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Accomplish Your Dreams NOW: The Easy Guide to Setting Goals

Note: Here is the 3rd episode of my ‘Coach Clinton 7-Steps to Accomplishment Methodology’ where I had set the stage for putting you on the track of accomplishment.

To get the most out of this article as well as the ones that will follow, I would suggest you to read the first article and second article before moving forward.

In the 7-step journey towards a successful and satisfying life, the piece that we are going to fit in today is one whose importance cannot be overemphasized.

Do you remember the fable about “The Ant and the Grasshopper”? The ant was diligent and planned for winter by gathering and storing food. What did the grasshopper do? It was short-sighted, only focusing on the present and failed to take heed toward preparation. The ending result? The grasshopper had no food and starved. The moral of the story is best summarized in the old adage – “If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.”

In the first step, appraise, you saw the importance of evaluating yourself and your performance in order to separate the value-adding habits and patterns from the hazardous ones and then focusing on the actions that will actually help you materialize your accomplishments.

Related Article: It’s Time to View Your Role as a Communication Expert

Moving forward, we will discuss the extremely important step, ascertain, that involves setting up goals for yourself that will drive your accomplishments and help you stay on track until the final objectives are achieved.

Why set goals?

You cannot achieve anything unless and until there is a clear and definite goal in front of you. Having a set of goals in front of you is crucial to your success because you can easily get distracted by other urgent yet unimportant things that won’t contribute towards your accomplishments.

In a landmark research study, American psychologist, Edwin Locke and his colleagues proved the fact that the presence of challenging goals enhances performance as compared to situations where there are easy goals, ambiguous goals or no goals at all. It is of utmost importance to set yourself goals because:

  • Goals add clarity to your vision
  • Goals help you break overwhelming feats into small, doable tasks
  • Goals give you a sense of accomplishment and the motivation to keep moving forward
  • Goals provide you feedback on your performance to be used for continuous improvement
  • Goals let you weed out the energy parasites from your life and help you focus only on valuable tasks

Elements of effective goals

Edwin Locke also proposed an influential theory by the name of ‘goal setting theory’ that rolls out the 5 basic characteristics of a successful goal(s). The following 5 principles, if kept in view, while setting your goals can improve the chances that a certain goal will be achieved:

  1. Clarity
  2. Challenge
  3. Commitment
  4. Feedback
  5. Complexity

There is another framework called the SMART criteria that can help you set successful goals. SMART is the abbreviation of the following parameters that can help you set goals with a higher chance of success:

  1. Specific
  2. Measurable
  3. Achievable
  4. Realistic
  5. Time-bound

Based on these two guidelines, you can make sure that your goals will be more likely to yield a successful outcome and contribute towards your life’s bigger ambitions.

Goal Setting Process

Now that there is no room for any doubt left about the importance of goal setting, you need to determine your goals and pursue them religiously if you are interested in living an accomplished and productive life. Since these goals will be deciding your fate, there must be enough due diligence going into the process rather than casually selecting your goals and wasting your time and energy – and having them revised later on.
Based on my extensive experience helping others with their goals, I recommend to use the process laid out here while setting your goals.

Step 1 – Goal Formulation

Remember the self-assessment diagnosis that I explained in my last article? In that article, I introduced you to self-assessment tools like The Innovator’s DNA Assessment, Gallup’s Clifton StrengthsFinder Assessment, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) Personality Inventory and DiSC Personality Test. Using these, and many other similar tools, you need to get to know yourself in greater depth and identify your strengths and weaknesses so that you can leverage your strong points to accelerate your success and find ways to eliminate the shortfalls.

To start with, you will formulate your goals at three levels:

  1. Long Term / Strategic Goals – First of all, you will sit down and contemplate on the ultimate demands that you want to place on yourself. Through this thinking process, you will visualize what you want to achieve and what you want to become. By doing this, you will be able to construct your long-term goals that will be the guiding light for all your efforts, from this point forward.
  2. Medium Term Goals – Once the high-level goals are in place, you will have to draw up the supporting goals that will be required to keep you on the right track – a track that leads to the achievement of your strategic goals.
  3. Short Term Goals – While keeping the ultimate objective(s) in view, you need to devise the short term goals with the intent to break down the sizeable long-term goals into manageable milestones. These goals when duly achieved will take you closer to the fulfillment of your life’s purpose.

