How BAs will need to adapt…

I have recently been involved in a number of discussion on the future of Business Analysis. While some in the industry fear (or wish) that the role will die, it is my believe that this role will always be valuable, but that what makes it valuable, and what will keep it valuable under the paradigms of the 4th industrial revolution is not what traditionally Business Analysis used to be, and the role needs to change and evolve evolve.

I hope this is interesting for those planning to enter this role, or those in the role, seeking inspiration.

Effects of the 4th Industrial Revolution

I believe that the 4th Industrial Revolution requires organisations and workers to shift their thinking and practices towards an (even more) value focused, agile and lean mindset, away from short term tactics to long term strategies, extending shareholder value to stakeholder value in the widest sense.

For talent this means that we need to stop thinking in traditional skills such as knowing prioritisation techniques or programming in JAVA, to facilitating the delivery of value over time and creating effective and maintainable code, just to make two examples, by principles and ways of working.

To achieve and retain Excellence, learning new techniques and tools, such a new methodology, is a pure hygiene factor, what counts is the adoption of principles, working philosophies and mindset that allows to solve problems in high complexity environments and achieve better outcomes.

Understanding the Business Analysis Role

I believe there is a big misunderstanding of what the role of the role of the Business Analyst is about. Whenever someone mentions that the role is about eliciting and managing requirements I am getting seriously worried: If you distil it down to its essence that’s correct. But what may practitioners mean by this is that this is about asking clients for their requirements and communicating them to delivery teams. This is far to narrow a scope.

Good business analysis is about facilitating the reasoning about complex domains, understanding real needs in a given context (requirements if you like) and supporting stakeholders and delivery teams in solid reasoning to achieve desired outcomes.

This of course includes hands-on activities such as prioritisation, risk and dependency management, but also requires softer skills that facilitate, align and drive towards valuable outcomes.

An excellent business analyst will be a leader, organically shaping ways of working, project/product scope, solution design and delivery approach rather than just applying existing patterns.

I should mention that I see ‘role’ as something that someone does, not a 1:1 mapping to an individual..

Why the role is here to stay

There seems to be a feeling (or wish) for the business analyst role to go away, driven by a (misguided) wish to safe cost and communication overhead or misunderstanding that other roles can do better what BAs do.

While it is indeed true that other roles such as Product Owners and Technical Architects these days are — indeed must be — and for good reason — involved in aspects of Business Analysis (shaping requirements and solution design), there are three reasons why the role (if kept current) is here to stay:

• people are good at different things, so specialisms make sense
• multi-skilled geniuses may not enjoy doing all roles
• as teams grow, mediating roles are required

I have discussed this in more details here.

The Key Challenge for Business Analysis

I believe that for us as Business Analysts (see here for a discussion of this role in regards to Product Owners and System Architects) this means focusing on ‘feeding the beast’ in the best way, i.e. providing relevant input to design and delivery teams, at the right level of detail at the right point in time, so to allow the team to deliver valuable output at speed, and learn and evolve ways of working and product continuously.

Paradigm Shift

While attention to detail and other classical analysis skills are still the core of what we do, what has to change is how we work with clients and team-members:

The successful business analyst will no longer be a scribe on behalf business users, analysing requirements at length in great detail following a minute bureaucratic process and documenting them following highly formalised modelling languages with the goal to create a single set of ‘perfect’ specification that wont’ change and can impersonally be given as a working order and mechanism of control to any implementation team that will strictly execute against it; and treat any risk to be avoided and any change as error of the preceding process

but instead

will help stakeholders and team members across all disciplines articulate information in the most appropriate way, at the required level of detail for that very moment, and shape this information into artefacts that drive incrementally towards an expected, valuable outcome. This will be based on the understanding that risk must be mitigate at the earliest possibility, complexities and unknowns tackled sooner than later, that change and uncertainty are facts and are to be seen as opportunities to learn and adapt; and that only high degrees of collaboration, (cognitive) noise reduction and high degrees of empathy and trust will allow for the autonomy and understanding required to get the best out of talent and thus the resulting solution.

We achieve this by

(just to mention some)

• working breadth over depth
• providing information just-in-time
• use of lightweight analysis and modelling techniques
• focus on what is relevant now
• early de-risking
• decoupling dependencies
• de-noise and defer where we can
• carefully choice of waterfall over agile (yes, you’ve read that right)
• supporting compliance by educating them and automating their concerns (‘what’ is the risk?)
• shifting to product and value based accounting

just to name some. You get the drift.

In more detail

The full presentation with additional detail in the speaker notes (see PDF) can be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iSP5a8_BB7zkjObB_xYvzaoHm3aoj88P

Where to go from here: check out my series on business analysis skills and getting into business analysis, more on tools, a random list of BA skills and tools, a talk (video) on how to run discovery phases, and finally some thoughts on interviewing as a BA.

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