The Inquisitive Project Manager

As an Intermediate Business Analyst do you feel cabin, cribbed, confined in your role? Do you feel at a point of stagnation and frustration? Perhaps you need a change?

One way for effective change is to shift your gears and navigate your way to a Senior Business Analyst role.

To become a Senior BA there must be a conscious effort to understand the expectations of that job. You have to earn the role. You're not always given an opportunity. You need to grow into an opportunity by accepting more responsibility. Do not fear it. Embrace it as a challenge.

There are 5 main methods I will describe today that can help you grow into that Senior Business Analyst role.

1) Play a strategic part in helping your stakeholders bring their goals and objectives to fruition through the right initiatives. Build opportunities to influence senior stakeholders by becoming a trusted advisor to them. Be that purposeful partner to executives.

Embrace a holistic overview of the business so you can ask pertinent questions to ensure  business goals are met.

What are the steps stakeholders need to solve business challenges? Develop solutions that address the business goal, and make sure your solutions are aligned to the business strategy.

2) Develop concrete analysis skills to be able to provide a clear range of forecasts or estimates for business solutions. Provide scenarios using analysis tools, like a Monte Carlo diagram. Be able to explain risks with forecasts, and adjust those forecasts based on new data. Learn to easily diagnose business problems.

Can you identify risks within the business requirements; communicate an effective mitigation or contingency plan to the project team; and follow up on those risks throughout the project?

Offer more than one solution for a business problem, with a recommendation and rationale for each of those solutions.

Offer a strategic analysis on how to move the organization to a future state.

3) Work on larger complex projects. Take on increased responsibility in projects of larger scope. Work with the project manager to decompose a WBS into smaller units of work. Do you understand the contingencies, constraints, dependencies and missing components involved in a work package? Know how to incorporate change requests into those work plans. 

Can you work on integrated systems and communicate with multiple stakeholders with various perspectives, across different departments and organizations, with different resources?

4) Become a BA Team Lead or show leadership. Review and coordinate the planning, requirements, deliverables, and work effort, for a group of BAs on your team.

Show a sense of urgency for solving problems. Have a positive attitude, and a willingness to mentor and coach junior and Intermediate Business Analysts. 

Constantly seek feedback to know where you need improvement. Show an awareness of how you can apply your skills within the business context.

Are you fully familiar with your company's business model and how it operates within the market? Do you understand business concepts within your domain and how they relate to one another. Have the confidence to easily adapt to new business domains, and to work comfortably across multiple domains?

Deliberately share ideas openly with co-workers and stakeholders, so they can develop insights from your knowledge, and make informed decisions about business problems.

5) Develop Enterprise Analysis skills. Become an active participant in defining the business need, and building the business case for that need. Understand the desired benefits associated with all those business needs. Confirm and clarify those items by asking poignant questions.

Know how to define capability gaps at a high level. 

Understand Business Rules Analysis. What is a business rule? It is more than just a constraint. It can also be a fact, a definition or a derivation.

Know how to analyze processes. The root of the problem may not stem from the data, but from the processes that surround the data. For example, understand the software and how it impacts other users whom you support in the organization.

Leverage a variety of methodologies to tackle projects.

Conclusion
In summary, to transition from a Business Analyst to a Senior Business Analyst you need to see the big picture, that 360 degree view of the business. Have those core competencies and corresponding skills which provide a breadth and depth of knowledge and experience for stakeholders.

Be proactive, be self-aware, be able to influence change, and show strong leadership skills.

Develop and maintain a strong sincere relationship with stakeholders through trust, reliability, and credibility.

Be open to new challenges. Take the initiative to extend that range of knowledge and experience by cultivating your skills through continuous development.

Overall there needs to be that intentional momentum to move and maintain that transformation, to become a valuable Senior Business Analyst.

When I started teaching VoiceXML at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada years ago, I didn't realize I was embarking on a 4 year teaching career in AI. VoiceXML is a natural language speech recognition software, which involves automated voice communications. It's a feature-rich computer language for building interactive voice response (IVR) applications. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a sub-field of AI where natural language data is processed and analyzed by computers. You may be familiar with ringing up any call centre, and receiving a voice chatbot asking you "Tell me what you want to do today." Algorithms detect your voice, and provide customer-friendly responses based on interpretation of your words. IVR systems discern intent, and can be used for a variety of services from banking transactions, to mobile purchases, online retail orders, and travel bookings. It begs the question, how can the business analyst have a space in the world of AI?

"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change." (Mary Shelly, Frankenstein). AI is certainly a great and sudden change in the IT world, but perhaps not as frightening as Frankenstein. Change is at the core of what business analysts do, and change in the AI field is more prevalent today than ever. So, what type of impact does this change have on the role of the business analyst in AI?

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
AI adoption is on the increase in businesses, and IVR is an area where there is large demand for business analysts. As businesses increase economies of scale and expand collaboration, there will be a stronger focus on AI tools, practices and procedures, at the centre of which will be people and data. This is where BAs will thrive on a grand scale within AI.