Step 2 – Goal Categorization & Prioritization

In the second step, you will categorize all your goals by looking at each one and assigning it an appropriate label. Then you will pick out the themes and make an exhaustive list of all the themes that your goals fall into.
With the category list in front of you, you can assign a priority to each category depending on how much value you give to each one. After assigning a priority to all the categories, you will now have a list of categories or themes which you want to pursue in the shape of goals along with a guideline regarding which one to assign more energies, resources and your precious time.

Step 3 – Monthly Plan Development

Napoleon Hill very rightly said that “A goal is a dream with a deadline”.

Now that you are clear about your goals and their priority, it is time that you develop a monthly plan and convert your goals into monthly deliverables. At the end of each month, you will have to sit down and track your actual progress in the light of your monthly plan. In case you did not meet any deadline, you need to analyze that lapse and uncover the reason behind it so that it won’t happen in future.

Step 4 – Weekly Plan Development

People tend to carry great dreams in their minds throughout their lives, but most of them remain unfulfilled because people are overwhelmed by the sheer size of their wishes and dreams and end up giving up all hope for achieving those dreams. If any objective is broken down into challenging yet reasonable sub-tasks, it becomes easier to believe that you will make it through and finally achieve that goal, no matter how big and ambitious the idea might be.
So starting with the first goal, break it down into tasks/steps and assign weekly completion of tasks for the goal based on your best judgment as to your ability and time to complete. Then stick to the plan and make sure that your weekly objectives are met without fail.

Now you have all you need to start developing, prioritizing and breaking down your goals into smaller tasks. You must take out some quiet time and sit down to cover this tremendously important step. When you are done with your goal development, you will come much closer to the fulfillment of your life’s dreams and aspirations.

Time is very limited and running fast – so take action NOW and get busy chalking out your goals.

An Essential App for the Business Analyst: Paper by Fifty Three

I’m going old school in a new way…Paper.

Paper is an application for iOS that is distributed by Fifty Three. I know a lot of individuals will comment that Paper doesn’t “do” enough, but what it does do is simple, elegant and, most of all, useful to a business analyst with a creative bent.

Did you ever sit in a meeting and start riffing with someone, but the whiteboard is marked up and there is a “Do Not Erase!” circled in the corner? Or, worse, no whiteboard in the room.

Perhaps you’ve experienced the agony of having a great idea on how something should flow when you are sitting in a car on a long drive with a colleague, but you don’t have any paper to write it out?

Maybe, like me, you just need a visual to really solidify the ideas people are sharing.

If these situations irritate you, and you have your phone, look no further for a quick and handy solution—Paper!

Paper allows you to draw things freehand, take a picture and draw on the picture, or just take notes. The product is easily shared and can really help in those situations where you need to do something NOW, but you don’t have all of your normal tools at hand.

Related Article: 10 Essential Apps for the Business Analyst

In addition, Fifty Three makes a product called Pencil which is a pretty sweet stylus. Not as utilitarian as I usually need for work, but if you are an artistic soul (which I am in my free time), this stylus rocks.

Here are just some of the examples where I’ve used Paper while I’m on the go to help with my project management/business analyst activities:

  • Quick screen mock ups
  • Process flows
  • Checklists
  • Photograph of a whiteboard and then marking it up for edits

Here’s an example of the power of Paper by Fifty Three. Let’s say you’re reviewing your traditional pen and paper interview notes and you find a statement, “Client requests an interactive dashboard that shows project ROI by fiscal year.” You begin to wrack your brain trying to understand the client’s vision because you neglected to jot down the details. Adding to this stress, you come to the realization that you must swallow your pride and return to the client to grab the details. Now, here’s how Paper by Fifty Three can help.

For this example, I’ve made a private space for the interview. Within this space, I’ve included the same vague interview note; however, I’ve sat with the client to sketch out a high-level framework of this dashboard. Note how the level of “interaction” is really limited to “VCR” buttons – a detail you would’ve never known by the interview note alone.

