Tag: Team

Business Analyst Team Kick-off Practices

Written by Terri Moulton on July 27, 2009. Posted in Articles.

Start your team off on the right foot, whether your project uses an Agile or Plan-driven project method, by ensuring that your team kick-off activities set accurate expectations and reinforce how you will work together. As the role of the business analyst begins to include more project management work, there are opportunities for business analysts to gain visibility and increase their business value within their organization.

Specifically, business analysts can take a larger role in designing and facilitating Team Kick-offs and Working Sessions, fostering productive collaboration between the business and the project team, and developing effective reliable relationships with subject matter experts. Often this work is called the “soft stuff” or the “soft side” of project work. The challenge most project professionals encounter is how to turn it into implementable work outcomes. This article focuses on the business analyst’s role in designing and facilitating Team Kick-offs and will provide specific techniques for Team Kick-offs employing adaptive or plan-driven project methodologies.

Project methodologies have been evolving from Plan-driven (e.g., Waterfall) to more incremental adaptive approaches (e.g., Lean Six Sigma, Six Sigma, and Agile). Some companies are firmly rooted in the ever popular Plan-driven methods where the entire project is defined in detail from start to finish while other organizations are evolving towards clarity and detailed definition in the short-term and are accepting of more ambiguity in future stages of the project. Of course, there are also firms who are using a hybrid approach to extract the best practices out of each method. Business analysts must understand the differences and incorporate them into their work at the activity level, not only at the theoretical level.

The Role of the Business Analyst in Designing and Facilitating Team Kick-offs

Prior to the recent acknowledgement and formalization of the business analyst role, the project manager owned the majority of the Team Kick-off activities and the business analyst was relegated to only administration and documentation. See diagram below.

Business analysts worked more behind the scenes in support of the project manager and waited for their opportunity to influence the project during subject matter expert (SME) interviews and business requirements working sessions. Now, as business analysts increase their role to include more project management activities, they can build on their current facilitation skills used primarily for requirements sessions to help the project manager develop the project team. All of this work begins with taking a more active role in the Team Kick-off. The diagram below highlights additional activities that will leverage the Project Manager, ensure their leadership positioning, and increase the business value and initial visibility of the Business Analyst.

In order to take on some of the above activities in the Team Kick-off, business analysts need to schedule meetings with their project manager to offer additional support in developing the Team Kick-off. Once new responsibilities are agreed upon, the business analyst should ask the project manager the following questions in order to begin the work:

What outcome is this project expected to deliver?
Which executive is sponsoring this work?
How is this work perceived in our organization?
When are you planning to conduct the Team Kick-off?
What are the primary skill sets and knowledge that we need on this project team?
Which organizations will you approach for resources?
Which project method will you use to complete this work (i.e., plan-driven or adaptive)?
What expectations will you set with the new project team?
How do you envision the project team operating or working together?
What expectations will you set with the stakeholders?

Business Analyst Team Kick-off Practices

How are Team Kick-off practices different for plan-driven and adaptive projects? It is important to recognize that shifting the project method does affect how work is completed at all levels in the project. See the diagram below.

All teams benefit from setting expectations up front, building trust, and understanding their shared purpose. The dimension that most increases a team’s probability for success is a clear understanding of their shared purpose. Business analysts can help drive shared purpose by designing the key messages, activities, and work approaches into the Team Kick-off. After all, project managers are known for following the plan and managing the schedule while business analysts ensure that the right work is completed within the work activities and deliverables. Shouldn’t this expertise be applied to the “soft stuff” as well? Do your project managers a favor…help them bring the team to life by focusing on the high-impact levers of project success.

To get started, visit the Team Kick-off webpage to download a FREE tool: The Team Kick-off Planner.

Terri Moulton is the Founder and CEO of CanChange. CanChange provides step-by-step solutions for common change management challenges. CanChange’s products support both individuals and organizations as they navigate change related to system implementations, process improvement and other business initiatives. To access tools, templates and additional resources for Successful Team Kick-offs and Facilitating Successful Working Sessions? Visit Terri’s website at CanChange. You’ll find step-by-step guides that will help you improve your skills and ability to design and facilitate successful requirements sessions and project kick-off meetings.

BA Times Only Special: Use the code “BABONUS” at the CanChange site to receive $20.00 off any product purchase.

Bad-Ass BA Lessons. Part 2

Written by Rebecca Burgess on July 14, 2009. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Bad-Ass BA Lessons. Part 2

Co-Authored by Cecilie Hoffman

This article is a continuation of the 10 Steps to Becoming a Bad Ass Business Analyst. These steps will help you take your professional capabilities beyond most people’s expectations and help you to stand out as a leader. In the first installment we covered:

Step 1. Exploit the hidden power in “menial” tasks
Step 2. Delegate!
Step 3. Compose in real time
Step 4. Define gonzo success criteria

Let’s move on to activities that establish you even more into a leadership role.

