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**Mastering Business Analysis**

Your key to advancing your career as a Business Analyst and beyond

Latest Episodes:

**MBA150: A High Five for Business Analysts** Feb 27, 2018
Show notes

In this episode, Tomette Kirk shares what she calls the high five; five essential tasks that we need to focus on as Business Analysts to be successful.
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After listening to this episode, you'll understand:

What essential tasks are needed for success as a business analyst

The right way to do stakeholder analysis

Why current state analysis is critical

How to find gaps in a process or change

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Show Notes

What are the essential tasks that can make or break a Business Analyst?

To be successful as a Business Analyst, we need to perform five critical tasks. They’re what Tomette Kirk refers to as the ‘High Five”. Those tasks are:

Stakeholder analysis

Current state analysis

Future state analysis

Gap analysis

Requirements management

These five tasks help us to involve the right people, understand where we are starting from, understand where we want to go, what needs to change, and provides clarity to the team.

When you combine the High Five with Tomette’s 5 part requirement (who does what, why, and done when), you have all of the elements for completing critical analysis work and creating a shared understanding.

Listen to this episode to understand how to apply Tomette’s high five approach to master the essentials of Business Analysis.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/masteringbusinessanalysis/MBA150.mp3
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Your Homework

Use current state analysis on your next project. You need to know where you are now before you can discover where to go next.

Tomette Kirk

Tomette Kirk is a Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP), Business Analysis Resource Manager, former president of the Southeast WI IIBA Chapter, and a frequent industry speaker.

LinkedIn

**Thank you for listening to the program**

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on **iTunes** and other podcatchers.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

.

The post MBA150: A High Five for Business Analysts appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

**MBA149: The Power of EQ** Feb 13, 2018
Show notes

In this episode, author and speaker Jen Shirkani helps us to understand the importance of Emotional Intelligence and shares techniques to boost your EQ.
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After listening to this episode, you'll understand:

What emotional intelligence (EQ) is and how it differs from IQ

Why emotional intelligence is so important

What happens when you have low EQ

How to grow your emotional intelligence

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Show Notes

Unlike IQ, Emotional Intelligence (your Intelligence Quotient or EQ) is something you can learn and develop. Studies show that emotional intelligence is a much better predictor of success than IQ.

There are three elements to emotional intelligence.

The ability to recognize yourself: You know how you’re wired and you have an awareness of your emotions and how they affect your behavior. This allows you to put yourself in situations that bring out your best and better control your responses in difficult situations.

The ability to read others: You have situational awareness and can sense the mood of others without them saying anything. Being able to read people can help you better understand the context and adjust your approach.

Respond appropriately: Being able to recognize your own feelings and having the situational awareness to be able to read others gives you the ability to adapt your approach and respond appropriately in the context of the situation.

**The Impact of Low EQ**

Teams with individuals that lack EQ tend to have more unhealthy conflict. People can become isolated and there is less collaboration. Developing the adaptability and consistency that comes with emotional intelligence also leads to building trust.

When leaders lack EQ, we often see issues with low engagement levels and employee retention, which leads to high turnover and lower productivity.

There needs to be a balance between the three components of emotional intelligence. Without self-awareness, you tend to self-sacrifice and can’t say no tactfully. Without situational awareness, it will be difficult to build and maintain relationships. Even if you have these two levels of awareness, you need to be able to use that information to adapt and respond appropriately.

**How to Build Self-Awareness**

You can develop your emotional intelligence in several ways. After taking a test to gauge your EQ, start with your self-awareness. We start there because it’s difficult to change your behavior if you’re not aware of what you’re doing or why.

It helps to take a personality assessment and communication assessment to understand your preferences and how you’re wired.

From there, self-reflection helps you to better understand your behaviors and reactions. Take time out to reflect on past situations and your responses to discover the ‘why’ behind your behavior. Having some downtime between meetings can help you reflect and refresh so that you’re ready for the next interaction.

