Month: January 2016

I have worked as a business analyst since before being a Business Analyst was a thing. At the time people made up all kinds of names for it, and the most common job title I had used at the time was “systems liaison,” since I ended up being the guy who liaised between the people in the business side of things – the “users” – and the developers of the applications they use.

I had been running a junior securities lending sales desk at one of the bigger broker dealer firms for a short period, and it didn’t feel as though it was a perfect fit for me. But something else was emerging in the business, and that was that a lot of the manual processes were beginning to be automated. In other words, instead of looking up inventory on a thick wad of computer printout, writing orders on paper forms, and having someone run those sheets down to a key punch operator, we were building terminal screens that the traders could use to query and enter data and cut out all the looking up and running about. Very exciting.

At first there was very little formalized discipline involved. It was very much a seat-of-the-pants kind of process. People asked for stuff and we’d delivery it, one way or another, and things sometimes got messy. At some point it became obvious that we needed a more formalized approach to testing, and so that became part of my role as well.

At the same time I was learning to do some very basic coding of my own, utilizing rapid-development tools and report writing software to take up some of the slack left because, in the early days, we were working with a limited number of developers and efficiency tools. This helped me understand better what the people on the development side were doing. And as it turns out that most of the BA’s that I have been working with over the past several years have mainly come from two backgrounds: either they were developers in a previous life, or they were very hands-on operations people.

Of all the BA’s I have worked with over the past few decades the best have had certain sets of qualities.

Domain Expertise

It may not be necessary, but it’s useful if you have a practical knowledge of the business in which you working, primarily because the conversations you are going to have with the users of systems you will be developing or enhancing are going to be a higher quality. There will also be a great deal of information you will already have at your fingertips, and will not have to going seeking it either from the users themselves, with whom you may have limited access, or by reading various reams of domain-related documentation, which is often badly written and nearly impossible to understand out of context.

With domain expertise, you will also eventually gain SME status (subject matter expert), which is in itself a useful thing to have on your resume, and valuable, of course, to your employers and that sales staff who are selling your skills to their clients and prospects, if you are in a consultative role.

Ability to Learn Well and Quickly

One’s education never comes to an end for business analysts, even if one has been a subject matter expert in one’s field for quite some time. There will always be changes in the market, people experimenting with new products and services, and even some requests that may seem odd and unreasonable at first. Newness is never in short supply. If you are working for a software or services vendor, your clients and prospects are going to expect you to understand what they are talking about without wasting much time. So keep your brain in good repair, challenge it often, and don’t watch too much TV, or hang out on social media. Read and/or do cross-word puzzles, Rubix Cube, Luminosity, whatever. You’re going to need a well-greased engine under the hood, so aim to tax yourself mentally in your off-hours at a higher level than you’re taxed on the job. I happen to find reading and writing ridiculously difficult modern poetry and playing jazz guitar works for me.

It turns out people with musical backgrounds are generally well-primed for this kind of work. Some of the best developers and business analysts I’ve worked with – the real genius types – have been through a rigorous musical training. In fact a business owner I know, whose company produces educational iPhone apps for children, once told me he will only hire developers with a musical background. He really believes that musical training produces the kind of brain wiring that best suits developers. I believe the same can be said for other art forms as well.

One of the best BA’s I’ve worked with is a real science fiction buff, and it is my opinion that quality speculative fiction also challenges and stretches one’s belief systems and cognitive skills in a way that helps him generate solutions like very few BA’s I know.

The key is, I believe, if you have a side passion, something that challenges you, then definitely give it your time and energy, as there will be a residual cognitive benefit on the job, even if there seems to be no obvious connection.

Curiosity

Some of the best BA’s I’ve worked with must have been the kind of kids that mixed the wrong chemicals together in their home chemistry sets, and either blew things up, or ruined the furniture. Or perhaps they took apart all the clocks in the house and put them back together wrong. The drive to understand, to want to experiment and explore, take things apart, will sometimes get you in trouble, but it will also benefit you greatly as a BA, so don’t stifle it. Feed it good materials and let it grow into the monstrosity it deserves to become. Many of the tasks you will take on will draw on the same inclinations that cause trouble in other contexts, and they can naturally help you to absorb more easily and fully the material and requirements you are dealing with, and will also motivate you to think outside of the box.

Analytical/Critical Skills

This one should go without saying, but I’m going to mention it anyway, as there is no over-emphasizing the fact that a well-tuned rational mind, equipped with analytical tools, is not only a great asset for a business analyst, but is wholly a requirement.

Not only will you be faced with a lot of material and half-baked ideas, but you may often need to gather requirements from the users themselves, and not everyone you talk to is going to be able to present a cogent picture of what it is they want you to do. You will get a lot of fragments of ideas, and things that need to be done, but there will be plenty of detective work, piecing things together, in order to form your own representation that you can then play back to the client or user.

Along with the obvious tools and certification trainings familiar with in the market, for those of you who are often in the position where you are interviewing clients and users to gather requirements, I recommend Jonathan Altfeld’s Knowledge Engineering training course. Jonathan was an Expert Systems programmer early in his career, which means he built artificial intelligence systems that imitate human decision making, particularly experts in a particular functional domain. Jonathan has taken this experience to help produce rapid learning systems, by extracting the key cognitive patterns that make up domain expertise, similar to what is discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, so that people can learn in a few weeks what usually takes years of experience working in that domain. Why this will be useful for you, is having an understanding of the Jonathan’s modelling process, or the like, will help you develop the ability to build better models, in real time, of what and how the user is thinking, and what kinds of tools would best suit the thinking strategies they use to get the best results. In other words, by making a study of the way your users think, you can create the applications and enhancements that will best compliment their reflexive skill sets and expertise.