Step 5. Ask the Crazy-as-a-fox Stupid Questions

Slang: “crazy as a fox” – the fox is considered a cunning creature who may choose to act in a manner that appears to be foolish or stupid, but actually advances its underlying plans, or, in the case of fox hunting, outwits its pursuers and saves its life.

All business analyst job descriptions should have these four expected duties:

Asks the questions that no one else dares to ask, and that everyone wishes somebody would ask.

“I’m not sure I’m following, it sounds like we have made an assumption that magic happens at this point in the process, and all the customer record duplications are cleaned up and removed. Could you tell me again how this is going to happen?”

Asks the questions that, once answered, will bring everyone to the same level of understanding.

It may be the case that some people in a meeting know what a particular TLA (three letter acronym) means, but others have no clue, and are having a hard time following the conversation. The “stupid” question, “sorry to interrupt, but could you tell me again, what SRM stands for?” isn’t stupid, it is a kindness.

Crystallizes the issue for people to understand what the sticking points are.

You may need to go out on a limb and take the risk of oversimplifying, but it is a risk worth taking. For example, it is not unusual for two team members to be arguing vociferously when they are actually in violent agreement. It’s your job to remove their blinders and show them how their opinions can actually dovetail. Try paraphrasing their positions, and then suggest how they can be combined.

“Let me tell you what I’m hearing. Lakshmi, you feel that A is the most important issue. Jorge, you’ve been saying that B has to be addressed first. I don’t think this is a win-lose situation. Your recommendations are not mutually exclusive if we do C, which essentially combines A and B. As for D, can we forgo it? Doing so would remove the risks we are concerned about. What would the ramifications of that approach be?”

Ask the questions that lead to out-of-the-box thinking.

One interesting “stupid’ question involves asking for the anti-solution and using the resulting suggestions to generate discussion on how to resolve those problems.

“Let’s spend a few minutes thinking out-of-the-box with the anti-solution. If we really wanted to mess this situation up, what would we do? [much laughter and crazy suggestions which you capture as discussion points] And how can we avoid point A? What about point B – aren’t we actually making that worse with this requirement we just defined? Does this raise the possibility of an entirely new solution/policy/process?

Step 6. Get Their Attention

Slang: A “clue-by-four” is a broad hint, firmly delivered. Also a metaphor for enlightenment. This term derives from a western American folk saying about training a mule: “First, you got to hit him with a two-by-four. That’s to get his attention.” A two-by-four is a standardized size for boards used when building – roughly 2 inches thick by 4 inches wide by multiple feet long.

People, unfortunately, don’t always pay attention to potential risk. Risk as seen through our BA eyes frequently has to do with the consequences of missing information. This kind of risk can be overlooked or underestimated by people who usually focus on delivery risks. The clever BA needs to not only identify the risk, but also assess the severity of the risk, and frame and communicate the risk in a way that makes the consequences clear and unappetizing.

The fact that Risk Management is usually considered a project management activity does not preclude a BA from putting this methodology into her own toolkit:

Identify, characterize, and assess threats
Assess the vulnerability of critical assets to specific threats
Determine and quantify the risk severity and likelihood of occurrence
Identify ways to reduce or avoid those risks
Prioritize risk reduction measures based on a strategy

Capturing this information in a tool like the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) permits you to share it with the stakeholders and get their agreement on the existence of the risk and buy-in to the risk avoidance and diminution methods. Then, when the stakeholder isn’t paying attention to a promise or deliverable, you get the joy of saying, “Madam Stakeholder? I just wanted to gently remind you that three weeks ago you promised to provide me with headcount of your developer teams so that we can estimate the number of licenses that will need to be negotiated for this third party application. According to the agreed upon risk management plan, if we don’t have the information by tomorrow at 5 pm your local time, we will have to defer all the requirements from your organization until the next phase of the project.”

Risk Management is traditionally the responsibility of the project manager. However, identifying risk is an activity that falls squarely in the lap of the savvy business analyst. Take some time to become familiar with it and the tools to support it.

Step 7. Schmooze Those Stakeholders

Slang: “schmooze” means to chat in a friendly and persuasive manner, especially so as to gain favor, business, or connections. Derivation: “schmooze” came into the English language from the Yiddish language shmues, meaning talk.

Stakeholders have the power to help you or hurt you, and if you surprise them with something, they will almost always hurt you. Make sure that they know when something is happening in your project that will touch their sphere of influence and that they buy into the change.