**How to Build Situational Awareness**

To improve your situational awareness, it helps to slow down and listen to understand. We often get so caught up in our own agendas and what we’re going to say next that we forget to listen.

Developing a natural curiosity and asking questions to understand helps you to slow down and truly understand others. It also allows you to understand and appreciate their perspective even if you don’t agree with it.

Active listening skills such as paraphrasing also helps ensure you correctly understand the other person.

You can also develop your awareness of body language by observing crowds or watching television with the sound off and trying to understand what others are feeling.

Higher stress levels may reduce our self-control, so finding ways to reduce stress will also help us to control our response, tune in to the situation, and select an appropriate response.

By raising your emotional intelligence, you’ll be able to develop stronger relationships, better collaborate, and be seen as someone others want to work with.

Listen to the full episode to discover more approaches to improving your EQ and how the need for emotional intelligence changes as you move to higher levels of leadership.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/masteringbusinessanalysis/MBA149.mp3
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Your Homework

Take a self-assessment to get a baseline for your emotional intelligence. That will help you understand which areas to develop first.

Also, at the end of the day, reflect back on your interactions with others and ask yourself how they would rate your behavior today.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Jen’s website JenShirkani.com

Get Jen’s books on Amazon

Jen Shirkani

Jen Shirkani is a leading expert on emotional intelligence and has been a featured speaker at several conferences. She’s also the author of two books on emotional intelligence and frequently speaks and writes about workplace challenges including: interviewing, employee engagement and motivation, generational differences, and coaching.

X
LinkedIn

**Thank you for listening to the program**

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on **iTunes** and other podcatchers.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

.

The post MBA149: The Power of EQ appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

**MBA148: 7 Keys to Succeeding with Agile** Jan 30, 2018
Show notes

In this episode, Paula Maychruk helps us uncover the key concepts that allow us to be successful with Agile approaches.
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After listening to this episode, you'll understand:

Why Agile transformations often fail

How you can best partner with Product Owners

What needs to be true for you to succeed as a Product Owner

The role you can play to help your organization succeed with Agile

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Show Notes

A lot of organizations have adopted Agile practices but haven’t seen some of the expected results. There are a few key concepts that organizations miss when transitioning to Agile that limits the effectiveness of the practices.

**Key Concept 1: Sponsorship**

Any Agile transformation or other large initiative will only be as successful as the most senior person that supports you. Top down sponsorship and leadership buy-in is key. Otherwise, teams will struggle seeing the connection between what they’re doing and the organization’s strategy.

**Key Concept 2: Vision**

Vision is key for creating the mindset shift needed to succeed with Agile. Whether it’s a vision for the organization or for the project/product, a compelling helps align people to a goal.

Vision is important for helping everyone to understand where we’re going and why. This contributes to getting buy-in and commitment from the team.

**Key Concept 3: Product Ownership**

Strong product ownership is an integral piece that allows teams and organizations to adapt to Agile practices and mindset. It helps you to better understand your customers and connects the team to the value they’re trying to deliver.

This requires seeking out feedback from customers and different parts of the organization so that we can adapt our approach. Product owners must be able to make decisions and empowered to talk to stakeholders to act on their feedback.

When Business Analysts and Product Owners partner together, the result is often stronger product ownership. Business Analysts can use their questioning and analysis skills to fill in some of the gaps common to newer Product Owners.

**Key Concept 4: Success Criteria**

To succeed in Agile, everyone needs a clear understanding of the ‘why’ behind what we’re doing. Establishing success criteria in a User Story helps the team to understand the value they’re trying to deliver. The “so that” portion of a story explains the value we expect to deliver.

Strong success criteria also helps us to discover how we will create the expected outcome.

**Key Concept 5: Planning**

It’s a common misconception that you don’t need to plan in Agile. In reality, there’s more planning in Agile than in traditional methods.

Agile approaches include frequent opportunities to inspect what we’re doing and adapt our approach. This means that we are continually planning and making small adjustments.

**Key Concept 6: Change Management**

To adapt to any change, people need to understand who’s involved in the change effort. We need to communicate and involve others for a change to be successful.

