as we think.

Instead of “We need to take a step back” we can say “We need to be clear on the best next step”.

Instead of using “Yes, but….” to list off all the problems, we can use “Yes, and…” to keep our contribution constructive.

We can use language that says I’m onboard with this project, I want to see it progress and my contribution helps move us forward.

BAs can sometimes see positivity as naivety. It is possible to be positive and well informed. We can use our experience to help projects avoid potential pitfalls, without insisting on a backwards step.

Conclusion

BA don’t need to single-handedly restrain projects. In fact the best way to influence projects and products in the right direction is to demonstrate that we are invested and enthusiastic about the outcome.

Language matters. Swapping restraining language for enabling language shows our stakeholders we care, we understand and want a positive outcome. There may still be difficult messages to deliver, but we can frame these as future-facing hurdles to overcome rather than backwards-facing steps to make.

Designing Case Study Interviews for Hiring Awesome BAs – A Hiring Manager’s Perspective

Written by Nadia Bachan on May 5, 2022. Posted in Articles.

When I first started hiring business analysts, there was a while there where I was great at hiring BAs that didn’t quite fit what I was hiring for. As a BA myself, I recognized the need to pivot beyond a verbal interview to get a real-time look at a candidate’s skillset. I needed to see what a candidate could do and evaluate that against what was needed for the role I was hiring for.

Enter the Case Study.

Designing the perfect case study is a lesson in trial and error, with each candidate revealing ways to make it better. More than ten years later, I’m still running case study interviews (and have hired some of the absolute best BAs I’ve ever worked with) and have a few tips for hiring managers that want to design their own.

Keep it simple. It’s a high-pressure situation, do not give your candidate a page of text. You will miss your mark due to misinterpretations, assumptions, over-analysis, time-crunch. A simple picture, a simple task. It’s enough.
Pick a couple key skills to evaluate. You’re only going to get so much out of the case study without making it overly complex. What are the two or three key things you’re looking for and design to see those skills in action.
Do not send the case study out ahead of time. You’re just asking for someone to show up with a ten foot long, professionally printed flow chart. Yes. This happened.
Be VERY VERY clear. Be specific about what you’re asking the candidate to do or produce. Are you expecting them to interview you, draw a diagram, write a requirement? No matter how clear you think it is, someone will misinterpret it. Repeat your ask multiple times.
Make it relevant to you. Use simple scenarios from real life; industry or domain relevant, something your candidate may face on the job. This will give make it real for both you and the candidate.
Be flexible. Everyone will interpret your case study differently based on past experiences. Don’t look for your perfect answer, and don’t design with right or wrong in mind. Instead look for skills being used, the questions being asked, the way ideas are communicated; capabilities are the key.
Make it fun. If you’re stressed, they’re stressed. Keep it casual, make a joke, lighten up. Turn down the pressure to allow your candidates to battle their nerves and show their skills off better.

There are innumerable ways to go about evaluating for a particular skill through a case study. Here are a few examples:

Facilitation and/or Elicitation Skills. Give the candidate a basic scenario – even something as familiar as ordering a pizza online. Ask them to gather requirements from their client (you) for a new feature. You should predefine your feature with a couple alternate scenarios or edge cases. See how well your candidate elicits your requirements. Did they catch those alternate scenarios?
Modeling. After gathering the requirements during the facilitation portion of the case study, ask your candidate to create a simple flow chart, use case diagram, context diagram – whatever you’re looking for. Did they accurately model the requirements? Do they know how to communicate using models?
Working with ambiguity. Include very little detail in your scenario. Throw them into the project with a paragraph and a pat on the back (totally unrealistic, right?). Ask – how would you start? What would you do? Look for how the candidate thinks and how they plan to work knowing very little. Did they talk about identifying stakeholders? Understanding the objectives, benefits or KPIs? Making a requirements management plan? Did they approach the unknown in a way that made you confident they could work through it?
Strategic thinking, risk analysis, problem solving. Throw a couple blockers into the scenario. The clients are swamped and rarely answer emails. Technical stakeholders are distributed across multiple departments and have competing priorities. The vendor hasn’t provided a data spec for the extract you need to document. The timeline for the project has been moved up and you’re being asked to compress requirements timelines. Don’t be afraid to throw in real scenarios you deal with regularly. I’ve gotten good ideas on problems I was dealing with myself!

