Retrospective on my life as a Business Analyst

For this April I'm marking 7 years in the industry and 7 years as a Business Analyst. It all started as I had articulated in my very first article "The beginning of a Dream". Today I will be recapping on what I had learned in past years working as a Business Analyst in 4 different companies and one to one completely different environments. Hope it will help the new bees who are getting ready to step out and kick start their journey's in Business Analysis. This is how 7 years along the journey my experience looked like.

To start I will take a different approach using something we use in our Scrum teams, the "Sprint retrospective". A Sprint retrospective is an agile ceremony we does at the end of each sprint. Scrum team get together and discuss "What went well in the sprint" and "What that can done better" in the up coming sprints. Learnt from the past experiences.

So, I will be doing a retrospective not on any project but on my career, considering the past 7 years of the journey and understanding what can be done better in the future. Hoping along the way that this will help all the aspiring BAs reading the article.

So I have depicted my experience in these 2 areas, What went well and What can done better.

1. Accepting all the opportunities - No matter big or small, you like or not, accept all the opportunities at the start of the career. It's benefits will quadruple in the days to come in unexpected ways.
2. Learn the foundation skills - At the beginning, learn the arsenal of business analysis. Learn what are user stories? how to write them? what are acceptance criteria? what are Use Cases, SRSs, RFPs, DFDs? etc. Try out a certification training such as ECBA at the beginning or in my case I did the BA foundation in BCS.
3. Collect and learn from templates - One way to learn BA activities quickly when you are a fresh beginner is learning from templates used. Try reading documents by other BA's at the office. Then try asking from friends working in other companies for templates for your reference. This can be SRSs, CRs, DFDs etc. If you are working in a startup you can improve and invent the templates by going through different sources. All though I learned BA work quickly through this method, it is not recommended to constraint your self to templates but focus on the process and delivery which are the most important. So I will count this step only at the beginning of the learning curve.
4. Do documentation in User perspective - Always try to use your requirement modelling in User perspective. You can use Use Case diagrams, empathy maps and prototyping in this regard. Then can include these in the SRS with user stories, so that any stakeholder reading the document will understand the requirement better. This help to bridge the gap between Business and developers.
5. Solve problems through User's angle - Most of the times at meetings you will not be able to come up with a solution or sometimes even to understand the problem properly. Most of the time this is due to that audience of a meeting consist of developers looking at a problem in technical angle. And their discussion will also get carried away in technical point of view. As a BA, what you should remember is that you are bringing a new dimension to the table, you are different from everyone else. So try to understand from user perspective instead and bring this dimension to effectively solve the problem with your team.
6. Work hard - This is the baseline of everything I had learned. Work your skin out when the situation is correct. I have achieved so much by just hard work, So will you!
7. Silently collect experience - Some BA's here might be going through a tough time at a work place. Might be due to your boss, colleagues or project pressure, you even might be prompted to resign. But instead, take one day at a time and mentally count month by month to your portfolio as experience. Remember, no place is a cakewalk, if it's hard, in the sake of experience and knowledge stay there. The outcome at the end of the tunnel will be a well molded, stronger and an experienced you.
8. Investing time on soft skills - At my first work place I had the opportunity to invest more time on skill development activities. We had a skill development team and facilitated lot of soft skill development gatherings to improve public speaking and personality. This can help a lot later in the career. One example is learning public speaking by managing fear of speech. When mastered, it helps a lot in confidence building when pitching products, doing demos and in various other project area. Most importantly, you will be able to handle fear. So for you, you can try a Toastmasters club near you, which will help you to mold the skills in a professional environment. So give some time to improve your soft skills, it will be coming handy going forward.
9. Complete academic qualifications in line with job - When I first started I was only having a diploma in software development. But after that, I aligned my BSc and MSc in BA relevant paths. Important message is always keep the belief to achieve these mile stones in your life as education is the key. Also when going for academic qualifications, learn the emerging tech as well, such as Big data, AI and Machine Learning. Because simply it is the future of tech.

1. Do good background check on the employer. - Something I had seen in new BAs and even me at the beginning of my career being ready to join any company that would give me an offer. It should not be the case. When applying for companies do a good background check. Let's say the offer is released, at least at this stage you should do a thorough back ground check before joining. There are lot of reasons for this. One reason can be if it's a Startup. In the case of startup's, check whether they are paying the employees properly and no black marks from previous employees. I'm not discouraging anyone not to join a start up. Some startups are very good. Some try new tech and there are lot of potential to grow. But there is a period after which we can decide whether this startup will become a Unicorn or will be a failure.
2. Learning Domain quickly - No matter the company, you need to learn the domain. Yes, it is possible to work effectively as a BA even without the domain expertise. What we learn through CBAP is that BA then should be able to handle subject matter experts with good stakeholder management skills and get the work done. But by adding the domain expertise into you with your tactical and technical know how will simply double your value to the team. You will be able to take decisions without additional meetings and work will be more quick and effective. For me at my work places it took some time, but moving forward to learn domain quickly one tactic I will tell you is to use the power of visualization to learn. You can use process diagrams using BPMN or Use case diagrams or any other diagraming to visualize. Else, you can learn by playing with the existing system through a UAT login. Also in another way, I put the domain as a story, and start learning the story behind. One method I leaned later that is effective in learning the story and breaking things down in understandable chunks is mind mapping, which you can also try at the start of a new domain.
3. Use Design thinking practices often - It's after some time I found out how effective is design thinking activities are. Now when thinking back, there are many practical problems to which design thinking should have been used but didn't. This includes using design practices used in the industry such as Human Centered Design which is promoted by Ideo. So to speak, all of it starts from Empathy, then define, Ideation, Prototyping and Test, which when combined together, can design a trail blazing software that everyone loves. So I will be using design thinking a lot in the future.
4. Becoming a comb shape player - There are lot of different types of players in a scrum team. The most common are the I shape players. As the shape suggest they only knows about one area and an expert in that precise area. These areas can be Business Analysis, Project Management, QA or Software Engineering. Then there are T shape players. Again as the letter depicts, these are people who are having a surface level understanding about all the roles but an deep expert in only their role. In the other hand the Comb shape players are different. They are having a deep knowledge on all the areas. This is the type that all the scrum team members should target at becoming. Which I found as the solution for most of the problems you will face in the future. First you should be an I shape, then the T shape and final target the Comb shape player, at a step by step process. In the future to become a Comb shape player, I would tryout to use SQL knowledge for testing and going forward increasing the knowledge in other areas such as software development as well. In the other hand to learn PM path, you can go for a training in PMI PBA where you will learn both BA and PM collaboration in a project.

So as you understood, Business Analysis is also similar to an eagle learning to fly. At first by trial and error it will try to fly, and with time it will get strong enough to touch the clouds from it's wings. So if you are new to the industry you can keep your learning curve open and try to learn by trial and error. Then when matured use the latest trends and tech similar to the eagle going for heights making it's wings stronger and more stronger day by day.