Everyone on the team has a responsibility to act with transparency and communicate risks and impacts of the change.

**Key Concept 7: Culture**

Agile requires a mindset shift. To be successful with an Agile transformation, you need to capture people’s hearts and minds. You need to create a desire for new ways of thinking and operating.

Processes and tools won’t save an Agile transformation. In fact, they can hinder this type of change.

Agile requires trust, respect, and collaboration. We need to create that culture and capabilities within our teams and across the organization. We want to create a learning culture in which we’re continuously improving and actively seeking feedback.

Listen to the full episode to understand how you can influence these key concepts and be successful in an Agile environment.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/masteringbusinessanalysis/MBA148.mp3
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Your Homework

Are you more focused on doing Agile or being Agile? To be successful, we need to connect more with the principles and mindset behind Agile.

Think about the mindset and principles of Agile and identify ways of working under those principles. Find small changes that you can make to move in the right direction.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Get a free audiobook of your choice from Audible

Paula Maychruk

Paula Maychruk has worked in the IT industry for the past 20+ years, ultimately landing in the role of Senior Manager, Project Practices with Sovereign General Insurance where she has been helping to formulate and champion better processes related to the delivery of projects and releases.

Paula has also been actively involved with IIBA and has held Board of Director positions and served as a member of IIBA’s Senior Leadership Team.

LinkedIn

**Thank you for listening to the program**

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on **iTunes** and other podcatchers.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

.

The post MBA148: 7 Keys to Succeeding with Agile appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

http://audibletrial.com/masteringbusinessanalysis — **Lightning Cast: Trust – The One Thing that Changes Everything** Jan 23, 2018
Show notes

In this Lightning Cast, we’ll discuss the key element to great teams: trust. Trust increases the speed to deliver projects and reduces cost. Here’s how to develop and maintain trust on your team.

*A Lightning Cast is a shorter form episode modeled after lightning talks. You’ll get valuable content in 8 minutes or less.*

Trust – It’s what Steven M. R. Covey calls “The one thing that changes everything.” It can take a long time to build trust and only seconds to lose it.

As trust goes up, speed increases and cost goes down. That’s because with high trust, people communicate openly, act with transparency, and meet their commitments. Without spin, meetings are fewer, faster, and to the point. There are less processes and less overhead needed to get things done.

Where there’s a lack of trust, people operate with hidden agendas. There’s more documentation and heavy processes to prove what people said and did. There’s more bureaucracy and rules, which makes it difficult to get things done. In organizations where there’s low engagement, it’s usually due to a lack of trust.

All of this bureaucracy, red tape, disengagement, churn, and unnecessary processes is the tax low trust teams and organizations must pay. It makes it harder to get things done.

**Credibility is Key**

To develop trust and be seen as a trusted advisor, we need to be trustworthy (worthy of someone’s trust). Dale Carnegie outlined four ways that people evaluate us: what we say, how we say it, what we do, and how we do it. It’s all about building credibility.

Credibility has four components:

**Integrity**: This is more than just being honest. Do you do what you say and say what you mean? Are you really living by your values? Do you act with humility? Do you act with courage and stand up for what you believe is right?

**Intent**: What are your motives? Do you have a hidden agenda or are you being open and transparent? If people don’t believe that your intentions are true and honorable, they’ll never extend trust to you.

**Capabilities**: Your capabilities are your skills, knowledge, talents, and abilities. We can increase our capabilities by constantly learning and improving.

**Results**: We need to be able to deliver the right outcomes. Even if you have good intentions, if the results aren’t there, neither is credibility. When people judge your credibility, they look at what results you’ve delivered in the past, what results you’re currently delivering, and what results you have the potential to deliver in the future. To improve results, we need to be accountable, take action, and deliver on expectations.

**Extending and Rebuilding Trust**

To create trust within our teams and with stakeholders, we need to build trust and extend trust to others. There’s a difference between extending trust and having blind trust in others. We need to use good judgment when extending trust and do a little analysis. Does the person to whom you’re extending trust have credibility and are they able to meet your expectations? Are the expectations clear?

