Even Business Analysts Need Love
Attention all stakeholders of the solar federation. My personal life has recently tuned me into pain in a way that makes me realize that the BA’s professional life offers great pain. “NO!”, you say, yet here is a list of hurts you may well have inflicted on a BA if you think about it carefully.
Don’t do these things:
Don’t kick the BA off the project just because they made a deliverable that looks like requirements to you even though you didn’t read it (sponsor, sponsor, sponsor). Your (anyone’s) deadline allows only the beginning of organizational learning. The loss of the BA guarantees the end of learning, never mind the teaching that must follow for change management success.
Don’t hire a BA if you know better than they do. You will annoy yourself while amusing the BA, which will only annoy you more.
Don’t give requirements as if they were dictation. If a BA takes your requirements EXACTLY as you give them and does not present an “analyzed” model showing what the requirements might REALLY be, it might even be that your BA does not like you.
Don’t dislike the BA. At worst they are only messengers, and at best they can get you results that you actually want.
Don’t withhold pay. Because may BA assignments are “temporary” (see above), many BAs are consultants/contractors/temporary. Making them wait long periods to be paid is not good for them, you OR them.
Don’t keep the BA in the dark. They can see how silly you look in the dark
Don’t yell at, or curse at the BA. Yeah, really. You know who you are, and so does everybody else on the project. Recriminations are not requirements. Not.
Don’t not read the requirements.
Don’t not read the email. Yes, it is OK for an email to have more than one sentence.
Don’t gush over the diagram just because it is nice. Be specific in your gushing, as in “I really like the fact that I can see ALL the redundancies across payment types” or “The pink really highlights just how risky a full cutover is, and how it pays to set up three teams.”
Don’t be impressed with nice looking diagrams unless the content is robust. The cuter the graphics, the less likely the analyst spent time on re-factoring process, the more likely the analyst spent time on re-factoring the format.
Don’t bring everyone to every meeting. The amount of work progress made in a meeting is inversely proportional to the square of the number of people. Eight people will accomplish 1/16 of the work that 2 might. Enforce the rule by accomplishing actual work at every meeting. This will help you keep meetings small.
Don’t accuse the BA of “blowing your scope”. It isn’t your scope, it belongs to the business. Besides, you got the scope wrong in the first place by rushing to solution, then broke everyone’s spirit by preventing any improvement once the team understood what the scope actually meant.
Don’t rush to solution. Plan the different approaches, from simple/cheap to complex/low chance of success. Use each simple approach to advance the solution by REALLY learning from it. REALLY.
Don’t have the BA walked out the door immediately, even when you must let them go. They don’t have access to sensitive systems functions (are they sysadmins or BAs?) and if what they know is dangerous to you walking them out is no way to make friends, and you are going to need friends (see 1st item above).
Don’t ignore maintenance of the highest level descriptions just because “everyone knows that”. If you are engaged in enterprise systems transformations, everyone is going to go from 5 people to 10 people to 40 people over a couple of years, and then to 20,000 overnight. Be ready for everyone – there will ALWAYS be new people, and a failure to model the highest levels of business requirements and process is the number one cause of failure – the big mistakes happen at the top levels of description.
Don’t insist that BAs produce meeting minutes – better they should produce models that represent business thoughts and decisions so stakeholders can see what they said. The alternative is to build based on the say as seen in the minutes. Then you will hear stakeholders say “I can’t say I see what this does for me.”
DO learn along with your BA, who is learning your needs and combining them with others that you don’t have time to learn. So many voices channeled through one, neutral, zero attitude model for all to reflect upon. Bliss, you think?
Don’t forget to tell me what you think, since you read this far, your opinion is already 1st percentile. Comments below 🙂
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