When you identify your stakeholders, those with the most power to help or hurt your project are the High Priority stakeholders, and should be regularly schmoozed by you and/or one of your key team members. At a minimum, meet with them regularly to keep them apprised of the project’s progress and potential impacts on their area of influence. Make sure they know who is supposed to be representing their interests, and make sure you understand what those interests are. Ask them what their success criteria are for the project, and if their idea of success is not in line with the project’s goal, perform proactive change management. Build bridges and help them understand that you are looking out for them. You will undoubtedly have to deal with them again in the future.

Step 8. Rat Out Those Underachievers

Slang: to “rat out” is to inform on, or tattle.

You’ve presented your requirements gathering plan; you believe that there is a shared understanding of the strategic direction and everybody has signed up to do their share of the work. A couple of weeks go by and everyone has completed their commitments but one team, Team Slowpoke. You did everything to ensure that all the work would come in on time. You called them a couple of days before the deliverable was due and asked how they were doing. You got a non-committal answer and they said they didn’t need help. The day of deliverable came and went. You called the next day and said that you must have missed their email with the deliverable and would they resend it. By noon. Today, Thursday. Noon came and went. It’s Friday 10 am. The entire team meets at 8 o’clock Monday morning. What’s a bad ass BA to do?

You can talk to the laggards’ peers, expressing your concern, and encouraging them to put pressure on the laggards. In parallel, you can talk to your manager and express your concern. No whining, just concern.

“Mr. Manager, I just wanted to let you know that all the teams have provided the information that they agreed to provide, except for the Slowpoke team. They have said they don’t need help. They aren’t responding to email, or voicemail, and no one is in their office. I’m concerned about what we can accomplish in our Monday meeting given their lack of participation.”

Finally, in the 8 a.m. Monday meeting, you can review all the deliverables and their status, thanking all the other teams for delivering on time, and calling attention to Team Slowpoke’s failure to deliver. You can ask Team Slowpoke’s leader, in the nicest possible way, to explain why this failure occurred so the rest of the group can help resolve the problem. You remain silent, maintain eye contact, and listen. Then you can ask how they intend to resolve the problem and what the new due date will be. In fact, you might even offer to talk with their manager, in case this is a resourcing problem and the team needs to have something taken off their plate. Use your sense of judicious audacity here, to determine how far this needs to be pushed.

The worst thing you can do is do nothing.

This is the second installment in this three-part series. In the next installment we’ll talk about speaking truth to power and that all important BA accessory, the Facilitator’s Flak Jacket.

Installment 1	Step 1. Exploit the hidden power in “menial” tasks
	Step 2. Delegate!
	Step 3. Compose in real time
	Step 4. Define gonzo success criteria
Installment 2 BA Times July 14/09	Step 5. Ask the crazy-as-a-fox stupid questions
	Step 6. Get Their Attention
	Step 7. Schmooze those stakeholders
	Step 8. Rat out those underachievers
Installment 3 BA Times August 11/09	Step 9. Speak truth to power
Installment 3 BA Times August 11/09	Step 10. Put on your “Facilitator Flak Jacket

Rebecca Burgess is the Business Process Methodology Analyst in the Commerce Lifecycle Transformation Office at Symantec and a Certified Six Sigma Black Belt. After many years of uncovering problems and determining root causes, she is now applying her BA skills to strategic process design and improvement. She can be reached at [email protected].

Cecilie Hoffman is a Senior Principal IT Business Analyst in the Business Analysis Center of Excellence, Symantec Services Group, Symantec Corporation. Cecilie’s professional passion is to educate technical and business teams about the role of the business analyst, and to empower the business analysts themselves with tools, methods, strategies and confidence. Cecilie is a founding member of the Silicon Valley chapter of the IIBA. She writes a blog on her personal passion motorcycle riding at balsamfir.com. She can be reached at [email protected]

The Three Myths of Virtual Team Leadership

Written by Cynthia Low on June 23, 2009. Posted in Articles.

I recently worked with a virtual team that was developing and rolling out a new product across many European countries. One colleague in London refused point blank to cooperate with another colleague who was based in Amsterdam. When I asked why, I was told that my English colleague found his Dutch counterpart rude and offensive-even though they had never actually met or spoken. When I dug deeper, it became clear that the real issue was about culture and style: the Dutch team member, for time management reasons, only checked his e-mails once a day, used a far more direct form of speaking than his English counterpart, and wrote his e-mails all in capital letters. His English colleague felt he was being ignored and, when he did get a response, that his Dutch colleague was SHOUTING AT HIM!

