So you want to be a Business Analyst 1 — Mindset vs Skillset

Over the recent months I have been approached by a number of people asking how they can get into ‘digital’ (read ‘software’ or ‘IT’) Business Analysis, be this as a lateral (often from software engineering or project management) or vertical (usually from classic waterfall mindset to a more product centric agile mindset) career transition.

Unfortunately the answer is not straight forward, as there is no defined formal career path, Business Analysis can mean very different things, and is closely related to other new(er) roles such as that of the product manager or product owner.

Anyway, I will try and provide some pointers for those trying to enter this role and inspiration for those already in it.

Tl;dr?

I highly recommend to read the full 5 post series, but if you want to skip the ‘why and what’ and want to go straight to the ‘how’, head over to post 4.

Still here? read on:

It’s more about mindset, less about skills

The current — 4th — industrial revolution has a strong effect on how organisations and consequently the talent they work with will have to adapt (‘shift’ in fact) their working mindset in order to remain competitive (read: deliver value efficiently to customers, economy and society).

In the ‘new world’ knowledge of tools and techniques (how to do things) are being downgraded to hygiene factors, while approach and mindset (how to go about things) become the factors of Business Analysis excellence.

I have discussed the changes we are seeing and what this means for the evolution of the BA role BAs in detail in a separate post.

Excellence vs. seniority

The challenge is that hard skills such as tools and techniques are easily taught and ‘learned’ while the right approach and mindset can only be developed. This is best expressed by the principle of ShuHaRi which explains the evolution of the Aikido martial artist from student to professional to master.

While seniority at worst comes with time and at best with knowledge — excellence is a function mindset (the will and ability to abstract knowledge and apply it to changing circumstances).

You should not care to be ‘senior’ but want to be ‘excellent’.

It’s all about tacit knowledge

A graphic designers’s skills are to do with the use of tooling, knowledge of the rules typography and colour, composition and aesthetics. Design excellence is is about understanding which design delivers most value in the given context and making this happen in the most effective way, which means understanding culture, client capabilities, customer needs, project constraints and how to navigate these complexities.

In programming, most of my colleagues are polyglot and find it easy to learn a new language or to adopt new tooling or frameworks. It is generally also easy to somehow write code that fulfils a given purpose. But to design beautiful code, i.e. code that is understandable, extensible, maintainable, stable, and resilient, is much more than applying known patterns. It is about ‘knowing’ what is right, right now and delivering this by intelligently applying and extending patterns and best practices.

Business Analysis is no different: the tools of the trade (writing stories, creating a business model canvas, prioritisation etc) are easy to pick up. But their practical, meaningful application, i.e. the pinpointing of what is important, not getting overwhelmed by complexity, being able to facilitate a team coming to meaningful decisions, helping convergence towards valuable solutions, these are subtle, implicit or tacit skills that cannot be taught or learned that easily.

So while learning about tools and techniques is of course a part of getting into Business Analysis, the way to excellence (generally) and to meet future challenges (specifically) will be more and more about about cultivating mindset and approach, i.e. tacit knowledge and soft skills.

Next up (03/10/2018): Post 2 of this series in which I will discuss Business Analysis ‘specialisations’ why they are largely irrelevant and that, in fact, they constitute entry routes into Business Analysis.