Photo Credit: Ari Helminen (Creative Commons)
Despite the constant influx of new tools, buzzwords, and technology flooding into business analysis over the past decade, the joys and frustrations that business analysts experience in their organizations haven’t changed that much.
In a recent survey with 32 business analysts (more details about their profile at the bottom), 1/3 of the respondents answered an open-ended question about their biggest source of job satisfaction with a version of “having a positive impact in my organization”. The two other top sources of overall happiness reported were the diversity of work and the ability to learn new things and interact with people in other parts of the organization.
These results are not surprising given the fact that business analysis offers great opportunities to collaborate with people from various departments, get exposure to different business domains, and create significant organizational value by understanding business needs and identifying and elaborating the best solutions to address them.
On the flip side, 30 (94%) of survey participants described one or more of the following issues as the top frustrations they experience in their role:
- Lack of buy-in from stakeholders who “do not recognize the importance of spending enough time on fully understanding the problem before jumping to solutions”.
- Stakeholders and project managers who “fail to see/admit the value BAs bring to the team” .
- Being treated as a “catch-all” role to fill gaps in projects, performing testing and other project-related tasks that are unrelated to core business analysis activities.
- Corporate red tape / management decision paralysis.
These results resonated with other BAs who had early access to the findings and agreed the list accurately describes the most frustrating aspects of their jobs. What’s depressing in this results is that they appear to indicate no change from the situation most business analysts were in ten years ago, when I started to coach BAs and had to help them navigate the exact same list of issues.
While the problems described can invariably be traced back to lack of strong leadership capable of supporting the work and communicating the results delivered by business analysts, BAs do a disservice to themselves when they get frustrated with these issues but take no action to address them.
Take for example the problem of analysts who can’t get managers to show up for meetings to discuss requirements, or their boss to enforce agreements with other departments or ensure they have enough time to study the problem before starting to design a solution. Many of those BAs accept a diminished role because they believe changing the status quo is too difficult, if not impossible. Still, there is plenty of evidence that this is not an impossible problem to solve, and that often even small changes in behavior can lead to disproportionate results in terms of the influential power that can be developed by analysts over time.
Not only in my career, but also as part of my coaching of business analysts, I witnessed countless times how a better balance between time spent analyzing problems and documenting solutions and building relationships with decision-makers and nurturing allies for my proposals helped a BA elevate his/her role and gain buy-in for anything from a recommendation for the optimal solution to participation in requirements workshops.
The key lesson here for business analysts is: don’t wait for others to solve the problem; start doing now what you can to change the situation. Stop resigning yourself to being in a role that is underappreciated and prevents your voice from being heard. As I wrote in this article for Modern Analyst, here are strategies you can use to change the situation. If you find yourself in the position of having to defend your contributions, the need for more time or access to the right stakeholders to do your job well, or the impact of your work for the overall results of your team, follow the tips in that article. And if you need help building skills in this area, this Case Study from our Case Study Series will teach you how to apply field-tested influential power and negotiation techniques to get your your most resistant stakeholders to cooperate in situations when you need them to. To quote from one of the readers, “The examples you gave really helped me visualise using the techniques successfully in my BA role, so thank you for putting in the effort to create this really useful resource!”.
—
About the survey respondents
Years of experience & education levels were evenly distributed between male and female respondents.
—
Get the help you need to succeeed in business analysis
Now you can check out Beal Projects’ various offerings (one-on-one training, eCourse, eBooks) in one page and add multiple products to your shopping cart visiting this page.
There you’ll find a list of common problems BAs face and the skill-building solutions that many business analysts have been successfully used to improve their skills and the results they achieve in their organizations. If you’re currently in the job market, at the bottom of the page you’ll find a case study with field-tested advice that many BAs are reporting made a big difference in how they interview for new jobs. (If you too have a success story to share, please get in touch! Learning those only strengthen our intention to continue to offer high-quality, skill-building content for the BA community.