Tag: Team

Breaking Through the Stakeholder Surface

Written by Kristen Gandier on April 21, 2021. Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Breaking Through the Stakeholder Surface

The Stakeholder Blueprint

Stakeholders are an important component of the business ecosystem, and especially important to initiatives, as they include any individual person or group that has any sort of connection to the business need or change at hand. Stakeholders can have a straight-forward connection to the initiative, or be a more complex and challenging piece. Stakeholders are not always the person or group with the easiest road of access, and overcoming challenges and barriers with stakeholders can build trust and facilitate meaningful business relationships and engagement.

Speaking the language of stakeholders is about understanding not only what is obviously promoted and agreed, but also about listening to what is not said. Within stakeholder silence can be hesitation, but it could also be unspoken agreement and support, or even untapped input. Not all stakeholders speak the same language, and it may depend on the initiative and accompanying environment. Understanding environment is important, as well as having self awareness to ensure no assumptions are made on perception of stakeholders.

Everyone knows the phrase, “watch out for those quiet ones”. In the landscape of stakeholders, it is not always a reliable approach to accept the loud voices of support as loyal, and the quiet ones as adversity. Understanding different communication needs can help to elicit not only requirements, but important business information to help with the initiative. This means not only thinking, but also performing and prioritizing outside of the box.

The Unlikely Mentor

Within stakeholder groups, there could be many different types of business relationships. Mentors can come in all shapes and at all career milestones. You may have spent some time focusing on one particular area of your organizational structure to find a mentor, only to happen upon your best ambassador and catalyst of growth from an unexpected network connection.

Mentoring as a professional input has changed over the years, and no longer is represented by the one-dimensional approach of an employee with seasoned expertise providing wisdom to a junior, within a specific organizational facet. Mentoring can be from one or many blended sources, allowing the optimal blend of experience, perspectives and advice to inspire multi-directionally. It is no longer the formal, stuffy documented professional connection and more modernly exists in a fluid, dynamic environment that fits more to the organic professional environment and multiple avenues of existing career paths.

Cohesion and the Business Need

Mapping stakeholder personas is an important Business Analysis technique in identifying specific sources, decisions and choices for involvement to the initiative. Keeping touchpoints open and approaches objective helps to elicit valuable information for projects and maintain a team’s engagement and value.

When leading teams through initiatives and keeping communication central, there may be times when information is not always easy to unpack. Depending on the initiative, challenging group conversations about outcomes may come up time-to-time, such as the sometimes “unpopular” outcomes of:

Doing Nothing
Accepting sunk cost

These outcomes can divide stakeholders, make some nervous, and may even inspire a reaction to perceived setbacks, even if they are indeed the best options. With the right communication though, these may actually allow for important reconfigurations for stakeholders to find a new perspective. That environment of honesty and trust can directly impact another future initiative, or even exist in understanding business needs, and how something such as “doing nothing” may prevent loss from continuing to pursue an initiative that delivers low-value.

Keeping stakeholders informed and direction honest can:

Enhance elicited information
Build trust
Create better business relationships
Solidify cohesion in the delivery of any outcome

When the team has the same view, the road to travel there is easier.

Delivering Excellence Even When You Dislike the Client

Written by Brad Egeland on March 25, 2021. Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Delivering Excellence Even When You Dislike the Client

Ever had those times when you knew you were performing at your highest level and you just weren’t connecting with the project client? It is not easy, giving 100% to those who don’t seem to like you or don’t seem to appreciate the effort.

I’ve been there. I had one client who said they didn’t like me. My tech lead said, “You don’t even know Brad.” Their response? “We are paying $150 / hour (my company’s charge rate at the time for a PM on a project) and we have a limited budget.”

What did I do? I decreased the visibility of my role, cut my travel out of deliverables and onsite meetings and made them feel a whole lot more comfortable. I could still manage the project effectively and they saved money in the process. Then they loved me, and we finished the project under budget and with a nice high profit margin. Win-win.