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As a PM/BA, I find that every added bit of functionality and efficiency can help. Paper works for me.

Becoming the Trusted Advisor

A couple of months ago I wrote on the value of the business analyst being a trusted adviser to many people on the project team and within the organization.  Read The Value of Business Analysis: The Trusted Advisor to see that discussion. 

I conveyed the business value of becoming that trusted advisor, but I didn’t tell you how to get there.  So if you read that article and thought to yourself “well that is all fine and dandy, but how do I become the trusted advisor to everyone within my company?”  Well, read on.

Set Expectations

Let your stakeholders know what is coming up next.  You shouldn’t leave anyone questioning next steps or action items; always call those out for both yourself and other team members.  When you take ownership of action items, that is called making a commitment.  It shows a willingness to be held accountable to complete the action item on time.  It does not guarantee completion on time, just shows your willingness to accept the responsibility.  There are many things that can crop up that get in the way of meeting commitments once they are made but never shy away from accepting the responsibility. This is a major way to earn respect.

When action items are assigned to other stakeholders on the team, especially when they intersect with action items assigned to you, check on their progress from time to time.  Your items may have a dependency on other’s action items or vice versa.  In the latter case, stay in contact with that team member and let them know your progress so that they may plan out their work on their action items.  When monitoring the progress of others, do it in a very non-intrusive and non-authoritative way.  Typically, you won’t have authority over someone else’s work so approach this from a co-worker checking on a friend or offering a helping hand.

Deliver

Now that you have made the commitment to take responsibility for an action item or task deliver on it.  Always work to finish your assigned tasks ahead of schedule so when those inevitable items pop up that take your time away from these tasks, you still have time to get back to it and deliver on time.  In this way your team members don’t see all your tasks slipping behind schedule. This is a major way to lose trust.  Be creative when the situation calls for it to complete task assignments.

I was always astounded by my children who always looked like they were trying to get a “C” in every class in school.  A “C” is a passing grade right…the problem was that far too many times they missed that “C”, and sometimes by a lot; so what did they end up with…a “D” or “F”.  When I was in school I always tried for an “A” in every class, whether I liked the subject or not.  So when I didn’t meet expectations what did I end up with….a higher GPA than my kids did.

Communicate

You know the old adage…communicate early, communicate often.  This ties back to setting expectations.  Let your team members know what to expect from you, so they can know how to work with you.  When new issues or risks pop up, identify and communicate them early so they can be properly managed.  Raise those red flags early.

Communicate bad news early.  When the project is behind schedule, when it needs more resources, or when lack of stakeholder engagement is slowing the project, address the issue with the project manager and/or project sponsor.  Be prepared with information and examples, and possibly a plan of action to get back on track.  This again ties back to setting expectations, are things slipping behind because expectations weren’t properly set or communicated?


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Provide frequent updates to the project manager, project sponsor or other stakeholders on your work or the project solution.  Survey your stakeholders to determine the right level and frequency of communication.

Be Consistent

Be consistent in your setting of expectations, making commitments, communication, and interactions with your stakeholders.  Consistency is at the heart of integrity.  Inconsistency tends to build walls between people and inhibit collaboration.  When people don’t know how you will act or react, they may shy away from approaching or engaging you.  As a business analyst you need information, and when your stakeholders do not wish to interact with you or discuss issues in an open way, this impedes your ability to get the information you need to be effective.

Have the Courage to Challenge Appropriately

I will combine lessons from Elizabeth Larson, Rich Larson and Bob (BobtheBA) Prentiss to say have the courage to challenge appropriately.  It takes courage to deliver bad news or just say “No” to someone.  You may see how a simple “No” won’t go very far; people  will find other avenues to get what they want if they see you as a roadblock.  So be prepared to back up that “No” with solid evidence, data and/or facts.  As Elizabeth says ”Courage without preparation is foolish.”

You will not challenge every idea that others have; that  is truly foolish.  Make sure you take the time to understand fully the idea and reasoning behind it.  Determine if the idea has value and feasibility.  Take a structured approach to determining when it is time to challenge an idea.  When you do challenge, make sure you do it with respect to everyone including those that presented the idea to the group.  Make sure your challenge isn’t perceived as offensive or confrontational.  This is another good way to destroy trust.