In all the above case study scenarios, you can design the challenge and evaluate the output differently depending on the skill level of the role being hired for. For a junior practitioner, I would evaluate a flow chart with a different lens than someone with 10 years of experience. I would expect a senior BA to identify more subtle risks and have tighter mitigation strategies than someone two years on the job.

The case study can be adapted for anything!

As you continue your case study journey, you will continuously tweak, adapt, and perfect. I’ve gotten it so close to where I want it that I enjoy seeing how else a candidate can trip me up and force me to adapt yet again.

My latest tweak: virtual case studies during pandemic times means you must send your candidates a copy of the case study. A digital copy can be forward to recruiters who then give it to other candidates. Candidates then magically produce a ten-page requirements document in half an hour. It took me a couple interviews to figure out that magic. Tweak time! Now there are variations of the case study used at random.

However, you integrate case studies into your process, above everything else, keep it simple and don’t take yourself too seriously. You’d probably find a case study interview stressful too! For those of you on the receiving end of a case study interview – don’t panic. Have some fun with it and show what you can do knowing that the hiring manager’s expectations will be more closely aligned to your skill set upon hiring and you’ve set yourself up to be more successful in the role in the long run.

Approaches for Being a Lead BA

Written by Aly Cassam on January 27, 2022. Posted in Articles.

You’ve worked your way up the BA ladder – started as a Junior BA, then a BA, then a Sr. BA, and now you’re a Lead BA on a project working with other BAs. What do you do? This article focuses on some of the Do’s and Don’ts of being a Lead BA. Some of it is science and some of it is art.

Requirements Governance:

1. Who do you take direction from your PM or your BA Manager:

The first place to start as a Lead BA is establishing your own personal Requirements Governance. Who do you provide status updates to and who do you take direction on requirements from – PM or your BA Manager? The scenarios I’ve encountered are:

You as the Lead BA take your BA requirements direction from the PM and provide status updates to your BA Manager.
You as the Lead BA take your BA requirements directly from your BA Manager and provide status updates to your PM.
The third and most often scenario is where both the PM and your BA Manager are of the opinion that you take requirements direction from them and provide status updates to the other.

Tip: Right at the beginning of the project start the conversation with your BA Manager and clearly establish the relationship you’ll have with him or her and with the PM (in my experience coaching BAs too many Lead BAs don’t have the conversation upfront and then find themselves in a bind when scenario C) above becomes an issue during the project itself). If the answer is taking your requirements direction from them, set up a short meeting with your BA Manager and the PM to establish this relationship as PMs generally don’t like that arrangement, and it’s best to get them to discuss it face to face. If the answer is taking your requirements direction from the PM, then simply follow-up the meeting with a confirmation email to your BA Manager and just let your PM know that you’re effectively going to report to them and take, where appropriate, BA approach direction from them.

2. Establish your role as Lead BA on the BA team:

Make sure it’s clear to the BAs you’ll be leading that you are the Lead BA, and they will work with you in that capacity. A couple of ways to communicate this:

Ensure you’re called out on the project governance as the Lead BA and ensure the BAs you’ll be leading review the project governance
Where you’re taking your Requirements direction from your BA Manager have them send out an email to the BAs you’ll be leading that you’re the lead and that you’ll be guiding the approach etc. to the Requirements deliverables

3. Start by learning about your BAs:

At the beginning you’ll need to establish how experienced the BAs are with eliciting, documenting, and analyzing requirements, how familiar they are with the project subject matter, etc./ by scheduling quick little chats with the BAs you’ll be working with

