HOW A CAREER IN BUSINESS ANALYSIS PREPARED ME TO BE A TECH FOUNDER

Who is a Business Analyst?

The simple way to define a business analyst is a communicator. As a business analyst my role was to understand the problems that my stakeholders have and to demystify these issues using very simple methodologies that could communicate the information to various other teams who could help provide solutions to the problem thereby helping my client get to their target operating state, synergizing people, technology, data and processes to achieve optimal value.

Some of the very simple methods that I use in simplifying my communication are below;

·??????User stories – These are small unambiguous request that only focuses on solving one problem for the client.

An example:

As a user on AfricExpress website (Precondition or initial context)

I want a way to search for products (Event or trigger)

So that I can find my desired product (Expected outcome)

Typically, a user story follows a couple of principles, as shown below

INVEST

-?????????Independent: The request must focus on solving a single problem

-?????????Negotiable: On a quest to deliver the most value the request must not be treated as a contract, conversations are encouraged.

-?????????Valuable: Delivering the most value must be central to request as this determines the order of priority

-?????????Estimable: The solution team should be able to estimate their effort to a good approximation

-?????????Sizeable: The request should be small; this is often achieved when a request focuses on just solving a specific problem.

-?????????Testable: There must be a way to confirm that this is done.

3 C’s

-?????????The Card – The story

-?????????Conversation - Descriptions around it

-?????????Confirmation – The acceptance criteria

Acceptance criteria

A measurable way to determine that the request has been met, we typically use the cucumber principal (Given, when, then):

-?????????Given that I am a user on AfricExpress website

-?????????When I am on any page of the website

-?????????And I type on the search

-?????????And click on the suggestions or the search icon or click the enter button

-?????????Then provide me the best results that match my product search

-?????????And if the product isn’t available inform me

Prioritisation: User stories are often prioritised in order of the value that will be gotten from having the request met, we often use the MoSCoW method.

-?????????Must Have – Without this the product is not usable or is illegitimate

-?????????Should have – The product is legitimate and can be used but it will benefit us a lot to have this

-?????????Could have - It would be great to have this if we can fit it into the budget and timeline

-?????????Would like but not now given the budget or timeline

Impact to entrepreneurship

The user story technic has helped me as a tech founder because when building a product as complicated as the one we are building (The Alibaba of Africa) AfricExpress, my ability to demystify highly complex scenario’s into small request prioritised in the order of value to the users remain key to the quality of the product we are building. I have the tools I need to effectively communicate to my solution design team in an unambiguous manner thanks to Business Analysis.

·??????Unified Modelling Language (UML): Every environment has its own language and like I stated earlier my number one role is communication. UML is the way we communicate in the tech ecosystem, we bridge the borders of language, skill sets, roles when we communicate using the UML means; a tech person in China, India,?Vietnam or Lagos Nigeria does not really need me to communicate in English when we collaborate, with the help UML we can communicate in a language of our own.

Some examples:

BPMN – Business process modelling notations

We use this method to map out As-Is and To-Be process which is basically the present state and the future state we want. This helps us understand and highlight gaps which needs to be rectified ns the As-Is to get to the To-Be state.

Everything in the image above communicates something very specific to any tech individual in the world, thereby bridging the gap in any communication barriers we might have had.

UseCase diagrams: This is a UML used in communicating the interactions between a specific stakeholder and the system we are working on.

Again, every single interaction above communicates something specific to all of us in the tech ecosystem globally.

Entity Relationship Diagrams: This is a UML that focuses on how data interacts across various entities in our system or systems. The interactions help us when we write API’s, data governance, metadata creation, and understanding our general architecture.

Again, every single cardinality above communicates something specific to all of us in the tech ecosystem globally.

Impact to entrepreneurship

The UML techniques that I use gives me an edge over other founders who do not have my background, because I can communicate highly technical or complex things in a language that simplifies it and nullifies some of the limitations from the Tower of Babel (Where multiple languages was first introduced to hinder unparalleled ability of man to build anything the set their minds to build). I’m able to achieve more in building across our value chain.?Business analysis gave me an unfair advantage.

·??????Stakeholder management: Put simply, a stakeholder is anyone who holds a stake in your project.

N.B. If you want to learn more about stakeholder check my previous article - Stakeholder's made simple | LinkedIn

To gather information about what you need to understand your current state or the solution to your future state there are people who are either impacted or need to be involved for you to get to your destination. These are your stakeholders.

Some skills I use in stakeholder management:

Stakeholder Matrix: Visual way of understanding or categorizing your stakeholders are based on their level of power and interest on your project.

Stakeholders and what to expect from them

Another technique I love to use and I believe will be helpful to you is STOP, it is a mnemonic that stands for;

S – Strategic

T – Tactical

OP – Operational

Strategic: This represents the heads of department, directors and other key senior leaders within your organisation. These guys often lead a very busy life and would only give you just enough time to clarify the vision of the organisation, project budget, and scope of the project. They might mention things once or in passing, ensure that you never ignore what they say, because the viability of your project may just about depend on it.

Tactical: This represents middle managers. These guys are concerned with performance, monitoring, and targets. They often report KPI’s to exec/ strategic level, therefore you have to verify and validate critical success factors (CSF’s) from this group. Also, maximise their experience when it comes to the templates you will use for various project deliverables.

Operational: In management, we refer to this group as floor staffs, it is with this group that most of us spend the most of our time; with this group, you have the opportunity to identify and explore key processes with the current system or operations. They’re also great at highlighting issues with the current state; they’re also the ones you need to tell you what they want in the future state.

To achieve the best outcome, you must speak to your stakeholders and learn how to extract information from them which brings me to me next skill Elicitation.

Elicitation: The process of extracting information (Explicit or Tacit) from stakeholders in a logical and precise manner. There are various techniques that we use which I can’t really go into, but I will talk about the skills that prepared me the most to be a tech founder

Workshop facilitation: Gathering selected stakeholders and eliciting information from them. This has helped me in holding focus groups for various users on my platform.

Presentation: I presented to various stakeholders frequently which prepared me to speak to investors, users, my team member and various other entities within my organisation.

As you can see I owe a lot to the amazing career I have in Business Analysis thanks to amazing mentors over the years like Vivienne Owuocha, Ian Richards and various other people or groups like BCS, IIBA, APMG and CMI.

To learn more about this amazing career the kick started this amazing career for me visit ?- https://slingstoneconsulting.com/ or DM ?me or any of the mentors mentioned above. ?

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