😵 🎓 🤸🏽 Where you were before, or Implicit features of BI BA 👩🏽‍🤝‍👨🏿 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩 👟

Sometimes you really want to suddenly open a magical portal to the future, and a more experienced version of you yourself has dropped a little wisdom and thereby laid the straw from possible problems and mistakes. But until technologies have given us such an opportunity, we have to cope for ourselves, the notorious “sweat and blood”, “learn from our mistakes” and that’s all.

Let me be for you a beta version of an adviser from the future and tell you about some facts in the work of business and system analysts, whose knowledge will help you in your career. Let's get started!

1. You need to be able to explain who you are and why you are needed.

Given the axiomatic comprehension of the importance of a business analyst and the work that he does, many of us still have to deal with perplexed views and questions like: “Business analyst? What is he doing? ” A separate challenge is overcome by those who come to the project where there was no BA before and other team members performed its duties in a degenerate form (for example, QA wrote the requirements, and DM kept the documentation).

In his book, The Ideal Leader, Yitzhak Adizes devotes a whole chapter to the importance of an objective view of oneself. This truly valuable skill should be highly developed in you. If you have a poor idea why you came to the project and what you will do on it, it is unlikely that you will be able to clearly explain this to your teammates. Not understanding your role and pool of responsibilities, it will be difficult for them to consider you as a component of their work process, and such a situation will not be at all beneficial for the project.

Allow yourself an hour of your time for a comprehensive assessment of your responsibilities, authority and area of responsibility. When you understand this yourself, you can easily explain it to your colleagues, and, accordingly, clearly outline your place in the team and allow each member to concentrate on his direct work, eliminating inefficient intersections.

2. An ideal user story does not exist

At the beginning of my career, I worked with a system that was actively expanding and introducing new features with great speed. As an exemplary and obedient business analyst, I tried to take into account all the nuances and details in my user story and diagrams, so that development would go without a hitch.

But always something was wrong. I constantly made corrections and comments to diagrams and models, refined and expanded the structure of relations between objects for a better context, and simply corrected the grammatical non-elegance of sentences in the user story. And still this was not enough. The team led the development, the features were successfully accepted by the customer and implemented - and I corrected all the rules. The team went home, and I emerged from the world of prototypes and flowcharts when guards closed the office for the night.

It took me a lot of time and internal discipline to understand one axiom: our work will never work out perfectly. This is her feature, and this is our main strength - to be able to navigate among constant changes and, like a brave Danko, lead a development team through constantly changing working conditions. Hold back your perfectionism and you will see that the missing comma in the requirements absolutely did not affect the performance of the new functionality. The ideal is not the main thing, the result is important.

3. No silver bullet

Making our way through an abundance of projects and gaining experience, it begins to seem to us that we, finally, were able to come up with an optimal approach to solving a certain number of problems that we face again and again. As in the notorious joke about pill No. 6, we were able to find a universal solution that our predecessors did not succeed in.

But let our inner Van Helsingi hide their pistols back in their holster: a silver bullet does not exist. Even if your solution worked perfectly several times in a row, it does not guarantee success from now on. Your career will include different domains, methodologies, a huge number of techniques, different customer expectations, team composition, and your projects will come to you at different stages of the life cycle. Attempts to pull the same decision suit over all situations will end badly: both the suit will tear (you will be convinced of the incapacity of your favorite tricks), and the project will freeze (the problems left to chance will only get worse).

A good recommendation here is this: use not what worked before, but what works right now. So you will always keep pace with your project.

4. For most questions and cases there is no single or specific answer.

At one of my past projects, we were faced with a number of controversial and difficult situations, which we could not find solutions for. Our manager was an outstanding mind person who knew very well the interior kitchen of the project - but never answered questions directly. Being young and stupid, I was infinitely angry: “Is it really so difficult to answer, will they give us financing for another QA or won't they?” It seemed to me that he was simply pretending to be mysterious instead of giving a clear answer.

Having tempered my ardor, I began to take a closer look at his style of work and eventually made an amazing discovery for myself: knowing all the answers does not guarantee success. Most situations in our work (however, as well as in life) do not have concrete and unambiguous answers, and attempts to find them will only obscure us with possible solutions to problems. Dividing the world into black and white, we will lose the shades in which there was just a clue or hint.