This is typical of the problems that occur when a team is spread across time zones, national borders or cultural boundaries. A virtual team does not have the same advantage as a team whose members meet face-to-face on a regular basis-when all the team members are inside the “30-foot limit.” Unconsciously, people pick up innumerable subtle cues when operating face to face with colleagues. We acquire information about our colleagues, including what is acceptable behaviour and what is not through observation. Inside the30-foot limit, people find ways to work together without even being aware of it. When we have no face-to-face experience with our new team colleagues, our communication lacks a certain richness. And because we don’t consciously attend to these things when we’re in close propinquity, we don’t appreciate their importance. As a result, the importance of these activities is often overlooked when working with remote teams. To ensure success, the virtual team leader must avoid being seduced by the three myths of virtual teams and must proactively attend to providing the social richness that virtual communication lacks.

The Reality of Virtual Teams

What can you do? At the start of the project, bring team members together in a start-up session so that they can meet each other face to face and socialize. This meeting will establish relationships in a way that is only possible when people are in each other’s physical presence. Human beings can relate to, start to trust, and feel responsibility towards someone they have met in ways that aren’t possible with a stranger.

Use this meeting to involve the team in developing team processes. This includes mapping dependencies between members, articulating their expectations of each other, and explicitly discussing and agreeing on the protocols that will operate between team members. The process-setting portion of the meeting may be the “official” reason for holding this meeting. This involvement will also create commitment and buy-in among the team members for these processes. If the start-up meeting isn’t feasible because of cost or time constraints, you should ensure that any complex work that requires close collaboration is handled by team members working inside the 30-foot limit.

Another option is to have key team members visit their remote colleagues to establish relationships and agree how they will work together. If neither of these options is feasible, be sure that your timeline and budget allow for the additional problems, delays and rework likely to be caused by mistaken assumptions, misunderstandings and conflict. During the life of the project, make sure that all team members are kept up to date on its progress, both what is going well and what is still to be achieved. This helps both to reduce the “outpost syndrome” and to show team members where they fit into the big picture. Repeat and reinforce the agreements made during the initial face-to-face meeting.

The Three Myths of Virtual Teams

As a virtual team leader, you must reject these three myths:

Myth #1

“My virtual team will be successful because they all share a common goal.”

Clarity of purpose and a compelling vision of success is a prerequisite for all high-performing teams. However, outside the 30-foot limit, the shared context that vision provides gets lost or forgotten if it isn’t reinforced daily through words and actions. You must ensure that everyone is up to date with the team’s progress and that expectations and dependencies between team members are understood.

Myth #2

“My virtual team will be successful because I have the best people on it.”

Individuals who perform at a high level in a co-located team situation aren’t guaranteed to operate well in a virtual or remote team. Often, individuals who find themselves working alone stop feeling connected to the team-an emotional state known as the “outpost syndrome.”

Myth #3

“My virtual team will be successful if technology is in place to allow them to communicate.”

It is, of course, vital that appropriate technology be evaluated and deployed in a considered and planned manner (and subsequently monitored to ensure it delivers the expected results). But, with due respect to all currently available technology, technology cannot and does not replicate human communication: technology doesn’t provide the same richness as that of people working in close proximity. The successful virtual team leader recognizes this gap and takes action to bridge it by addressing the human factors that technology filters out. As a team leader, you must initiate action to support the transition to remote working as well as develop team processes and enable a feeling of connection to prevent the outpost syndrome.

Judi Williams is the owner of Great Beginnings Limited and an author and instructor with Learning Tree International. Great Beginnings offers tailor-made training solutions. They design and develop a wide variety of training and professional support material such as fully immersive classroom training, interactive e-learning tools, video-based training, downloadable products etc. Judi has authored a number of courses for Learning Tree International such as The Art of Coaching, Effective Time Management and Personal Skills for Professional Excellence.

The Virtues of Virtualization

Written by Cynthia Low on June 16, 2009. Posted in Articles.

Virtualization technologies have graduated to the big time, but it didn’t happen overnight. While early virtualization application experiments can be traced back to the 1960s, it is only in the past decade that there has been growing acceptance of this cost-saving technology.

Foreshadowing new virtualization breakthroughs, a 2006 IDC analysis projected that companies would spend more money to power and cool servers by 2009 than they would spend on the servers in the first place. And a recent Goldman Sachs survey of corporate technology users found that 45% of respondents expect to virtualize more than 30% of their servers (up from only 7% today).

The heart and lifeblood of virtualization consists in using a hypervisor (software that provides a virtual machine environment), situated between the hardware and the virtual machine. The virtual machine is, in essence, data, while its applications files are stored on a physical server or on a remote storage device. The result is that the virtual machine has portability, which translates into a strategic advantage in adverse situations.

