How I Explain the BA Role to My Family Lesson Objective: After completing this topic, you ll be able to identify my perspective as your instructor and proceed through the course materials with ease. I m Laura Brandenburg, your instructor at My Business Analysis Career. Today, we re going to talk about how I explain the BA role to my family. And after completing this lesson, you ll be able to describe the essence of business analysis using three distinct metaphors. As you begin your journey in to the business analysis profession, you will be asked many questions. Your family will want to know about this new career you are pursuing, people you meet at network events will be curious about what you do, and well intentioned friends that would like to support your job search want to understand your role and how they can help. Most often, new BA s are stuck and you are probably a bit confused about what exactly is a Business Analyst. And if that is the case, how do you even start to explain it to somebody else? I will share three metaphors that I use to describe business analysis to people outside the profession. Each of these metaphors will help you see a different aspect of the BA role. None of these metaphors are perfect. Metaphors tend to break down at a certain point, but they do all work together. And so, these are going to be touch stones that we ll refer back to as we break apart the pieces of business analysis in future lessons. Business Analysts Build Bridges First, we re going to talk about how Business Analysts build bridges. I want to share three different ways that Business Analysts build bridges and then kind of bring those together for you. Bridge Business and IT First, Business Analysts bridge between business and IT. And we often think first about how a Business Analyst translates business needs or problems to the technical team or in to technical solutions. They might understand what the real problem is that the business needs to have solved, and then help communicate that to the team responsible for implementing that solution, and communicate that to the development team, the infrastructure team, all of the people involved with building that solution. Copyright 2010 Laura Brandenburg http://www.bridging-the-gap.com Page 1 of 7
This also happens in reverse. Sometimes the Business Analyst will be involved in understanding what the technology can do and in communicating the possibilities of that technology back to the business in helping them envision how they can use that technology to address critical paths of business problems. The bridge between business and IT really goes both ways. Often, it involves not just communication one way or the other, but actually reconciling conflicting language and terminology. An IT person might use a database term to refer to a concept and a business person might use a customer facing term,. The BA willbring those together to enable real conversations about the solutions to emerge. And this is when you think about a Business Analyst unleashing their passion for problem solving because they are bringing these sorts of different minded professionals together to solve a real problem and ensure that the actual problem gets solved. Now, not all solutions to all problems are technical. And in this case, the Business Analyst can bridge between multiple stakeholders within the business. So that s the second bridge that we re going to talk about. Bridge Business Stakeholders So when you think about the business, it really helps to break that down in to different stakeholders because each person from the business that you work with will often have their own needs or own agendas. Each person has their own perspective on what is the problem and what a successful solution looks like. The Business Analyst is often involved in driving alignment between these stakeholders and ensuring that the business has a common understanding of the problem. This might involve some negotiation between multiple business units or functional areas from within the organization. Often, what the marketing person wants out of the product might be different than what the customer service representative thinks they can support, and might be different than the finance team thinks that they can bill for. So you have to blend those perspectives together. You really want to gain buy in from all these different business units for that proposed solution before IT builds it. What happens if you don t is late changes come in whenthose stakeholders get involved either during implementation or after the product goes live. When we hear about the costly requirement errors,it comes from that kind of situation. It s usually stakeholders who haven t been involved or weren t aligned on the solution before IT started to build it. Copyright 2010 Laura Brandenburg http://www.bridging-the-gap.com Page 2 of 7
Even within the business, there s another bridge that I want to talk about, and that s between executives and employees. Bridge Executives and Employees Typically, when we think about business stakeholders, we might be thinking of a director or a manager somebody with a fairly high level view of the organization. They re typically the people who might sign off on requirements for thea Business Analyst. But often, as we go through the requirements process, we are dealing with people across all levels of the organization. And so we re dealing with executives, and we re dealing with employees, and everyone in between. So our job as a BA is often to bring those employees into the solution while they can still make an impact on the direction because often they have information that the executives don t. Often, this starts with communicating what those business critical problems are to the employees. You need to gain their trust and earn their commitment to providing the information that you need so that you can actually