Of course, you can not constantly stay in the fog of uncertainty, and there is a reliable guide. The main thing is to work with customer expectations , as he will ultimately set the course for your spaceship. Listen carefully to it and learn to make decisions according to the general direction. You will work on specifics later.

5. -

Each of us has a different background in teaching business analysis and developing applied skills. Sometimes, finishing the next refresher course or getting a new Professional Knowledge certificate, we think that now we know enough to cope with any situation. But, unfortunately, no matter how much we learn, this will always not be enough.

A new project and a business domain, a new customer and features of communicating with him, new technologies and market requirements ... There will be many variables in the equation of a vibrant professional life in BA, but there is always only one constant - constant training . Of course, such a remark can also be made about technical specialists, but for BA, the scope is much wider, because often you have to keep abreast of a wide variety of events from a variety of areas.

The main thing that needs to be done at this stage is to accept the fact that you will always be in the pursuit of new knowledge and the missing puzzle pieces of your competencies. Do not spread rot for ignorance, but open a new textbook, take a new course and practice a new skill. Inspiration in this context is our everything.

6. Understanding the business makes you stronger than your colleagues

When we talk about any IT project, one cannot but note the cornerstone of the role of a system analyst.

Experts disagree on whether a systems analyst should know a business domain. I am inclined to believe that I should, albeit not at the SME level, but still more than the development team. Indeed, it is precisely a deeper understanding of the expectations of the business, the market, current trends and competitor products that will help you create an analysis architecture sufficient for a successful and effective start of the project. Your understanding of events flows helps to identify interacting objects of the software system (linguistic analysis of events flows) and to model the structure of relations between objects of the developed system even before the architect presents his concept of IT-solutions.

It is true to note the following: it is all about accents.The analyst is your role , and its power and strength should not be limited by position or position. Don't get yourself stuck in creating class diagrams and dynamic interaction models. Allow yourself to be in both classic roles of the analyst - the person of business and the person of the system. Such a versatile approach will allow you to solve customer problems efficiently and rationally. Knowledge of business adds +100 to wisdom and armor, knowledge of technology allows you to look at a business problem more broadly. Win-win situation, anyway.

7. Once you start writing code - and that's fine

Imagine a very unfortunate arrangement of stars that brought three meteorites into your measured life on a project:

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spreadsheet- , . Excel , , , .
When there is an intermediate link between you and the customer in the form of a designer, often the adoption of certain UI / UX decisions is delayed, drowning in the "draw - review - comments - corrections - draw" mode. Sometimes even the smallest visualization is not enough to just make sure that you are moving in the right direction. A rough sketch - too unprofessional, correctly drawn prototype - too long.

And here you go on stage. Your technical knowledge is enough to solve each of these problems on your own, and your work schedule is now not so busy. And you start the IDE on your computer or “open” some kind of page that has been laid down.

Perhaps it will take you several hours to complete this task, while your colleagues closed it in 15 minutes. But now it doesn’t matter. You pumped your skills from the very practical side. The experience of such "voluntary" programming will not be in vain either for you or for the project. The script has been prepared and sent, screen forms have been drawn up and are waiting for discussion, and the processing and uploading of data for your work is automated and saves you time. In the long run, everyone will benefit from your participation in the technological process - and, first of all, you yourself.

8. You can do everything

It is a logical consequence of everything that was said earlier. As the hero of Van Damme from the legendary action movie of the 90s, you are a universal soldier. You can do everything, you know how to do a lot of tasks at the same time, and you can learn absolutely everything if necessary. You are the very cool agent who does not turn around for an explosion.

You really are a very cool specialist, and even if you are still at the beginning of your journey, believe me, this profession really allows you to grow. Not only in terms of career, but also in terms of personality - tested on yourself!

BONUS: Business analysts are incredibly positive and life-hungry people with their internal micro-memes and internal sources of power.

Be sure to join the community, both in your regions and globally. Besides the fact that this is an exchange of invaluable knowledge and a lot of insights on how to pump and become even better as a specialist, it is also a party of wonderful people who speak the same language with you, understand your troubles and problems and drift on the waves of the IT world in the same boat with you. That feeling, when you are part of something so big and cool, gives strength for a new day - and a new project!

Where you were before, or Implicit features of BI BA