Creativity

Great BA’s are the great under-appreciated geniuses of the tech world. They may be the undiscovered Steve Jobs’ or Elon Musks, generating solution after solution without the big rewards or celebrity status. You might not have the big, world-altering ideas (at least not yet), but you are possibly just as brilliant for the number of smaller solutions you generate in a single day or week. There’s something to be said for that as well.

This is a huge topic that there is really no end to discussing. In some ways, creativity sits side-by-side with learning and curiosity, since all learning is a creative act of building internal representations of things in the world that are new to you. And of course, curiosity helps make that more natural and efficient.

I attempt to address creativity in a number of my posts, and will continue to do so. I give different perspectives on developing creative habits here, here, here and here, as well as in a number of other posts. At one point, I taught college creative writing classes at The New School, in New York City, so this is a favorite topic of mine.

There are of course endless selections of books about how to develop creativity, about what it is, and what types of people end up being the most creative, and some of them are useful to read. My opinion is that you are likely already as creative as you need to be, otherwise you would not have survived and flourished as well as you have. You may not be aware of how creative you are, however, and there are things you can do to take notice, and better utilize that ability (if it can actually be considered an ability at all, or a collection, perhaps, of personality quirks). I also tend to believe that books about creativity are not as good as experiencing actual creative artifacts, i.e. great creative works of fiction and poetry, music and other works of art.

And of course, it helps to be exposed to the work of some of our best creative entrepreneurs, scientific geniuses, and so forth, i.e. the Elon Musks, Teslas (the person, not the company), the Einsteins, Jobs’ and David Bowies of the world.

Communication Skills

We imagine there can be nothing smoother than a water droplet running along a pane of glass. From our ordinary perspective it seems to roll as freely as anything possible, yet when watched closely we see that the motion is made of many pixilated jumps, sort of a jerky dance of stops and starts, of wiggling back and forth.

Our days proceed similarly. We jump from thought to thought, often unaware of the many byways and stoppages, the leaping about and the escapes from blockages. We were designed by nature to be machines of both focus and distraction. Without focus, we would never follow through on anything, the rendering of this sentence and reception would both be impossible. Yet, without the natural inclination for our brains to be distractible, we would get stuck any time anything unrecognizable or novel occurs, as it takes this jumping about from thought to thought within our memory to make all the required associations, comparisons and measurements. We also begin to blend past associations with the present in ways that combine multiple fabrications, objects, what have you, to make sense of the unknown that is in front of us.

Our brains are like three dimensional window surfaces with billions of water droplets moving hither on yon, at blinding speeds, and to parts of that surface that have been designated for particular functions, generating a holographic-like gauziness of cognitive array, that gets meshed together in what we call experience. And beyond ourselves, we are like a single droplet in a much larger array of individual people sharing common languages, concepts, events, projects, aspirations, some which complement and some of which conflict. In other words we are individually made up of multiple interactions, and we ourselves are particles of a larger set of interactions, and on every level there is this smooth/jerkiness type processing that enfolds each disparate part.

The Whole System is a mess, and we are part of that mess. And we have much to celebrate. The chaos we try to keep at bay is us, is life itself. Go figure. Granted we need ways of organizing it in our minds so that we can somehow get things done, so out of the millions of years of the churnings of military strategies and philosophical dialogs, we have these residual sets of concepts and practices inhabiting the business world, i.e. those that make up what we call project management and business analysis. Some of these concepts and practices are things we have been trained to do on the job, of course, or through certification programs that work hand-in-hand with what we are doing in a working capacity. Many of the skills, most of them in fact, are things we have brought to our jobs from previous experience, from our formal and informal education up to this point, from our bantering about, and bumping into things. From growing up.

What makes a person unique, exceptional, extra-valuable, is rarely the stuff that gets taught in the formalized programs, the certs and training events, but is the stuff that you’ve learned from adapting, combining ideas from different systems and worlds that you live in. A mathematical or musical background will shape the array of raindrops differently than one more focused on language or mechanics. All your accumulated learnings, habits, and expertise come into play, as soon as you begin to think in a continued state of blending, which helps you adapt to your surroundings, challenges, what it is you are trying to get done.

A formal education is a great thing, as are the specific and focused training events that have given you the tools to operate at your current job according to its description. But none of us really operate according to plan, or are really so neatly described.  We are ever at the edge of the familiar and organized world looking out over the chaos and currently unknowable that we need to navigate, and that is a job for artists. Yes, you are an artist whether you like it or not. We are all artists. And as artists we each have the freedom and responsibility to combine all parts of what we know to create the best value for ourselves, our clients, our world, whether it’s an enhancement to an application, a software implementation or organizational change,  even something vaster, our moment to moment living in the world that we hope we hope is better off because of us.

What is it in that vast mesh of noise, your particular alchemy of ideas and experience that you are made of, that you haven’t combined and tapped yet that will make a difference in your world and in others? What is it that you’re going to do this year that will leave an imprint of excellence either in your current work world, or around the world? This is something we all need to think about, as the world needs you, and after all, it is the beginning of a new year.

OUR world needs you at your best, which may be easier than you think. Instead of the stress and strain, the habits of conflict you may always seem to bring to all you are faced to do, why not think of the jerky smoothness that really gets things done anyway, whether it knows it or not?