To Gain Respect, Show Respect

This should go without saying, if you want respect you have to earn it.  One of the best ways to earn respect is to show it to others.  Respect every stakeholder’s expertise in their subject matter or domain.  Respect and acknowledge everyone’s contribution toward the common goal.  Respect their role within the team and organization.

Also, remember that your role within the organization is one of the newest, and not everyone has worked with a business analyst before or knows how to interact with that role.  So some education of your role within the team and organization may be in order.  Take a coaching approach to this opportunity and don’t make any feel dumb because they don’t know this yet.

Be Proactive

Anticipate the needs of others.  Not only your project manager and business stakeholders but your technical resources as well.  When preparing a presentation to management or your project team, anticipate questions you will get and be prepared to answer them.  Have adequate examples and models prepared to demonstrate an idea or concept.

When issues or risks arise, identify and communicate them early.  Possibly prepare an action or risk mitigation plan for it.  Don’t allow tasks to slip so far behind that it affects the project schedule and is noticeable by everyone, communicate roadblocks and other commitments, so team members understand the conflicts and pressures. In this way they understand that slippage isn’t because you are lazy; communicate the situation.

Take responsibility for action items and tasks quickly; ask for them, don’t wait for them to be assigned to you.

Be Authentic

Being authentic is simply being yourself.  Be sincere, speak from the heart, be respectful and be empathetic. Don’t mix your words in a cloud of ambiguity; say what you mean and mean what you say. Take the time to build relationships with your team members and stakeholders.  Be interested in their situation and ideas.  Understand their perspective, motivations and attitudes.  If you are not truly interested in their perspective, motivations and ideas; then don’t pretend that you are.  However, you will find how much harder it is to work as a business analyst when you don’t understand your stakeholders.

If you are able to master these skills and competencies, you will gain the trust and respect of your stakeholders.  Remember, that it takes much longer to regain respect and trust once destroyed then it does to earn it in the first place.  So take the easy road and earn that trust from the first encounter with every stakeholder and work vigorously to keep that trust.  Respect each stakeholder’s role in the project and organization, show your capabilities and you will earn their trust.

If you would like some additional reading on this topic, I suggest you take a look at:

  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey (2013)
  • The Influencing Formula: How to Become a Trusted Advisor and Influence Without Authority by Elizabeth Larson and Richard Larson of Watermark Learning (2012)
  • The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything by Stephen M. R. Covey (2008)
  • Influence Without Authority by Allan R. Cohen  and David L. Bradford (2005)
  • The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford (2001)

Starting with the Man in the Mirror: Using Assessments to Drive Your Accomplishments

Note: Here is the first sequel to my ‘Coach Clinton 7-Steps to Accomplishment Methodology’ article where I had set the stage for putting you on the track of accomplishment. If you want to pick up something practical from this article and the ones following, I would suggest you to read the aforementioned article first, if you haven’t already.

If you are ready to do something that is nothing less than remarkable and committed to breaking all the barriers that are blocking your path to success – you are set to follow the Coach Clinton 7-Steps to Accomplishment Methodology.

Today in this post, we will dissect the first step ‘Appraise’ which is the starting point of your journey. You are starting the journey toward your destination by analyzing the person who is staring back at you in the mirror. The process of appraising yourself falls under the first phase i.e. the Mind Mapping phase. Now the first question that you should be asking is ‘What on earth is a mind map?’ Well, that question is best suited for Tony Buzan, the inventor of this technique:


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“A Mind Map is a powerful graphic technique which provides a universal key to unlock the potential of the brain. It harnesses the full range of cortical skills – word, image, number, logic, rhythm, color and spatial awareness – in a single, uniquely powerful manner. In so doing, it gives you the freedom to roam the infinite expanses of your brain. The Mind Map can be applied to every aspect of life where improved learning and clearer thinking will enhance human performance.”1

In other words, a mind map is a graphic or a visual thinking tool that lets you plot your ideas and generate new ones by breaking large blocks of thoughts into smaller intelligible pieces. In the mind mapping phase, you will create a visual log of your goals and plan your journey effectively.

