How to Start a Business Analyst

How to Start a Business Analyst Career

Career
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents.........................................................................1
Sample Page 1.............................................................................2
Typical Day.........................................................................................2
During project initiation....................................................................................................2

Sample Page 2.............................................................................4

Practice listening..............................................................................................................4
Practice translating..........................................................................................................4
Practice asking questions.................................................................................................4
Organize a meeting..........................................................................................................4
Observe someone.............................................................................................................4

Sample Page 3.............................................................................5

Networking events...............................................................................5
What events should I attend?...........................................................................................5

Copyright © 2009 by Laura Brandau.

How to Start a Business Analyst Career

SAMPLE PAGE 1
This chapter is intended to help you see yourself in a business analyst’s shoes.
Decisions become easier if we can see and feel what the end result will be like. I
invite you to absorb what’s written here and see yourself in various aspects of the
role. You will also have the opportunity to do more exploration in this area when you
talk to business analysts, as suggested in a later chapter.

Typical Day
What typical day? There is no typical day as a business analyst. Rather, there are
multiple different kinds of days, some of which tend to repeat themselves
throughout project lifecycles and some of which bear no explanation.

Business analysis is not the type of career where you need to necessarily be
prepared for anything, but expect the occasional surprise or unexpected situation.
In most business analyst jobs, you’ll experience a fair amount of variety in your day-
to-day work. And while this is not a role like IT support requiring near constant
interaction with others and real-time prioritization, priorities shift and a certain
amount of flexibility and responsiveness is important. Of course, if your company
experiences a catastrophe or uncovers significant unexpected opportunity you will
most likely be called in to help on short notice, but that’s the exception not the rule.

Most often your days will not hit you, instead you’ll hit them. The best business
analysts drive the requirements process. This means scheduling meetings,
managing input, influencing stakeholders, and ensuring decisions are made. Great
business analysts are proactive and seek out answers. If this is not a comfortable
role for you, it might be possible to find positions where you can partner with a
strong project manager. In general, however, you should be prepared for planning
out your own work to meet deadlines (possibly set by yourself, possibly imposed)
and facilitating input and occasionally follow-ups from a variety of people to achieve
your end goals.

While there is not one typical day, there are several kinds of typical days.

During project initiation

Project initiation mainly involves eliciting requirements to understand the scope of a
potential solution. Elicitation days are fun and many business analysts enjoy
elicitation days the most. These days occur early in the project or possibly even
before the project starts and involve meeting with stakeholders to understand what
they want to achieve in a project. You will spend the day drinking from a fire hose
because you will be learning so much and handling so many different perspectives
about the project. You’ll often spend the afternoon or evening typing up your

Copyright © 2009 by Laura Brandau.

How to Start a Business Analyst Career

copious notes and analyzing what you learned. I find elicitation to be a very
intellectual activity. All of your intellectual capabilities and

Copyright © 2009 by Laura Brandau.

How to Start a Business Analyst Career

SAMPLE PAGE 2
Practice listening
The most critical skill you can refine and develop with respect to elicitation is
listening. Listening means comprehending what
you are hearing and letting the stakeholder
know you have understood them. You can
practice this skill using a technique called “My first corporate job was
paraphrasing. After listening to someone speak at a call centre in the mid-
on a topic say “Let me be sure I understand nineties. After the initial
you, if I can put what you just said in my own few months of learning the
words….” You’ll get immediate feedback on ropes I started to become
how well you understood and you can use this annoying by asking
technique repeatedly to improve your listening questions and challenging
skills.1 the process by proposing
ways of doing things that I
Practice translating thought were better. And I
As you improve your listening skills, you will tried to do this as a team
begin to notice disconnects in conversations. player, rather than as the
Practice reframing what each person is saying disgruntled rebel.
to help them all understand each other better.
Eventually this led me to
Practice asking questions being handed a number of
Whether or not you are responsible for projects to work on, and
facilitating a discussion, a well-placed question then to lead. The [BA]
can serve to reframe the discussion and help career evolved from there.”
others communicate. Ask questions when you
believe something isn’t clear or if people
appear to be talking past one another.

Organize a meeting
How well are your meetings organized today? Could you focus on improving them,
making them more focused and efficient? Great business analysts facilitate
productive meetings. What could you do to improve your meeting skills?

Observe someone
Could you create an opportunity to observe someone in their day-to-day work? If so,
this is a great opportunity to practice elicitation skills, even if you are simply
eliciting the requirements for how they use the system or perform a process today.
Ask questions. Connect the dots. Take copious notes. And use your new
understanding to create value for your organization.

1
The suggestion to improve your active listening skills was offered by Doug Goldberg.

Copyright © 2009 by Laura Brandau.

How to Start a Business Analyst Career

SAMPLE PAGE 3
Networking events
What events should I attend?
Your best networking opportunities will come from local professional associations.
In particular, if you have a local IIBA® chapter, you’ll want to start attending their
meetings. If you don’t have an IIBA® chapter, look for professional meetings in
related professions (including business process engineering, product management,
project management, quality assurance, or software development) as it’s quite
likely you’ll find business analysts at these other meetings…maybe even others who
want to collaborate to start an IIBA chapter!

A second group of networking opportunities will come from process-specific groups.

In particular, Agile and SCRUM tend to have local groups and people from a broad
range of software development disciplines attend their meetings.

Consider industry-specific groups where you will meet people from a variety of
professions but working in the same industry. These groups could be especially
helpful if you plan to leverage your industry expertise to help you transition into a
business analyst role.

Finally, if you are currently unemployed or have a lot of flexibility in your schedule,
also research local career or job networking groups in your area. These groups help
people “in between opportunities” stay connected and up-to-date.

There are several valuable resources for finding local events, most of them online.
Here are a few of my favorites.

• Meet-up: www.meet-up.com. This site allows local groups and organizers

to post events for a small fee. You will find a variety of groups, not all of
them geared toward professional topics.

• Local LinkedIn groups.

• Web searches for your location and “networking events” or “groups” or

“meetings”.

Once you attend a few events, it will be easier to keep up-to-date and informed. Just
ask attendees what other meetings they attend.

Copyright © 2009 by Laura Brandau.