So, I’m not so much looking at this from the angle of us not liking the client, but rather the relationship just not being A+. Perhaps they are very difficult, and you just don’t like them. Whatever the case… how do you go forward, manage the project, team and customer effectively and eventually deliver a winning project? Let’s look at some steps or ideas on how to get there…

Go through the motions. This sounds bad, but it’s true. In this scenario you basically put your head down and run-on auto pilot using the best practices knowledge you’ve gained through years of experience and keep your eye on the prize of a successful project delivery despite the adversity and consider it a huge win if you do. This doesn’t mean you don’t think and manage and be strategic. It means you go solo with your team as much as possible and involve the customer as little as possible. This goes against my overall feelings that customer participation is a huge part of the successful project equation. But if this gets you through it, it’s better than any project confrontation if it helps avoid it.

Suck it up and be responsive. In this scenario, you put a smile on your face and put aside every difference you might have and pretend that the customer smells like roses… or just always picture them in their underwear… in a non-pervasive way. Sort of like they told you how to get through those first big presentations in your personal or professional life without fainting or wetting yourself. Remember that first college speech or whatever? Use that… you can make it!

Give some things away. You can take the high road, turn the other cheek, and kill them with niceness. You still will not like the customer, but they end up loving you and that’s half the battle. Give something or several things away for free knowing you probably end up winning in the end because of it. They (the customer) become more cooperative – if that was a problem – you get past some issues and get things accomplished. You do not have to give away a lot, but make sure it is known that it is being given away. There is nothing worse than suffering through a project – giving things away to make better things happen – only to keep the pain and suffering going because they don’t realize they are receiving a “gift.” The gift giver usually should not brag or boast or point this out – but in this case you need to in some not too subtle way, so you don’t keep pulling your hair out.

Never forget to rely on your support team. Finally, never forget to rely on your team. They are not the problem, and you must take the blinders off and managing the whole big picture, not just your frustrating situation with the client. Otherwise, you’ll end up taking it back to your wife and if she has to listen to it for too long she might kill you in your sleep! I’ve been there. Seriously, though… your team is assembled with pros who have felt this way themselves. If they say they haven’t ever – then they are probably lying. So, rely on them to keep you from getting too aggressive with the customer – let them step in when needed and take the lead so you don’t have to show frustration and can keep your game face on throughout the engagement. After all, the customer isn’t likely to feel too comfortable with a PM that basically wants to smack them every time they talk. You can think it, but do not let it show and hide behind your project team when necessary to make it through. They are your 10 step support group.

Summary / call for input

So there you have it. My opinions and steps and thoughts on how to make it work when you and the client – for whatever reason – are not really the best of friends. It can make for a long 3 months, or 6 months, or even 2 years depending on how long the engagement lasts… but just because you do not like each other doesn’t mean you can’t win on the project. If that were the case none of us would have very many Facebook friends from our high school days. And now some of those are the most fun Facebook friends to have, right? And now you get along!

Readers – what are your thoughts? Have you ever had those strained project relations that you have had to punch your way through and basically grin and bear it till the end no matter how the yucky customer treated you or no matter how much you didn’t like them? Life is not just always coming up roses and it can be hard. Managing projects is nearly always hard, not always fun, and sometimes it can be a nightmare. But there is usually a light at the end of the tunnel. Even a marathon ends after 26.2 miles even though you are sure you will fall dead first!

How to Thrive as a Business Analyst in the New Normal

Written by Ananya Pani on March 24, 2021. Posted in Articles.

The Pandemic hit us suddenly and yes it came without any notice to our lives as a transient thing but became the new normal way of life.

Some of us were initially worried thinking about what lies ahead, some were shocked, some found pleasure being relieved from the daily commute, time on the road, and traffic jams.

With the COVID 19 pandemic hitting us globally, organizations have embraced remote working as the new way for 2020, and some have announced it for 2021 also.

Moving to WFH

IT industry has moved to this new model in a relatively easier way, and the transition is relatively smoother.

But for the traditional industries, it’s a big shift, and the mode of working and infrastructure needed rethinking, planning, and to be worked out.