If you’re dealing with Sr. BAs with lots of experience, then your focus with them will be on making sure things are going smoothly and that they working to the timelines for their requirements work packages; You can give them fairly large and complex requirements work packages
If you’re dealing with more Jr. BAs then you will be in a more guidance/ mentoring mode – periodically reviewing their requirements and providing feedback, mentoring on approach to different types of requirements such as documenting process flows and business rules, etc.; Initially limiting the scope of their work packages to small well-defined pieces of requirements; have little chats with them about how things are going

4. Develop a view of the requirements work packages:

Typically, a group of BAs is assigned to a project because the project is complex and there are multiple “groups/ categories” of requirements that need to be created to deliver the scope of the project. At the outset understand the drivers and objectives of the project and establish a view of the requirements work packages. Some examples of this are:

a. Achieving compliance with regulations or another compliance-related purpose:

1. You may need to look at work packages focused on complying with different sections of the regulations
2. If the compliance covers multiple departments or Lines of Business (LOB) you may need to focus on requirements for each department/ LOB to comply with the regulations

b. Developing and implementing a large technology system or platform:

1. 1. You may need to look at requirements work packages focused around different groups of users with the system – for example if it’s a workflow system you likely have work packages for customer-facing components, back-office-facing components, etc.
  2. You may need to look at requirements work packages focused on different functional features. For example, a customer-facing platform for a direct investing platform may consist of trading-related features, viewing account holdings, researching different securities, etc.

5. Managing the requirements work packages:

a. Establish a view of the project timelines with respect to the requirements work packages based on their complexity etc. I prefer a matrix like this to do so (using the direct investing platform as an example) based on the requirements lifecycle – plan, elicit, analyze, document, get sign-off (note do this in Excel or Project to track progress, etc.)

	Plan	Elicit	Analyze	Document	Sign-Off
Trading requirements	01/01/22 to 10/01/22	10/01/22 to 25/01/22	25/01/22 to 02/02/22	02/02/22 to 16/02/22	16/02/22 to 28/02/22
Security Research requirements	01/01/22 to 10/01/22	10/01/22 to 25/01/22	25/01/22 to 02/02/22	02/02/22 to 16/02/22	16/02/22 to 28/02/22
View account holdings requirements	01/01/22 to 10/01/22	10/01/22 to 25/01/22	25/01/22 to 02/02/22	02/02/22 to 16/02/22	16/02/22 to 28/02/22

b. Based on what you learned about the BAs you’re leading assign them to different work packages – and monitor their progress on their work packages against the. I’ve found the best way to keep track of this is using a matrix like this that I update on a weekly basis:

Legend:

P – Plan, E- Elicit, A- Analyze, D- Document, S- Signoff

	BA1	BA2	BA3
Trading requirements	P – Jan. 1/22
Security Research requirements		P – Jan. 1/22
View account holdings requirements			P – Jan. 1/22

With these 2 matrices, you can keep track of who’s doing what and how they are doing against the target dates so you can provide status reports to the project team as required.

6. Monitoring progress and connecting the BAs as a team:

The most effective approach that I’ve found to monitor the progress of my BAs is to hold weekly meetings – with a twist. Most people just do a status check-in during their weekly meetings – how are you progressing against your timelines. I believe that weekly meetings are a good chance for the BAs to inform and help one another. I encourage them to talk about challenges they are having – someone else in the team may have encountered this and have a solution/ approach to tackling it. I encourage them to talk about effective approaches that they’ve found to doing things that may be helpful to other members of the team. Finally, I ask each BA to give a brief overview of the requirements they are working on. As most projects with a BA team have a common goal – by talking about requirements it will quite often identify synergies or conflicts between requirements/ work packages that will help move the project forward more efficiently.

Conclusion:

Hopefully, these approaches will help you become a more effective BA Lead. There are lots more approaches and in future articles, I may expand on them.