Just BA things: On becoming a business analyst

I’m regularly asked questions by lovely people who are interested in becoming business analysts. Unfortunately are no easy answers here, but I have had a go at distilling what I learnt during my time as a BA, and want to pay forward anything that I can. To those that helped get me to where I am today, I thank you, and I hope you can see your influence within. 💟

If you are searching. I really hope you find some of what you need in here.

First things first

If you’re not a BA yet, it is a difficult thing to make a change. But there are steps that can be taken to try to best represent yourself.

What the cluey people are looking for is potential. Early measure of this include things like mindset, behavior and passion. That, and hunger to learn, change, and grow. (It takes a lot to get a person to be self aware enough to want to change, let alone to have the commitment to be able to)

So think about these things, be deliberate, self aware & curious about what each of these things means for you. Each of these topics are worth investigating and exploring.

I am going to list a lot of books during this document. This does not mean I expect you to read them all.

📚 There are great books that might help with some of these things!

• “Mindset” by Carol Dweck
• “Drive” by Dan Pink
• “Daring greatly” by Brene Brown
• “Toyota Kata” by Mike Rother

Competencies

Next we look at the “core competencies” of a BA… basically the fundamental things about you that need to be, or become true, for this to be the right opportunity to pursue.

Specific competencies I was recommended in the early days were things like the below.

• Analytical skills: To analyse means to break a topic or concept down into its parts in order to inspect and understand it, and to restructure those parts in a way that makes sense to you. As a BA this means sitting with a problem. Understanding the impact. Translating to people.
• Researching: How you go about learning, developing understanding.
• Proactivity: Resolving things (getting to outcomes), getting help, “finding out”
• Problem solving ability: Facilitate & communicate to help “solve” a problem (you’re not there to solve though, one person doesn’t solve it. There are always options, and together you navigate towards the best one).
• Personable skills: Active listening, developing rapport, emotional intelligence, sensitivity, ability to understand and wield influence
• Asking questions: To support the rest

Each of these can be developed. Some will be natural, others will not. Some will be strengths, others will be weaker. Think about how you can model and develop these things even today.

📚 Some resources would be things like:

• “Radical candor” by Kim Scott
• “A more beautiful question” by Warren Berger
• “Emotional intelligence” by Daniel Goleman
• The Cynefin framework for problem domains
• DiSC influence styles (and other influence frameworks)
• “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman
• “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R Covey

Relationships

Underlying everything, and I mean everything, as a BA, is relationships.

There are different kinds of relationships that we will be involved in as a BA. Here are some things to consider:

• How do you go about forming relationships with different people?
• How do you communicate with different types of people? How do you identify different needs, personality types, styles, and adjust accordingly?
• What is emotional intelligence? What is empathy? How do you build it?

Different relationships that you will need to invest in will include…

Team:

• What is their way of working?
• Where does a BA fit in?
• What are the things I notice?
• How can I make an impact?
• What is the wider structure of the team from an engineering perspective? What are the different roles & responsibilities in the area?

Stakeholders:

• What are stakeholders?
• Who are my stakeholders? How do I keep track of them?
• How do I manage them, their expectations?

Customers:

• Who are my customers? How are they different from one another?
• What matters to them?
• Why does it matter to them?

Skills (Aka ”toolkit”)

Then we look at the skills a BA might have. Their toolkit. Each BA has their own, I will try to share mine. Your job is to figure out what other tools are out there, and build your own.

• Mapping techniques (Process mapping, impact mapping,
• Facilitation techniques
• User story mapping & slicing
• INVEST user stories
• Behavioral Driven Development, Test Driven Development, Gherkin
• Gap analysis
• Stakeholder mapping
• Problem statements
• Lean canvas

This list is in no particular order, and is not exhaustive. I suggest talking to other BAs, and creating your own list. Even consider adding to this for me!

Next you can begin to see how the other parts all come together

What is “Value”?

Business Analysts need to always have the customer in mind. Who is the customer, and what matters to them? If you know who your customers are, and what matters to them, then you can identify customer value. Customer value is something specific, measurable, and deliverable, that improves the lives of your customers.

BAs champion value.

Learn about your customers, and what they value. Product & design people should be able to help you out!

