Getting it right with tech in 2024: a Business Analyst perspective

The Business Analyst (BA) career is slightly dynamic and ambiguous. While there are common denominators and transferable experiences, the BA roles and expectations vary from organization to organization and from project to project. Thus, in starting your career in this field, one of my ultimate advice is learning to take initiative.

Transition Training

As mentioned in my previous articles, one of the ways to venture into a BA career is to be trained by a reputable organization that upskill people for tech careers. However, in my experience and in listening to others who have plied this route, there is no training that would 100% prepare you for the dynamism of the role.

Thus during or after your training, you might consider doing the following: firstly, go through all the past project catalogues to review the various artifacts produced by past students. Secondly, reach out to two to three of your colleagues to work on a project, for example, build a mobile App, or website, or procure cheap software. In all, put on a BA cap and document your learnings.?

Thirdly, schedule calls with practicing BAs, bi-weekly or monthly, and ask them what they do in their work. If you earn their trust and there are no privacy breaches, let them show you some of their deliverables and artifacts. Lastly, you could look for tech startups and volunteer pro bono. Here, you can map their processes, service blueprints, business requirement documents, and many more. You could ask practicing BAs and ChatGPT what you should be doing.

You do not have to be perfect but these training grounds would further increase your confidence.

Career Commencement

When you kickstart your career, things might not be so clear to you. To navigate the curve, you might consider taking some of these initiatives. Firstly, take time to have ongoing meetings with the Product Owner, Product Lead, Delivery Manager, or Scrum Master (if your organization is agile). These people have a general understanding of the product roadmap and the set of deliverables expected per time.?

Secondly, ensure you are in touch with your manager and they understand your challenges. Furthermore, you could ask your manager if there are people you could shadow, projects outside of your team you could be a part of, or past projects you could study. If your organization has any document showing what the BA deliverables are, you may use this as a talking point when you schedule a call. In my organization, this is called Double Diamond and you would see what the BA deliverables are in each phase of a project.

Thirdly, during your daily stand-up, listen to the updates people are giving. If someone mentions something you think is exciting, chat them up if you would like to be a part of it. For example, colleagues in User Research Design might want to conduct some research or user testing, express your interest that you would like to observe, or take notes for them during any of the sessions. This way, you are getting involved and building relationships.

Fourthly, if there are Senior BAs on the team, ask if you can join their meetings to shadow them. While in their meetings, take notes. To take good notes, depending on your organizational policy, you may consider recording discreetly with your phone to ensure you are not missing any details and deleting afterward, seeking consent and recording the meetings with Teams, or joining with AI tools like Read.ai to summarise the key points of the meetings.

Afterward, you can share this with the Senior BA while also documenting it for yourself. You may take a step further to publish them on your company’s Confluence page for future reference, especially if it’s a cross-team meeting as a way of working.?Finally, you could ask if you could peer-review the works of the Senior BAs and share any feedback you have.

Lastly, there are times when things might be very slow: when no project or many activities are going on. During these periods, you might consider reaching out to colleagues for catch-up to get more understanding of their roles, projects, and things they have learned working in the team. You could also speak with those who are skilled in specific tools like Miro, Visio, Figma, JIRA, etc. to organize training sessions for you.

Furthermore, you may consider taking courses on the e-learning portal of your organization or general BA-related courses. In addition, you might dig into the organization's document management system to look up past projects and understand the BA deliverables during testing, writing user stories, acceptance criteria, process mapping, and others.?

I believe that learning to take initiatives like these would help you manage some of the ambiguous curves of the BA career. Hopefully, you then figure out how to manage things yourself going forward.