In most countries, the pandemic hit so suddenly that it left no time to prepare for the upcoming times. Going remote isn’t an easy task for many, as we may think.

However, as it’s popularly said, every cloud has a silver lining; similarly, every challenge comes with an opportunity. It’s up to us to step up and embrace this change and take benefit of the opportunity.

Though many are happy with the new way of working for the reasons like:

The extra time gained from the commute
The better work-life balance
Increased productivity
Saving of money and resources
Lesser distractions

However, many challenges started to unfold as the new normal started sinking in, and this seemed like here to stay for some more time.

For this article, we will take a deeper look into the business analysis profession, what seemed to have worked well, the new challenges thrown, and how we can make the best of it in the new normal.

As a business analyst, one is responsible for:

Leading change and bringing new technology and products to the organization
- Gathering existing and new requirements/processes/features as part of the automation/new product
- Coming up with solutions to business problems/needs
Developing new systems/solutions to take care of any manual process / better performance / better revenue stream / more efficient process / better user experience
- Elicitation of requirements
- Modeling of requirements
- Signing off on requirements from the stakeholders
- Managing changes, if any to requirements.
- Development and implementation of the solution
- User acceptance testing
- User training

The business analysis profession is primarily involved in communication (written, verbal, visual), and the absence of face-to-face meetings brought new challenges.

Practical challenges for BAs in remote working

As part of the solutioning, requirements elicitation, user story reviews, prototyping, or any other phase of the project a BA needs to have close interaction and work with stakeholders, the tech team, the QA team, and other BAs.

Some specific challenges are:

Staying Engaged with Stakeholders

Most of these tasks were done traditionally with stakeholders using pre-dominantly following techniques such as Workshops, walk-throughs/Reviews, Brainstorming, and Observations.

Here is a list of challenges and a few things that worked for many business analysts as shared by them when we asked them – https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6687061335701778432/

Challenges most of the business analysts faced:

Getting stakeholder engagements
Getting to know the non-verbal cues
Meetings can get off track.
Getting clear communications
Getting approval and clarity on requirements
Staying updated with the status
Bonding with the team
Figuring out the way everyone’s schedule and style of working
Making everyone comfortable and be participative in the meeting
Multiple time zones and the work timings followed with the new way.

Here is a set of guidelines for business analysis professionals to work effectively and efficiently in this new way and to make the transition smooth.

Few practices that worked well for most:

Breaking the ice – to get better participation from stakeholders and team
Give some background and the solution’s objective to get everyone talking for the requirements elicitation meetings. Silence kills participation.
Having catch-up calls, one in the morning for planning and one at day end for a status update, is good to keep everyone updated.
Scheduling meeting with clear agenda well in advance.
Starting the meetings by giving a brief background of past discussions and agreements.
Spend initial 5 minutes in setting out expectations and responsibilities like who will take notes, who will take responsibility for which part, who is expected to share inputs or information, who will get sign off, etc. A RACI matrix may be of help here. Meetings with clear agenda, expectation, success criteria, ownerships, and tasks assigned to members are more effective.
Wrapping up the meetings with the major discussion points and decisions made.
Being better prepared for the meetings/requirements elicitation sessions having gone through all the previous documents, changes suggested, and the mockups/processes/documentation.
Keeping all the documents needed open in the background for the meetings
Schedule 1:1s with colleagues and mentors to get feedback, schedule 1:1s with customers to check on them.
Get stakeholders/team take accountability and responsibility to stick on to the commitments and deadlines.
Following basic rules like muting when not speaking and using the chatbox to communicate points instead of disturbing the flow
Use visuals and demos to gather better inputs or feedback. Start showing similar applications to gather/understand requirements and collect feedback instead of doing it verbally. Some popular visual/diagramming tools are
1. Visio
2. BizAgi Process Modeler
3. Zoom white Board
Use collaboration tools to be more effective, like:

Zoom
Webex
Go to meeting
Go to Webinar

Being open about being away from work/break timings. Transparency is the key; keep everyone up to date, even if it’s good or bad. In this new normal, trust keeps us going –
Stay connected with the team through IM or chat options.
Most draw a line between work and family

Many say they love the new way since they can avoid the commute and have a good cup of tea at home in the morning before starting their day.