solve the real problem. As you go through and talk to the employees, you gain insights in to the reality of their day-to-day work. Sometimes the solution the executive thinks will work doesn t really quite mesh up with the day-to-day work of what happens. It is your job as the BA to communicate back or bridge back to the executive team and help them understand how the real problem will be solved day-to-day. This is also a very critical bridge when you are dealing with problems where technology is not even part of the solution at all. Let s say you are investigating a customer service issue or a workflow issue. The entire solution to that problem might be in changing the business process or changing the handoffs between different departments. And it might not have anything to do with technology. So those employees are going to be the people who actually see through the solution for you and implement the solution by changing how they work day to day. Again, we talked about three different bridges. Business Analyst s bridge between business and IT, they bridge between different business stakeholders, and they often bridge between executives and employees. Each of those bridges is a two way street. The Business Analyst is sitting in between. They are not being the go-between necessarily, but are connecting these groups together so that they can have common conversations, share a common set of goals, and most importantly, have a common understanding of the problem and the solution that the project is going to address. Business Analysts are Like Architects Copyright 2010 Laura Brandenburg http://www.bridging-the-gap.com Page 3 of 7
Now we re going to move on to the second metaphor, and that s how Business Analysts are like architects. I want you to take a minute and think about your relationship or your potential relationship with an architect somebody who s going to design the home that you are going to move into. Maybe you ve had this real world situation before, so this will be even more powerful for you. But even if not, I think you can imagine you and your spouse, or your partner, sitting down and deciding that you re going to build a new home from scratch and working with somebody to think about what that home might be like. Understand Real Business (Homeowner) Needs The architect that you re going to meet with is going to come in and want to understand your vision for the new home. This is much like a Business Analyst might go and interview the sponsors or the stakeholders for the project and kind of understand their idea. You might provide examples of homes that you like. You might cut out pictures from magazines, look through architecture books and make some photocopies. You might share information about your style. This is a lot like a stakeholder will share with you the Business Analyst: solutions to their problem or comparable examples. I can t tell you how many times I ve had a stakeholder tell me, I want a product that looks just like Google, or works just like Google. Or, Just like Amazon, right. So these are the real world examples that have some similarity to the end state that they envision for their idea. And it s the same thing as those cut outs that you might give your architect. You might also tell your architect how many bathrooms you want, how many bedrooms, and how big the living room needs to be. You might have some very specific requirements about what you want and the architect is just going to absorb all of that information. And a stakeholder will also be very specific about something. For example, the search needs to work in.31 seconds You ll be trying to place that in the overall business need. If I were an architect and somebody said I want four bathrooms, I would say, Wow, how many people do you have that are going to be staying over? Or I might ask How many kids do you plan on having? In essence, I m trying to understand, How many people will be living in this house that will make four bathrooms useful? Maybe there s another solution to that problem. And we re going to talk a bit about different solutions to business problems. Copyright 2010 Laura Brandenburg http://www.bridging-the-gap.com Page 4 of 7
Draft Options After the architect comes to an understanding of what the homeowner s vision is and what they really really want out of this new home, they re going to go away for a while and come up with a few options. They might sketch out some ideas much like you as the BA are going to sketch out some models. You might put some quick visuals together, or draw a diagram, a workflow diagram of how they new process might work. These early sketches will help gain feedback, but most importantly buy in to see Am I on the right track? After the architect reviews the optionswith the homeowners, that client is going to provide a ton of feedback on that direction, and they re going to tell them what they like, what they don t like try to picture themselves in the house and see if it s going to work for them. The same thing will happen with you as a BA. You will be working with your stakeholders and they re going to give you a lot of feedback on that model, especially when they re visual. They re going to be able to tell you a lot about what they want and don t want. A lot of times what clients want is really unrealistic, either based on the technical constraints or based on their budget, and the architect might help adjust those client expectations. As the business analyst, you re going to have to do that as well, and you re going to help your client prioritize their requirements, identify what the constraints are and understand regulations, if that s appropriate for your project. You will help them envision what they want within the constraints of what can be built given their budget. Create Detailed Specifications The final way that Business Analysts are like architects, is when it comes