As the Russian proverb says, “Trust, but verify.”

When trust is lost, restoring it is difficult, but not impossible. Think about the root cause of why trust was lost. Did you overpromise and under deliver? Were your intentions unclear? Often, it’s caused by unclear expectations.

To rebuild trust, you’ll likely need to apologize or make restitution for what happened. Be sure to speak with honesty and sincerity while discussing what happened and the current situation. Don’t blame others and take responsibility for your actions (or inaction as the case may be). Be sure to hear their side and act with respect for the value that others bring. Going forward, you’ll need to be clear about expectations, keep your commitments, and deliver results.

When you have trust, people feel like you are truly listening to them, you have their best interests in mind, and your interactions will be truthful and transparent. This leads to more engagement and it makes it easier to get things done.

Trust makes change easier, people don’t withhold information, we collaborate more, share helpful feedback, work together to improve, and innovate more.

Here are a few quick tips to help you build and maintain trust:

Make your motives clear by sharing the ‘why’ and intended outcomes of what you’re doing.

Be transparent and speak with candor. Make your work visible and speak directly without spinning the truth.

Be accountable and don’t use no excuses or blame. Hold others accountable for their actions and deliverables as well.

Clarify and manage expectations by creating a shared understanding. Rephrasing expectations helps with this.

Fulfill your commitments and keep your promises. If for some reason you’ll miss a commitment, let the other person know as early as possible. Letting them know that you weren’t able to meet a commitment you made after its due is too late.

Listen to the full episode to understand why trust is critical to success and how to build trust.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/masteringbusinessanalysis/MBALC013__Trust.mp3

**Thank you for listening to the program**

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on **iTunes** and other podcatchers.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

.

The post Lightning Cast: Trust – The One Thing that Changes Everything appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

**MBA147: The Business Agility Manifesto** Jan 16, 2018
Show notes

In this episode, Ron Ross explains the Business Agility Manifesto and helps us to understand the role business knowledge plays in enhancing business agility.
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After listening to this episode, you'll understand:

Why the Business Agility Manifesto is and why it was created

How business knowledge can enhance an organization’s agility

What you can do to help your organization reduce time to develop solutions

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Show Notes

Agile has had a huge impact on the way we work. Agile thinking and Agile software development is evolving rapidly and is moving beyond the confines of IT. It’s starting to focus on the organizational or social dimension of agility, energizing the work of teams, organizations, and leadership. But Agile itself does not guarantee business agility.

Today there are deep structural problems in the way we handle business knowledge that severely limits of any social or organizational remedies such as Agile practices. The Business Agility Manifesto identifies root causes and long term fundamentals that we need to address to achieve business agility.

Essentially, the Business Agility Manifesto explains what the business and practitioners need to do to adjust and thrive in the new reality of the knowledge age. Business knowledge is a corporate asset and it needs to be treated as such.

We as practitioners need to reshape how business knowledge is handled as much for our own and the project’s benefit as for our organization’s benefit.

**The Business Agility Manifesto**

The Business Agility Manifesto calls for the appropriate infrastructure for retaining business knowledge. This is essential for managing perpetual change. If an Agile approach isn’t addressing that problem, things aren’t going to improve no matter how clever or invigorating your Agile approach might be.

The manifesto also mentions the inclusion and delivery of business knowledge into projects and business solutions. This means that we need to apply common business vocabulary and rules to our solutions.

It’s critical that everyone has access to the business knowledge and can help evolve that knowledge. This requires us to change the way we retain and manage that knowledge and create a single source of truth.

To achieve business agility, projects need to be justified directly on the basis of value creation for end customers and the business strategy, not on the basis of software features. We need to emphasize the importance of getting the right results, not just getting results fast.