They can avoid office distractions and have their best productive time put to work.

Some say they can have a good time with children and pets, and having them close brings their best self out

Overcoming the CHALLENGES

Maintaining Work Discipline

Few things that will help when you start as a practice/discipline:

Setting up a workspace –
- Comfortable – A work desk/table with comfortable sitting arrangements. Couch, Bean bag, a bed should be avoided.
- Clean – Keep your workspace organized and clean to have a better/ productive day.
- Organized with your daily needs – Notebooks, drawing board (if you are a visual BA), pens, markers, etc.
- Good to have a green view
Avoid noise/distraction-free environment –
- Have a workspace set up in a place that’s away from the sounds of a pet, dishes, or cooking.
- Invest in a good pair of headphones to cut down on noise for conference calls.
- Make sure you are in proper attire if you are expecting a video call.
Keep back up for power and network outage.
- Most of the smartphones can be used as a mobile hot spot as the internet back up.
Make your availability known.
- Communicate your break timings (lunch, coffee, etc.) to your team and others
- Sign out of the instant communications applications like chat, IM, etc, when taking a break.
- Ensure your availability as per your official working hours

Keep track of your tasks and plan your day.
- Keep track of your tasks and time spent.
- Plan your day at the beginning of the day
- Make your day plan known to others in the team with dependencies and support needed from the team.
- Share your day-end update with the team to ensure smooth working with the team.
Time Management
- Stick to your work timings – Remote working doesn’t mean you can start anytime you wish and end it at any time you wish.
- Be self-managed by keeping distractions to the minimum.
- Have your tasks for the day seen in front of you either as a sticky note or a day planner

Upskill to keep yourself updated –

As the famous saying of Dr. Deming goes, “Learning is not compulsory nor is survival.”

Time and again, it has been proven that upskilling and getting certified puts one at the forefront in the job market, makes one eligible for the best opportunities and promotions.

Hence please keep some time booked or marked in your calendar for learning new skills, tools, or a certification.

Organizations have realized the importance of having highly skilled and matured BAs to enhance their delivery capabilities. So, when the demand for BAs is on the rise, how do you set yourself apart in a highly competitive world? Well, the answer is certification is one of the best and independent ways of showcasing your skills.

IIBA Certifications are the most sought-after BA certifications for business analysts to excel in their careers.

If you are a BA and looking for upskilling and certification and unsure of the level of certification that you should seek, then here is a basic guide:

The beginners and newbies without any BA experience should pursue ECBA.

For professionals with 2+ years of BA, work-experience should pursue CCBA.

For professionals with 5+ years of BA, work-experience should pursue CBAP.

There are many other intangible benefits of learning and certification like

Improved confidence
Making one a trusted leader by management
A huge help in navigating the job market
Improved ability to guide and mentor team members
Ability to provide better business opportunities/decisions to stakeholders
Improved ability to lead successful change efforts
Higher productivity and better self-esteem

Handling Yourself – Physically, Mentally, and Emotionally

Exercise – Find time for exercise to keep yourself physically fit – it’s proven that exercise helps us release chemicals like endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine that boosts our sense of well-being and suppresses hormones that cause depression and anxiety.
Meditation – Helps you remain calm among stressful and hectic schedules and when things go out of your control.
Emotionally – Stay in touch with friends and immediate family members over the phone, messages, video calls to make one feel connected and emotionally secured.
Pick up hobbies that make you happy like cooking, painting, music or gardening, etc, which can be done without getting out or risking your safety.
Unwind during the weekends and try to destress yourself.
Share responsibilities at home with your partner. Teach your kids to take responsibility for keeping their room clean, picking up things after their play hours, helping you with chores like watering plants, laundry, pet care, etc.

Cut yourself from negativity.

