Who is a Business Analyst?
From the Building the Foundation: The BOK on BA Blog
by Laura Paton,
Joy Beatty, Cheryl Lee, Sue Burk
According to Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, anyone who performs business analysis activities regardless of their title is a business analyst. The business analyst role has deep roots in IT, but there are many who perform business analysis activities outside of IT as well. Business analysis can be used whenever products, services or processes are being created or enhanced, or when seeking to understand customer needs.
Several people asked us in last week’s blog post to associate business analysis with innovation. Business analysis enables innovation as it fosters creativity and moves us away from the age-old habit of thinking we know the best solution before fully understanding the problem space. Many associate innovation with technology, but it isn’t just technology that should be innovating, and thus, not just IT departments that should be leveraging business analysis.
In my experience as a business analysis instructor, one of my most memorable classes was a Business Analysis Essentials course with a group of television producers. As you can imagine, they started out with a lot of skepticism, questioning the value of spending the next couple of days with me learning about honing in on their business analysis skills. Someone asked, “Did our boss sign us up for the wrong course?” Television producers oversee all aspects of video production on a program, including casting, set design and screenwriting. Essentially, they are delivering a product, the television program, to meet the needs of the viewers. It is essential to first identify those needs by performing business analysis activities and then provide recommendations to meet them. By the end of day one, they realized they were in the right course.
Some other notable scholars of business analysis that have passed through my classes are scientists, event planners and building architects. One scientist was tasked to find new and innovative ways to ensure we have clean water and learned to use business analysis skills to perform research and ultimately provide a recommended solution. Event planners provide a service and use business analysis to understand and bring to life their clients’ vision of a fairy tale wedding. Building architects also use business analysis to understand the needs of their clients when designing their forever home.
There are so many uses for business analysis skills and so many people that perform business analysis activities without even knowing it. My favorite part of teaching these classes is the aha moment when people realize they’re a business analyst! We all have a little bit of the business analyst in us. For this reason, as Laura mentioned in her blog post, we are trying to focus on business analysis as a discipline rather than the role of the business analyst. We use Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman’s, It’s the Goal, Not the Role as a motto on our team to remind ourselves of this.
As we put together the Foundational Standard in Business Analysis, we want to ensure what is described as business analysis can be applied to not only IT projects, but within non-IT environments as well. It would really help us out to hear more examples of the non-IT applications of business analysis, like the ones I described in this blog post. That way, we can keep an open mind and together, develop something that is useful and relatable to all practitioners of business analysis. This way we can all innovate!
We are looking forward to seeing your examples of non-IT applications of business analysis in the comments!
Posted
by
Cheryl Lee
on: June 03, 2016 10:38 AM |
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Comments (11)
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Sergio Luis Conte
Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Thank you for sharing. Please let me some comments trying to add value. First, business analysis is applied in non-IT environements. We need to avoid and we need to change that perception that persist because the first version of the role definition. I firmly believe that when we talk about business analysis related to IT we need to have a big and worldwide picture before to talk about that. For example, I have performed business analisys courses, whole curricula following each knowledge area of the BABOK, from the last 10 years one or two class per day and 15-30 people each class in several countries in Latin America. More than 70% wre non-IT people. ....continued
Sergio Luis Conte
Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Second, sorry if I missunderstood your point, but let me say that while I agree in general about your comment on innovation (in fact, the component of the office in the organization where I am working right now and I belong to is named Innovation and Transformation and is the place where business analyst are located) let me say that business analysis could be used to put in place innovation initiatives if that is the solution to a business problem but business analysis does not enables innovation per se or, in other words, the use of business analysis does not implies that when you create a solution you are working using innovation techniques. We need to separate tools and techniques from discipline we follow. Unfortunatelly innovation is one of the new buzzwords and in my humble opinion we have to review our messages about our discipline to not make the some mistakes again.
I am agree with you laura, BA is becoming a discipline. I teach BA in university, and next year, we will launch a specialization in BA for bachelor studients in Business Administration. BA techniques and tools are principles of Management. Everyone have to solve problem and make a decision... Elicitation, requirements management evaluation, value management and collaboration have to be understood.
In other hand, I would suggest you to integrate also in this BOK, principles of value analysis, value management, http://www.scav-csva.org it s a real add value for BA.
Sergio Luis Conte
Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Tying to add something to Cedric comment, please let me say that all business analysis activities inside the organization I am working today are enclousing inside a value management framework. And I have been using it from years in other bussiness analysis implementations. In my humble opinion Value Management is the differentiator in our discipline. Our thinking is about a solution is composed by "the thing" to be created and "the process" to create it. Generally speaking "the process" is related to project manager work but business analysis intervention is about "managing project by value" and it is a critical role to lead the project/program/portfolio governance process.
Henry Hattenrath
Project Consultant| Tectonic Engineering MSA LLC
New York, Ny, United States
While IT and non-IT applications has framed the blogs, the business analyst role goes well beyond the other areas highlighted in the blog such as television production, event planners and residential building architects. Lets hope the continuing blog goes to other areas ,such as transportation infrastructure and real estate development, where BAs are instrumental throughout the project lifecycle from project identification, scoping and selection; through management and execution of work involving changes and value engineering; and into commissioning of the product involving start-up and staff transitioning, facilities maintenance and asset management.
Cheryl Lee
Business Analysis and Project Management Consultant and Instructor| Knowledge Adapters
Thornhill, Ontario, Canada
Thanks for your comments everyone!
Thanks Sergio, I agree with your points. A needs assessment is a domain of business analysis that evaluates the situation to determine root causes in order to introduce solutions to meet business needs - which could be an innovative solution or not. Without conducting a needs assessment, many resort to implementing solutions that do not meet business needs. I have worked at many organizations where execs attend trade shows, purchase a new product and create projects in order to use the new product. So while conducting business analysis may lead to innovative solutions, business analysis may also stop you from innovating for the sake of innovating.
This leads to Cedric's point that the solutions organizations implement need to provide value. Thanks for the link Cedric! Value analysis and management is a concept that will be included in the BOK on BA.
Henry, I completely agree that the business analyst role goes far beyond the ones I mentioned in the blog. Thanks for bringing up transportation and real estate. Our goal is that the Foundational Standard in Business Analysis can be used by all industries!
Very happy to see this topic discussed. Having worked in IT and non-IT fields, such as Aerospace, as a Business Analyst (BA), I would certainly have to agree that the skills can easily be applied to non-IT environments.
The best way I can explain how I have been able to transfer my skills from IT to non-IT BA roles goes back to one of the first concepts I learnt in my very first Systems Analysis course in University. The professor taught us that to be able to properly analyze a client's needs, you have to first understand the client's business. By no means do you need to understand everything of your client's industry, but you need to know what your client's business is all about so that you can understand the realities your client is working with to get their job done and who the ultimate end-user might be.
This concept, whether you realize you're applying it or not, is a major part of what allows you to improve processes, come up with user requirements, and perform your other BA tasks. And these are all skills/tasks that different industries apply to improve their product or service.
Cheryl Lee
Business Analysis and Project Management Consultant and Instructor| Knowledge Adapters
Thornhill, Ontario, Canada
YES! Thanks for sharing Daphne! Regardless of industry, without the context, it makes it difficult to recommend improvements.
I was recently chatting with someone who provided business analysis services within the construction industry (without any prior knowledge of the construction industry) to solve a staffing problem they had. He had conducted root cause analysis to better understand the problem and then produced visual models to highlight the problem and outline a recommendation.
Interesting topic, great discussion!
Kevin Coleman
Subject Matter Expert, Author, Speaker and Strategic Advisor| - Insights
Pa, United States
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