Listen to the full episode to understand the role business knowledge plays in business agility and whay you can do to enhance your organizations agility.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/masteringbusinessanalysis/MBA147.mp3
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Your Homework

On your next project or initiative, look for existing sources of business rules. If you’re lucky, there are existing projects from which you can identify and reuse the business rules.

If that doesn’t work, look at all of the relevant contracts, agreements, memos, and anything else that documents the company’s obligations and commitments that are relevant to the focus of the project. That documentation represents a source of business rules, although it needs to be disambiguated.

If no such documentation exists, you’ll need to elicit business rules from subject matter experts.

Links mentioned in this episode:

The Business Agility Manifesto

Business Rules Community website

Ron’s website: Business Rules Solutions

Ron Ross

Co-Founder of Business Rule Solutions, LLC (BRS)

Ron Ross is recognized internationally as the “father of business rules”. He is the author of ten professional books including the groundbreaking first book on business rules *The Business Rule Book*. Ron is the co-author of the Business Agility Manifesto and was also a contributor to the IIBA’s BABOK v3.

X
LinkedIn

**Thank you for listening to the program**

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on **iTunes**.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

The post MBA147: The Business Agility Manifesto appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.

MBA146: The Full Stack Business Analyst Jan 09, 2018

Show notes

In this episode, we explore what it takes to become a Full-Stack Business Analyst. Similar to a Full-Stack Developer, a Business Analyst can broaden their skills to reduce waste and contribute more value to their organization.

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After listening to this episode, you'll understand:

What a Full-Stack Business Analyst is
Why developing knowledge across the product delivery stack is valuable
What the components of the product stack are
How to begin growing your skills

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Show Notes

Are you a Full-Stack Business Analyst?

A Full-Stack Developer is someone who’s able to work on the entire technology stack required to deliver the desired functionality. This includes the front-end user interface as well as the back-end database, logic, and other processing systems for an application. Full-Stack doesn’t necessarily imply that you have mastered all of the technology, but you know enough to understand and work on the technology required to deliver the application.

Full-Stack Developers can be a valuable asset to an organization because there are less handoffs, fewer silos, and more awareness of impacts and dependencies from a technical point of view. It also helps with estimation and creating a shared understanding.

If Full-Stack Developers are in high demand and can add value to an organization, with about Business Analysts? What’s our version of full stack?

A Full-Stack Business Analyst is someone who can take an idea from concept to cash. It’s someone who can help identify opportunities and shape products that satisfy a need. They can also rally support for the initiative and gain alignment within the team. These people may also have a strong technical voice to provide input and guidance related to technical solutions and tradeoffs. Finally, they can see the initiative through to completion and ensure ongoing monitoring of results.

Instead of a technology stack, the Full-Stack Business Analyst focuses on the Product Stack, which is comprised of:

Ideation: Discovering possible opportunities
Validation: Ensuring that this is a good/the right opportunity
Visioning: Creating a shared understanding and leading through development of a compelling vision
Decomposition: Breaking the vision into smaller achievable chunks and identifying experiments to test and learn
Delivery: Building the solution and getting those solutions into the hands of our customers
Monitoring: Analyzing metrics to validate success and identify new opportunities

Let’s take a closer look at the Product Stack.

Ideation: Discovering Opportunities

Ideation is where you use data, your knowledge of the business environment, knowledge of your organization’s capabilities, and your understanding of your customers to discover ideas for potential solutions. This may require industry knowledge or research, data mining techniques, and a genuine empathy and understanding of your customers.

Skills and knowledge needed for ideation include problem analysis and identification of opportunities through SWOT, SLEPT, or PESTEL analysis. You may also use approaches such as Design Thinking or Lean Startup and tools like personas, empathy maps, customer journeys, and experiments.

Validation: Confirming it’s the Right Opportunity

Validation occurs when you analyze your idea to make sure there’s good problem/solution fit as well as good product/market fit. You want to ensure that the product idea meets an important customer need, customers are willing to pay for it (or willing to use it for an internal product context), and that it’s scalable and marketable.