As mentioned in the last article, appraising in this context means assessing your current state of performance and identifying the factors that aid in enhancing your performance.

There are a number of assessment tools out there, and you need first to decide the tool that will bring out the best results for you. These tools focus on a number of aspects of your personality, your actions and habits, your strengths, your behaviors under stress, or your career options. In completing the assessments, it is imperative that you are specific about what you are assessing and answer each question honestly. It is also important to have a clear understanding and appreciation of your results. Do not judge yourself or your responses. The only way to effectively maximize your potential and create change is to accept what you’ve learned from the assessments and seek to comprehend them. Once all results have been received, the information will later be used to create an actionable plan for improvement.

Use of assessment tools is absolutely necessary. In order for you to reach your desired ending destination, you must first have clarity on your starting point. The assessments offer you the requirements needed to accelerate the speed of your journey.

The first step is to understand the nature of the tools available for assessment and then move on to deploying a specific tool that seems to fit the bill.

The discussion that follows is aimed at introducing you to a few assessment tools that are worth considering, when you are shopping for the most suitable assessment:

  • The Innovator’s DNA Assessment – As the name suggests, this tool’s foremost focus is to unearth the innovative or creative capabilities of an individual. This assessment is based on five specific skills i.e. Associating, Questioning, Observing, Networking, and Experimenting. The renowned developers of this assessment system, Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen & Clayton M. Christensen, have identified these five innovation capabilities after years of rigorous research. The Self & 360 Assessments tools provide individuals with a personalized Innovation Profile, detailed scores for their Courage to Innovate, Discovery Skills, and Delivery Skills.
  • Gallup’s Clifton StrengthsFinder Assessment – This assessment tool digs deep into the test taker’s personality and reports the most prominent strengths of the individual. These strengths then can be used to identify the types of activities that will be most suited for a certain person. The assessment presents the individuals with 177 pairs of statements that offer the opportunity to describe themselves in a number of different angles and perspectives. The test-takers are then required to choose the statements that best describe them in a limited period of time.
  • Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) Personality Inventory – MBTI is a widely used personality assessment tool that categorizes people in 16 different personality types – based on a number of individual characteristics derived from Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types. The main ingredients of a MBTI profile is made up of a 4-item combination of these characteristics:
Extraversion or Introversion (E or I)
Sensing or Intuition (S or N)
Thinking or Feeling (T or F)
Judging or Perceiving (J or P)

So the result that you will get a four-letter profile (for example ISTJ or ENTJ) along with a detailed insight about that profile including the most suitable professions for your type of personality.

  • DiSC Personality Test – DiSC is another powerful personality assessment tool that provides the opportunity to have a closer look at one’s self – including the motivations, conflict management / self-management capabilities and problem-solving skills. DiSC is the acronym for:
Dominance – emphasis on accomplishing results
Influence – emphasis on influencing or persuading others
Steadiness – emphasis on cooperation, sincerity and dependability
Conscientiousness – emphasis on quality and accuracy, expertise, competency

Now that you have been introduced to the idea of using assessment tools to achieve the optimum performance levels, you should dig into the tools discussed above and see which one seems to stand out to you the most. This is not a comprehensive list; it is however, a list of a few of my personal favorites. This evaluation should be based on the objectives that you plan to achieve from this crucial exercise. If you really want to get the most out of it, I will advise you to research additional tools that are best suited for your personal needs.

For now, I’m leaving you with the task of looking at yourself in the mirror and throwing some tough questions at the person staring back at you – who is this person and how can I make use of assessments to know this person inside out. The answers to these important questions will pave the way for the next step that is goal-setting for realizing your dreams, discussed in the next article in this series.

Until then, start the process of honestly getting to know yourself.

[1] Source: http://www.tonybuzan.com/about/mind-mapping

An IT BA on a Cross-Functional Technology Team

If you, like me, have spent most of your BA life sitting amongst other BAs or inside a cluster of business partners, you can appreciate the “shock and awe” I experienced moving into a workspace filled with engineers and QAs.