We don’t control many things in our lives, but we certainly control the way we react or respond to it Hence, it’s important to keep the positive side up and negativity at bay, be it negative people, news, incident, or thoughts.

Focus on the IMPACT you create

See the value you bring to the table in your project.
Acknowledge the contributions you make to the stakeholders.
Value the effort saving with automation you made
Value your impact on your family
Don’t measure things with the number of unsuccessful attempts to see your resilience and persistence.

Remember that it’s not the situation that makes or breaks you; it’s how you respond to it that makes all the difference. When you stay positive, you pass on the positive energy to your team and your immediate family, and the people around you.

Your organization, team, and family need the most positive version of you NOW.

Rising to the Challenge

Written by Anna Rajander on March 3, 2021. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Rising to the Challenge

Visions. Missions. Goals. Objectives. They are great for creating a shared understanding and bringing teams together for a common purpose… until they’re not.

Having a team contribute to the goals and objectives for their project or area can be a great way to communicate the organisations vision and promote team cohesion. Measuring progress against objectives can help maintain momentum and allow the team to see progress, identify issues, and share success.

Sounds great, right? Or alternatively…

Visions and goals are just overly-optimistic business jargon that serve no real purpose. They have no bearing on my work and discussing them is a waste of time when I could be doing something more important. Objectives are just a way for management to shirk their responsibilities, and measuring objectives leads to unnecessary paperwork and micromanagement.

As Business Analysts, it is drilled into us how important a shared vision and/or goal is when coordinating a team of individuals to implement and sustain business change. Cascading visions and objectives can be a great way to align work across an organisation, ensuring the goals and objectives of the component parts contribute to the organisation vision and/or mission as-a-whole. It is accepted practice to set, regularly review and tweak goals and objectives, and there are several techniques to support the discovery, definition, communication and monitoring of goals and objectives, including MOST, SMART, and Balanced Scorecards.

However, for some, it can be hard to see the point of goal and objective setting. There can be a variety of reasons for this, including but not limited to:

Feeling threatened by the prospect of being managed/measured
Disappointment with previous efforts to define and deliver on goals and objectives
Difficulty seeing how the wider vision relates to their day-to-day work
General resistance to change

In cases where you have several individuals that feel this way, trying to define goals and objectives as a group is likely to prove fruitless.

So how can you bring a team together without a shared goal? Are there other ways to create a clear, shared purpose for a team?

The Challenge.

An alternative to setting a goal is to set a challenge. Having a challenge to overcome can create the clear direction and purpose required to coordinate work across a team.

The difference between a goal and a challenge you ask? Not a lot.

Overcoming a challenge is as good a goal as any. However, while the end-result may be the same, the mindset for getting there can be quite different:

‘How can we contribute to the organisation vision?’ vs. ‘What challenges do we face in meeting the demands of the organisation?’
‘What is our common purpose?’ vs. ‘What is stopping us from moving forward together?’
- ‘How do we measure progress against the objective?’ vs. ‘What steps have we taken to overcome the challenge?’

In the same way you can analyse and decompose goals to create objectives and requirements, a challenge can be further decomposed into target conditions and steps. Ultimately, challenges can be reworded to create goals, target conditions objectives, and steps requirements – meaning they can still be analysed and aligned to the visions/goals of the wider organisation/department.

Are there techniques that can help?

Yes, there are. More generic techniques such as Brainstorming, Mind Mapping and Affinity Mapping can help with the initial identification of challenges. However, when it comes to decomposing challenges into target conditions and steps, the A3 is a particularly useful technique.

The A3 (so named because they generally cover a single sheet of landscape A3) is a technique that has been developed and used as part of the Toyota Kata and adopted by Lean organisations. It is used to identify, define and manage process improvements. While Toyota uses A3’s as part of a wider process improvement philosophy and cultural mindset, an A3 can be a powerful stand-alone technique for supporting the discovery, definition and documentation of challenges, as well as record any progress in overcoming them.