Understanding problems

Before you start trying to solve problems, you first have to understand them. Problems have depth, and breath. The longer you spend in a space, the better you understand, and this understanding can effect the final outcome. I can’t tell you how many times I have thought that I knew the answer, before doing some more learning and finding there was a lot more to understand.

Understanding is key. Your growing understanding, which leaves to growing and evolving level of shared understanding in the team. This involves things like:

• Gathering requirements from wherever they might be — where are they? Recording your findings.
• Asking questions. Curiosity. Avoiding jumping to the first obvious solution. Active listening.
• Generating shared understanding. How do you get the team’s understanding up? How do you articulate and share what you have learnt, or take the team on a journey?
• Building domain context (not becoming a domain expert) over time, gathering the right information at the right time to inform your decisions.
• Documentation!

Generating options

Next while you are building out understanding, you are considering the various options that might be available. I’ve said it before, everybody can come up with a solution when faced with a problem. How do you sit with that, and balance all those options? How do you decide? How do you compare one solution with another?

There are some bits that can support this:

• Ask yourself questions. What are the various ways that this problem can be solved? (Including: “what happens if we do nothing?”)
• Design thinking, the double diamond, divergence and convergence
• Risk assessment
• Impact mapping, Impact/Effort matrix
• Decision making
• Documentation!!

Facilitating solutions (an outcome)

Everything else is leading to an ultimate outcome. Without an outcome, you are spinning your wheels. The outcome you are trying to achieve is customer value, delivered to a customer.

• How does software delivery work? What does delivery mean? Understand the engineering part of the process.
• Shaping the work. Analysis has helped you understand the work and identify the shape that makes sense for effective delivery
• Slicing is a series of different techniques that assist with the most granular parts of shaping the work. Google “Slicing Heuristics” by Neil Killick. In fact, read just about anything by Neil Killick on this subject.
• Writing user stories is about how to articulate those slices in a way that is focused on customers. Jeff Patton is an excellent role-model here.
• Meeting facilitation is where you involve other people and teams, intentionally, all throughout the process. You need the team at every phase to be effective.
• Estimation & sizing links to slicing and the shape of work too. Understanding what story points are, why we estimate. Why some folks don’t believe in estimation (see #noestimates)
• INVEST (if you search for the term) is a guideline for this breaking down of work that can help provide structure to this process.
• Did I mention documentation?! Seriously, if you were hoping that being “agile”, means you don’t have to write anything down, you’ll be disappointed. This is about finding the right level of documentation for each circumstance. It is an artform in and of itself and a delicate balance to achieve.

Agile, and other methodologies

When you learn about Agile, what you will figure out is that this combination of “understanding problems”, “generating options” and then “facilitating solutions”… Is not a linear process (see “Waterfall Methodology”). The idea is instead, the team will be at different stages of the cycle at all times, and trying to go faster to get to outcomes more reliably. So go and learn about some of these things so you can figure out what I’m talking about!

• The agile manifesto, and the underlying principles
• Kaizen, Continuous Improvement
• Agile frameworks. Scrum, Kanban. Ceremonies etc
• What is the difference between the manifesto, and the frameworks? Why are both important?
• Lean (Lean manufacturing, lean startup, lean canvassing, the theory of constraints) (📗 “The Goal”, 📘 “Lean Startup”)
• Growth Mindset

The very existence of this document is an example of this process. However it has not been delivered in an agile way… due to my preoccupation!

Lastly: Detaching

Particularly as a new BA, you will be taking in a lot of information. You will be recalibrating your definition of “work”. You will be meeting lots of people.

You will sooner or later find yourself overwhelmed. I’d recommend you have a personal practice/discipline that helps you take care of yourself. Otherwise you will lose sleep thinking about work, and potentially find yourself in a mess.

So figure out what works for you.

• Meditation
• Yoga
• Journalling
• Regular exercise

This may be the last thing on this list. But for me, and my career it has been the single most important lesson, and most vital part of the journey. Developing self care and self awareness, above all else, made self improvement, change and personal growth possible.

You have to put the oxygen mask on yourself, before you can help those around you.

Wrapping up

There it is. There is far more out there, and there are others Business Analysts, who have vastly more training & experience, that will have equally different approaches and beliefs.

The key thing you must realise is that you have to find your own way, your own style. Find the approach that resonates with you. Keep your head down, keep moving and growing.

I really hope this helps somebody out, even just a little bit.