Half of our IT team re-orged into system-specific cross-functional teams. The business analysts combined with the QAs, system engineers and even a database engineer (DBE) or two to form a cohesive group of support, brainstorming and execution. I went through this transformation last year and can say the experience has been nothing less than eye-opening.
Keeping the engineering side of your business in focus is important for any BA, but when our business wants to turn left and our engineers – developer, programmers, DBEs, etc. – are diligently working on how to use the latest technology to turn right, we find out how painful it can be!

The engineers (I lovingly refer to them as my Geeks) are as committed to driving our business as I am and are always looking for the inches of improvement around us. Suddenly, the total commitment to our business partners involves some tough choices for me, the BA.

One day I’m in a devoted business partnership, the next day I’m in a devoted partnership of driving the business during system upgrades and failovers!

The first thing that shocked me on the Geek-filled team was finding out I was actually skating on thin ice all those years as I was driving our business forward on top of new technology. Yes, I understood how the system worked and what some of the possibilities were, but all that time the engineers were looking for better ways and innovating like crazy. Suddenly, I understand why the engineering response to my change requests was often “WHAT?”, “WHEN?”, “WHY?” and sometimes “Wait!” I was driving the business on top of a system or systems the Geeks were constantly improving. Understand, our company culture is deeply ingrained in all team members, but sometimes during those days as a business BA I wondered if the Geeks and I worked at the same place. Getting on the same page, or not colliding on the same page, was the source for a LOT of discussions, but, the real challenge had been making the business better on top of the ice and how to make the system better below.


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The second “wake up” moment was when I spent the first month with my Geek team and realized we had been meeting and making decisions over the years while saying the same words and meaning completely different things. For example, I have used the term Doc Type for about 14 years and never knew the engineers supporting my system have been mentally translating it to Doc Type Number. Only when I physically joined their world did I hear the comment from one to another “She means the number.” A simple difference, but really got me thinking. Geeks talk differently. In my part of the world, they speak English, but a different kind of English. There I was, thinking I was an expert at translating technical changes into business-speak, and I found myself needing to come up to speed on translating geek-speak to technical changes to business-speak.

Thankfully, I landed on a team with patient engineers and QAs. I think this patient Geek may be few and far between, but if you find one – listen and learn! My experience with Geeks is that they run fast and when they get an idea – watch out! A discussion can go from clear and orderly to “Wait, what if we do ….” and “No, I heard about something that ….” REAL fast. Your BA skills are needed like no time before. Remember how you led that meeting with business big shots and their conflicting agendas? Child’s play. Now you need your special skills, as I like to say, to herd cats. You are dealing with super-smart, ready-to-execute, get-it-done individuals and what we don’t EVER want to do is stop that innovation and passion for execution.

You just want to figure out how to do what our business needs us to do and make it to your next meeting (or lunch) on time. Remember how I mentioned I work with patient engineers? Well, even their patience is limited when it comes to asking them to remind me (again) what a thread is. You will want to decide what questions you need to ask during a meeting like this and what questions can wait.

My suggestions, if you find yourself gifted with an opportunity to work on a cross-functional technology team:

  1. Concentrate on just listening during your first few team meetings. Ask an engineer or QA afterwards to translate what you didn’t quite “get”.
  2. Slowly start asking questions to find out if anything on the agenda will affect your business partners. This is a way to bring the business closer to your engineers, QAs and DBEs.
  3. Add something to the agenda that is pure BA, pure business. Get ready for odd looks, questions and maybe even some chuckles. This is where you find out how wide the chasm is between what your Geeks think the company does, and what you know it does.
  4. Make an effort to educate your team members as you get educated yourself. Share your current business meeting challenge, your thoughts on acceptance criteria for a task or other things in your typical BA day. Pretty soon you find the discussions become mutually informative, and the action items have you all on the same page.
  5. “BA” for your engineers! Give them the support and input they probably didn’t know they could ask for. Do the analysis, contact the subject matter experts for any clarifications, and learn to test something from the very bowels of the code. Show your cross-functional team what they have been missing all this time and why they need you in their lives!
  6. Lastly, enjoy the most exciting team experience you have ever experienced. Dive deep, sweat a little and celebrate the big wins as a cross-functional team.