to creating a detailed specification. When you think about it, once that architect gets that high level model in place, they re going to draft a very detailed plan for building the new home. It s going to have specific measurements for each hallway, each wall, the size of each bathroom, and each bedroom. It s going to put everything together to make sure the stairway connects to a hallway and not right in to a bedroom. All of these details that come in to play to make sure that every feature of that house works together and is actually a home. You re going to do this too as a Business Analyst. You re going to elaborate your requirements into a detailed specification;, ora detailed set of what the system needs to do to achieve the end result. Just like the architect is going to share that plan with the general contractor who s in charge of building the home, you are going to communicate that set of requirements to the IT staff who would be building the solution. Or, in the case of a process change, to the business users who need to make a process change. Just like if the general contractor reaches problems with the design as he builds the house, he would go back to the architect for adjustments, the IT staff should be coming back to you with issues that surface during development. Or the business users might say, We found this new exception flow and the process doesn t cover it. How should we change things to handle it? Copyright 2010 Laura Brandenburg http://www.bridging-the-gap.com Page 5 of 7
So when you think about how Business Analysts are like architects, think about the following: Both roles understand the real business or homeowner needs Both draft options or pictures or visuals to gain buy in early on Both proceed through to creating detailed specifications. I find that the architect metaphor is an extremely valuable metaphor for communicating what it is to be a Business Analyst to somebody who doesn t understand it because very few people would think about trying to build a house without hiring an architect unless they re a skilled architect themselves. And the model communicates some of that value. How do you go from an idea to a solution, and how do you make sure that communication is very clear? Business Analysts Plug Gaps We re going to talk about one last metaphor, and this is the metaphor of plugging gaps. The Gap to Fill is Not Always the Same We already talked about how Business Analysts bridge gaps, which is the core of what the Business Analyst does. Now we re going to talk about this idea of plugging gaps because the truth is that the gap that the business analyst actually fills with their work is not always the same. What we find is that because the Business Analyst sits right in between the problem and the solution, they re not always filling the same role. Plugging Business Gaps Could Involve They might work with business stakeholders who do part of the project analysis up front. They might come to them with a business case or even a set of business requirements. (These are deliverables we ll talk about later on in the course.) Or they might just leave gaping holes. It might just be two sentences in an email saying, We ve got to solve this problem. And that might be all they have. Depending on how well the business stakeholders have thought through their problem, the Business Analyst will pick up that project in a different place. It s just what naturally happens over time. Plugging IT Gaps Could Involve Now it also happens on the flip side when you start to think about communicating your requirements to whoever is in charge of implementing that solution. Let s just talk about it in an IT context because it s much more tangible there. The IT leader might need great and specific detail about what exactly they Copyright 2010 Laura Brandenburg http://www.bridging-the-gap.com Page 6 of 7
need to build. They might need functional requirements, or they might even want the BA to do some of the technical design and make some technical decisions. I ve also worked with IT leaders who are very comfortable with the business and are able to deal with a set of pretty detailed business requirements and they do the functional requirements themselves. Because the BA is sitting in between these two groups, you are very much plugging a gap. The role that the Business Analyst fills is going to be different based on the roles of the other participants on the project. When you think about business analysis, think about bridging the gap, but also think about plugging the gap. That s going to help you figure out what will make you most successful in a business analyst role in any given situation. And this is also going to provide some context for why there are so many different Business Analyst roles. We re going to talk more about the types of Business Analysts roles there are in the future lessons within this module. What s Next? So what s next? Take a look at the next action worksheet. This is going to help you take the metaphors that we just talked about and identify ways that they apply to you. In this course, everything that we re going to talk about, I want you to be able to take it and look inward in how this applies to you, because this is going to help you identify your best path in to business analysis. So the more you take this information and apply it to yourself, the better and the more quickly you ll move along, creating your own roadmap. Take a look at the worksheet and then head over to the forums where we re going to talk about what metaphors resonated with each of you the most, and which might be most applicable to the kind of BA you want to become. Thanks again. I look forward to seeing you in the forums, and we ll catch you next time. Again, this is Laura Brandenburg, your instructor at My Business Analyst Career. Copyright 2010 Laura Brandenburg http://www.bridging-the-gap.com Page 7 of 7