Virtualization technologies have come a long way, says James Geis, director of integrated solutions development at Boston IT consulting firm Forsythe Solutions, because evaluating capacity was once difficult. Thanks to improved capacity management tools, that task has been simplified and has become a mainstream means for resource planning.

Geis also notes that, while massive adoption of virtualization solutions has become commonplace, not all servers and applications are meant to be virtualized. The choice, he says, of when, where, and how an application can be virtualized should be based on performance metrics. “There are cases where processing, memory, storage, and network requirements dictate a solely dedicated server.”

However, the value of virtualization as an enduring strategy for continued growth is enormous. Geis outlines the following benefits:

Capacity optimization. Virtualization places capacity planning and optimization at the forefront of data center management. Properly implemented, it produces the maximum return on investment per server dollar.

Rapid server provisioning. Speed and accuracy are essential in a frenetic virtual business environment. Using a server template, virtual servers can be created effortlessly. Geis says new server provisioning takes minutes or seconds, rather than the days or weeks required to procure a new box and install an operating system and software.

Server portability. Virtual servers and the applications they support can be easily moved or copied to other hardware, independent of physical location or processor type. This feature alone provides unlimited flexibility for hosting servers and applications on any combination of physical hardware.

Reduced hardware, facilities, and HR expenses. Fewer server boxes cost less, take up less floor space, require less electricity and air conditioning, and require less maintenance, thus reducing costs related to hardware procurement, real estate, utilities, and human resources.

Larry Honarvar, vice president, consulting services, at CGI, a Montreal-based IT and systems integration consulting company, employs virtualization technologies in the following areas: managed services, software development and maintenance, and hosting solutions.

For software development, virtualization better leverages hardware and software investments, Honarvar says. This works well, given the fact that customers are often scattered around the globe, working in different time zones. “Virtualization makes better use of our infrastructure investments because it allows us to test different development and testing environments. It lets us control costs and redirect funding into product maintenance and enhancement,” he explains.

In hosting solutions, CGI employs virtualization solutions to maximize services and, at the same time, contain costs. Honarvar stresses that a compelling selling point for clients is that virtualization offers transparency. “They see the benefit of being able to have more environments pre-configured and quickly available to map their needs.”

The virtualization solutions marketplace gets bigger every year. Many companies are turning out half a dozen virtualization solutions a year. Here are two examples:

Toronto-based company Asigra has developed a line of backup and recovery services. Its Multi-Tiered Storage Billing System is designed to save the time and expense of developing or modifying an existing billing system, which the company says could run up to thousands of dollars. Its features include “agentless simplicity” (software is installed on only one node, whether the customer has one PC or hundreds); advanced security features (authentication, encryption and non-escrowed keys); and autonomic healing (provides managed backup/restore services for customers).

Ottawa-headquartered Mitel has introduced a number of communication tools for small and medium-size businesses, offering reporting and a signaling protocol called SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) capabilities. Mitel is aggressively promoting its Business Dashboard, which allows companies to track call activity on an internal IP network with both historical and real-time reporting. It collects trend data on call volumes and times, and trunk usage. Its neatest feature is tracking the path of a single call through internal systems and departments, which makes for accurate management of calls.

And that’s just a brief sampling of the virtualization technologies on the market. Look for aggressive new startup companies from all over the globe to jump into this application-rich, expanding niche.

Bob Weinstein is a science and technology writer with Troy Media Corporation.

The Teamwork Model

Written by Jonathan Malkin on May 26, 2009. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on The Teamwork Model

People fall into the following three levels of teamwork:

Level 1: Individuals. Individual performers on solo projects. Within a limited scope individuals can deliver exceptional results.

Level 2: Groups. A group includes the participants and a leader. The team’s final product is a joint contribution and reflects the strength of the group as a whole. Teams at this level take time and require a stable environment to build working relationships amongst the participants.

Level 3: A Collection of Individuals. This level of teamwork exemplifies the positive attributes of individuals and groups. A Collection of Individuals is able to tackle the most ambitious and difficult projects. Each member is a master craftsman. At this level of teamwork the product reflects the strengths of individual participants and the group as a whole. Level 3 teams typically do not require a stable environment and may, in fact, thrive under changing circumstances.

The business world demands that Collections of Individuals be formed on an ad hoc basis. In many cases it is neither cost effective nor an efficient use of resources to commit a group of people to the same set of tasks for any length of time. While it may be unrealistic to expect a level of true mastery from everyone it should be the goal we all strive to achieve.