An understanding of marketing, product management, and finance is needed here. You’ll likely develop a business case as part of the validation to ensure that the product idea is worth the investment and to help with prioritization.

Visioning: Gaining Buy-In and Alignment

Once you have validated the product idea, you’ll need buy-in from your organization to get the time, money, and other resources you need to make the idea come to life. This involves influencing, using data from your earlier validation, creating a compelling vision, and creating alignment by developing a shared understanding of the problem, proposed solution, metrics, and expected outcomes.

Decomposition: Making Work Manageable

Even if you have a great product idea and alignment in your organization, it’s difficult to understand and deliver the solution in one big piece. We need to break the work down into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Not only does decomposing work help with creating a shared understanding, it also allows you to experiment and create smaller feedback loops to adapt or pivot as to deliver. This gives you the opportunity to get frequent feedback, revisit and revise your product idea, and create solutions your customers will love.

This includes a lot of the typical business analysis work of requirements elicitation and analysis.

When you decompose work, you’ll likely identify the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Minimum Marketable Features (MMF). You can also use techniques such as Story Mapping to create a holistic view of the initiative as well as thin slices to deliver.

You may also need to build models to discover new information and create a shared understanding. Prototypes, wireframes, and mockups may also be used to gain clarity and create a great customer experience.

Delivery: Getting the Right Solution to Customers

Once you have alignment and an understanding of how the product can be delivered, it’s time to build the solution. Whether you’re developing in iterations or a big bang implementation, you’ll want to create fast feedback loops and adjust your approach along the way.

Familiarity with technology will help to better understand any development challenges, options, risks, and dependencies.

Once the product (or product increment) is built, it needs to be tested before you release it to production. Familiarity with testing approaches allows you to ensure product quality. Whether it’s creating User Stories with acceptance criteria in Gherkin format, actually writing test cases, performing User Acceptance Testing (UAT), or ensuring quality in some other way, this is a critical piece of product delivery.

The other component beyond building the solution and testing it is getting the product into the hands of customers. Knowledge about how your organization delivers products will help you provide more value and reduce delays. This may mean learning about DevOps practices.

It also means that you need to understand change management approaches. You often won’t be successful without preparing your customers for the change; especially internal customers. You may need to develop instructions, update user guides, and provide training before you deliver the product.

Monitoring: Metrics for Success

Just because you successfully deliver the product, your job as a Full-Stack Business Analyst isn’t done. How do you know if you achieved the intended outcome?

You need to be able to monitor the product, its usage, and metrics. Doing so allows you to validate your original hypothesis and helps you to discover new opportunities.

The Most Valuable Skill

Focusing on the entire stack from concept to cash can lead to the perception of being a jack of all trades, but master of none. This leads to the specialist versus generalist debate, which can be the subject of an entire episode by itself.

My preference is to develop T-shaped skills (or its variations) where you have depth of understanding in a few key areas and narrow but wide knowledge of other facets.

All of the skills and focus areas that we discussed sounds like a lot, so don’t get overwhelmed. Realize that you don’t need to master all of these areas. Think about what full stack means to you and your organization and them begin filling in the gaps. Learn just enough to meet the most immediate need and then shift to another area.

The most valuable skill is the desire and ability to learn and to be self-aware enough to know when you don’t know something. Having a natural curiosity and eagerness to learn new things will help you grow and increase your ability to contribute value every day.

Listen to the full episode to better understand the value that a Full-Stack Business Analyst can bring to an organization and how to develop your skills.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/masteringbusinessanalysis/MBA146.mp3

Your Homework

Examine what ‘full-stack’ means to you and your organization. Start filling in some of the gaps by finding the most valuable skills and learning them. Learn just enough to meet the most immediate need and then shift to another area of learning.

Thank you for listening to the program

To get more valuable content to enhance your skills and advance your career, you can subscribe on iTunes.

Also, reviews on iTunes are highly appreciated! I read each review and it helps keep me motivated to continue to bring you valuable content each week.

The post MBA146: The Full Stack Business Analyst appeared first on Mastering Business Analysis.