Your actions matter
Angela Wick
| 2 Million+ Trained | Helping BAs Navigate AI | BA-Cube.com Founder & Host | LinkedIn Learning Instructor
In my first LinkedIn Newsletter I spelled out what Modern Analysis looks like, and discussed the Dos, Don'ts, and context of the follow Modern Analysis musts:
- Customer Focus
- Facilitating Decision Making & Problem Solving
- Experiment
- Collaborate Differently
- Your Actions Matter
- Own Your Craft
- Always Be Learning
- Keeper of Responsible Decisions
In the last issue, I focused on how to collaborate differently. In this issue, I want to deep dive into how YOUR ACTIONS MATTER!
Yes, every action you take shows what your values are, your stakeholders and team are watching!
It is easy to unconsciously revert back to behaviors and actions that are not aligned to your values of great analysis!
How can we reflect on our behaviors in the hustle of each crazy, deadline driven day? That is for each of us to figure out and set an intention to do so, perhaps a daily planning practice for 15 min to think about your goals for the day and what behaviors and actions will align.
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DO: Act as if approval and value in your work are sought from your actions, behaviors, collaborations, and how you make others and yourself feel and think.
DON'T: Act as if what you document is what is approved and judged. It will be all that matters if that is all you do! Then you become a note taker vs. analyst and agent of change.
CONTEXT: Your value and worth are about how you take others on the process and journey of solving the problem and implementing the details of a solution. Your relationships, interactions, thought patterns, and how you collaborate to determine your worth.Documents are the results of all of this, without the right mindset, interactions, and collaborations, documents will not be of any value.
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Modern Analysis Values - Find Your Clarity!
To connect our actions to our values, first we need to get clarity on our values. The values I like to work with when I am teaching, writing, speaking, and coaching teams are these:
- Understanding the customer/user problem or opportunity over jumping first to a solution. We continuously explore the problem domain as we incrementally identify potential solutions
- End to End "Full stack" analysis of the user experience, data flow, process, rules/policies, over analyzing a single system component. We know that quality issues and customer frustrations come from disjointed workflows, data flows, and user experiences that don't make sense to the users.
- Shared understanding with high-impact collaboration over detailed documentation and hand-offs to component teams. We collaborate by using visual models, and visual artifacts that represent the user scenarios, data, rules, and a user perspective to drive the end-to-end conversation to achieve a holistic shared understanding.
What are some steps you can take to make your actions matter?
Take time to build awareness of how your current actions and behaviors align to your values. Sometimes they are habits we have learned, that we don't even realize go against our own values. Finding the behaviors that no longer serve our values can be emotional and tough work.
Build a practice to plan your day, not just tasks, but also your mindset, actions, and behaviors that align to your values. Reflect on situations that may come up that will challenge your learned reactions and how you will adapt to your actual values.
Give yourself grace, it takes time to align your values, direction and actions. It doesn’t happen overnight. You are a work in progress, enjoy the journey!
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Want to learn more skills to align modern analysis and help change your behaviors?
Continuously learn modern analysis skills with me in two ways:
My Linkedin Learning Courses - Ten courses all about business analysis, and agile analysis.
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Angela is passionate about helping organizations and professionals modernize analysis practices. Angela has been working to modernize analysis practices for over 20 years with a focus on innovation, collaboration, and lean analysis techniques to keep teams moving forward!
Assistant Vice President: IT Business Analysis/ Enterprise Agile Services
3 年Your modern analysis values are on point. So many times we jump into action before we really understand the problem or opportunity and we miss opportunities to analyze and collaborate on solution options. In many organizations this type of analysis isn't valued because it "feels better" to be in motion even if we don't truly understand the opportunity. Jumping straight into something we don't truly understand increases the probability that we're only solving a small part of the challenge and may even be creating more challenges downstream. Shifting from "it looks like work" to "valuable work" should be every analyst's goal and helping the team apply these values is where we can provide leadership.