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The Future of Business AnalysisBusiness analysis is consistently showing up on lists of top careers for today and the future. But the future of business analysis looks a lot different than the past.
Of Business Analysis is Bright!
Key changes in the evolution of great business analysis practices of today and the future include:
- The business analysis role as a requirements note taker is a thing of the past. (In my opinion, this never was the role of a great BA!)
- The days of long requirements specification documents are over.
- The idea that a BA has a dedicated series of weeks or even months to “complete” a requirements package and get sign off is now an ancient practice.
- The concept that a BA reports to a PM and that PM is the next career milestone for a BA has long expired.
Business analysis in agile and digital is here! And, it’s impacting all organizations!
The high-performing business analysts of today and the future are curious, strategic, experiential, constantly learning, facilitative, extremely collaborative, explorative with hypotheses and amazing communicators (visually, verbally, and written). They foster strong relationships, have the courage to stand up for value and the end customer, keep up on the latest technology trends, and understand the value they can provide to teams.
The traditional business analyst of the past must leave behind the ghosts of BA past. To be successful today and in the future, BAs must change their mindsets and behaviors, and learn new, modern skills.
Many traditional skills are still important, but it’s how they are used and incorporated into the team that changes. It’s important that BAs learn these new ways of working to stay relevant and continue to add value to teams. Without changing, BAs will simply become dead weight for teams and be left behind.
Old Practices
Scope the whole project out at the beginning.
New and Future Direction Of Practice
Create a solution or product vision to guide the team.
Create/define impact metric. Work with the team on understanding how to know if the solution is making the intended difference we wanted and needed.
Use some scoping tools and techniques like user story mapping, journey mapping, and scope diagrams to foster the conversations that are critical to a shared understanding of the problem, opportunity and vision.
Define requirements and deliver small chunks, folding these small pieces into existing systems, or developing a new system to deploy the slimmest version of something. Learn, analyze, deploy, repeat!
Old Practices
New and Future Direction Of Practice
Meet with the team and stakeholders weekly to discuss the upcoming priorities, user feedback and backlog refinements.
Observe users and use data insights to better understand the user’s changing needs in their own context.
Hypothesize and experiment with unknowns and assumptions about the user, the data, the process, the system, etc…. identify and drive these hypothesis and experiments.
Old Practices
New and Future Direction Of Practice
Old Practices
New and Future Direction Of Practice
Let the development team design with your involvement and others to truly get the best possible design. Work in layers, broad brush, test out assumptions, learn, then add more detail.
Old Practices
New and Future Direction Of Practice
The system, data, features and capabilities are important, but only within the context of the user and desired results.
Old Practices
New and Future Direction Of Practice
Meet monthly to plan releases (or more often if you can release more often!).
Meet every 2 months to discuss and update the roadmap based on learnings, feedback, and other changes internal and external to the team.
Old Practices
New and Future Direction Of Practice
Focus on dialog and conversation to get a shared understanding rather than reviewing text line by line.
Old Practices
New and Future Direction Of Practice
Old Practices
New and Future Direction Of Practice
Old Practices
Take what the architect or tech lead brings you as the final design.
Whatever the stakeholder asked for they get, they asked for a specific design.
New and Future Direction Of Practice
Explore many options and alternatives to solve for the user need. Together discuss the options that will get the best result.
Get feedback as quick as possible along the way to avoid rework. Learn quickly! Then adjust and adapt.
Old Practices
New and Future Direction Of Practice
Being a BA today is exciting! It will continue to be a great career that is complex, challenging and rewarding! With the right mindset, skills, and commitment to continuous learning, the BA career can take you in many directions.
The BA-Squared Approach
At BA-Squared, we are passionate about keeping BAs learning and improving as practices change and evolve. We help organizations, teams and individuals upskill and modernize their business analysis practices.
Our training is relevant and modern, while being practical and actionable!
Our onsite courses are top rated by clients, conference producers and attendees. They are known for being highly interactive and full of insights that inspire new thought patterns. Every course provides practice opportunities that motivate teams to change their practices for the betterment of their customers and stakeholders. Having Angela teach onsite provides the spark teams need to be inspired to do great analysis!
Our new online platform, BA-Cube.com, provides a multi-dimensional learning environment for professionals with business analysis responsibilities.
BA-Cube combines live virtual events and on-demand resources to challenge, motivate and continuously upskill BAs. BA-Cube members enjoy exploring topics relevant to their immediate needs, on their own time, at the level of depth they desire. They also choose how they learn—independently, with BA experts during live events or with peers in discussion forums. From a quick-tip video, to an in-depth 2-hour live interactive course, or an hour-long mentoring panel, BA-Cube is there for you and your team!
Angela Wick, BA-Squared’s principal trainer and BA-Cube.com founder, is a globally recognized expert in business analysis.