The main idea behind the A3 can be summarised in four simple steps:

Understand the Challenge
Grasp the Current Condition
Establish the next Target Condition
Experiment towards the Target Condition

Templates for setting out an A3 vary. I have provided an example below. However, it is important to note that regardless of how sections are laid out on the page, it is important that the four key elements of the A3 are tackled in the order set out above – Challenge, Current Condition, Target Condition, Experiments. It’s also important to realise that the Target Condition should be the next Target Condition – there may be multiple Target Conditions before a Challenge is overcome.

There are a couple of benefits to using the A3 technique:

Its very logical, so will likely suit people who have a more logical mindset
It’s can be used as a way of documenting and allocating discrete pieces of work
It works well for situations where the path from the Current to the Target Condition is unclear, allowing time to think, explore options, and experiment – rather than feeling forced to articulate a solution straight away.

In the end…

Challenges and Target Conditions may be used as an alternative to the traditional approach of setting cascading goals and objectives. Involving team members in the process of discovering and defining challenges can be a good team-building exercise, especially in circumstances where a team feel removed from the vision of the wider organisation. A3’s can be used as a framework for documenting challenges and working towards overcoming them. While not a panacea for dealing with resistors and detractors, it is another tool that may prove useful in any journey the involves coordinating groups of people, aligning goals and objectives, and creating a shared vision to support the successful implementation of business change.

Resources:

Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Rother, Mike, 2009.

Anna Rajander, February 2021.

Resources for the Investigative Analyst: Take your pick!

Written by Divya Kishore on January 14, 2021. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Resources for the Investigative Analyst: Take your pick!

Being a Business Analyst (BA) is a lot like being an investigative journalist.

You often must dig through lots of seemingly useless information to find the truth that can set you on the right path for your project.

Here are a few frequently overlooked items that you can utilize as resources and analyze to help uncover useful information:

1) Meeting Recordings: What can I gain by listening to a recording? Well, it gives you an opportunity to pause and think through:

What a stakeholder quoted?
What a developer suggested?
What a tester recommended?

These meetings can be analyzed and translated into process flows or current state diagrams. At the very least, by hearing a recording, you are now caught up with what was missed!

2) Presentations: I like to observe how slides are presented and structured during meetings. When slides have an organic progression of a topic, it is easy to follow along. When slides have too much information, I can get lost. Revisiting the slide deck after the meetings can help gain a better understanding of the topic or prompt you to jot down follow up questions. Analyzing the style or format of the slides that the author applied can trigger ideas or suggestions for your next presentation!

3) Email: Checking your inbox is like a daily chore in our professional and personal lives. What kind of analysis could I perform? Watch for those long email chains that includes all the back-and-forth conversations, they could be a potential input for Responsibility/ RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) matrix. Yes, it is exhausting to scroll all the way down, but it gives you an understanding of all the stakeholders involved and can provide a fuller perspective.

4) Notes: Missed attending a meeting? Missed recording a meeting? Notes can come to the rescue. Raw or clean notes, they are extremely helpful to get a coworker caught up or can be a memory refresher. In addition, notes can be a powerful input to build decision logs or can feed an action item tracker. Tada, now I know why we did what we did!

5) Chat conversations: I was working on a project one time and there was some confusion about the scope. I recalled I had a casual chat conversation a long time ago relating to the same project with the developer. I searched my chat history and bingo! I was able to pull up what we had chatted about. Fast forward…six months later, this back in the day chat helped the developer and I comprehend what was discussed in the past, what was missed in the previous release and perform a comparative analysis to identify the scope.

6) Artifacts: Grab a document or a diagram that was probably created by a team member or your peer. Study their style and how you can improve your next set of deliverables. Perhaps, it could be an eye opener to how one of the artifacts that you had authored in the past could have been trimmed down by replacing the written content with diagrams instead.

Conclusion:

Next time, when you are wondering, how to make information gathering more productive, I hope the above ideas can lend a helping hand and prove to be beneficial in your next investigation journey. Remember, it is the little things that can make a big difference or rather the little clues that can lead to the ultimate truth!