For example, an IVR Business Analyst might work directly with call centre leadership, telephony support teams, or network with vendors to determine business solutions for the IVR applications. AI could report on IVR retention and success levels, and fine tune speech recognition analysis in applications like Nuance Application Report (NAR) or IBM Watson. The BA would be responsible to manage the requirements needed to be programmed into the IVR system. And, the BA would be able to interpret and articulate that output data for management and C-Suite executives, to enable them to make informed strategic business decisions.

An IVR BA could also make recommendations on speech and touch-tone user interface design enhancements, and focus on managing risk within IVR systems by liaising with legal, audit, and risk and compliance teams. This involves effective communication skills, a key ingredient for all BAs. As a conduit between business customers and the technical teams, an IVR BA would still have to identify issues or gaps where crucial technical and business solutions need to be made.  

Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID)
RFID is a form of automatic identification and data capture (AIDC). RFID technology uses electromagnetic signatures with radio frequencies to capture data. For example, using tags RFID can track inventory goods like automobiles during assembly line production, or for pharmaceuticals in warehouses. And, it can be implanted in animals as a microchip to track livestock or pets. RFID tags can also be attached to money, clothing, various possessions, and even people. All the data collected from these tags need to be interpreted by BAs, to determine and understand product trends within the market place. RFID has been projected to grow to $15 billion USD within 2021.  This is definitely an expanding area where BAs in the AI field are in much demand.

Brand Marketing
Noticing and understanding marketing trends are paramount for many businesses, and is a task within the AI sphere where BAs are much needed. For instance, social media campaigns are heavily influenced by the data gathered from TagBoard, which collects hashtag information from social media, or from OneQube, which is an audience development platform. Business Analysts would manage these tools, which track online conversations that focus on detecting keyword usage associated with branding. Of course, this inevitably influences target advertising and marketing use cases via AI.

Crunching and calculating all this data would be done by AI software, while the BA would be better suited to interpreting the analytical data. The results from data queries and reports can be used to understand customer patterns of behaviour, which enables businesses to personalize products based on geographic location, income, age, gender, and a myriad of other categories. Segmenting customer characteristics is at the core of AI. Undoubtedly the outcomes from predictive analytics can heavily impact customer purchasing decisions, allowing more streamlined access to new markets or to new products, delivering products faster to market with greater value, being first to market, or forging new business ventures.

Whether in banking, manufacturing, retail, tourism, and the like, a BA can use data points, produced through AI, to discover what motivates a customer to access a business, and what converts that movement into sales. The objective is influencing buyer behaviour, improving quality assurance, and increasing competitive advantage. 

GPS
I once rented a minivan for a return road trip from Phoenix, Arizona to Southern Utah. It turns out these minivans are equipped with GPS technology. Imagine the hundreds of rental minivans and rental cars all over the world that are being tracked by GPS technology. All this data is collected, managed and analyzed by AI software. BAs are needed to interpret this data to maintain quality customer service: to predict when vehicle maintenance is required; to locate customers during an emergency; to learn how to market a wider range of customers, and so on.

Conclusion
Whether it be IVR, RFID, brand marketing, or GPS, BAs can work within different contexts using a variety of tools from root cause analysis to decision modelling, to determine the performance levels of organizations. 

The BA can look at the holistic picture, and with the assistance of AI, can break down large projects into smaller manageable bite-sized chunks, devote more focus on the crucial people aspect of the business, and contribute to interpreting deeper insights into rich data. These aspects are instrumental in exploiting services and increasing ROI for businesses.

By leveraging AI, a BA’s role within an organization can ultimately be enhanced by effectively adapting to change, no matter how great, and devoting more time to contribute to critical business decisions. Such decisions could include forecasting market trends, providing different perspectives on a problem, facilitating workshops, collaborating with key stakeholders, enhancing current capabilities, understanding customer environments, or promoting an AI strategy, all of which add immense value to a business.

Peter Drucker was a well known Austrian-American management consultant. His ideas are highly regarded in the project management field. He wrote many books and articles, but one in particular that comes to mind is "Managing Oneself". Still a very popular article, it neatly and meticulously spells out a few practical tips on how to build a life of excellence. First, one must ask a few questions:

1) What are my strengths?
2) How do I work?
3) What are my values?
4) Where do I belong?
5) What can I contribute?

At first glance these questions might sound trivial. But with a closer look one can see how these questions help drive ambition, and motivate one to maintain a positive trajectory to elevate oneself to the peak of any profession. In essence it helps one become a chief executive officer of their own career. As the old saying goes, if you don't manage your career, someone else might manage it for you, and that may not always be pleasant. The above 5 questions help each one of us develop a significant understanding of ourselves, how we can work best with others, and make a significant contribution to increase our value within the workforce.

What are my strengths?
Use feedback analysis to effectively identify your strengths. When making pertinent decisions, write down your outcome. Compare actual results to expected results to get a more informed idea of your productivity, by observing the variance between these two perspectives. It's more productive to remedy your weaknesses and bad habits. This will increase your performance.

How do I work?
What is your optimal form of processing information? Through listening to others, or through reading? Do you work best alone or with other people? Do you function best in a predictive or adaptive environment? People achieve positive and productive results by doing what they are good at, and exploiting those skills.

What are my values?
Do your ethics influence how you live your life? Do your organization's ethics influence your performance positively or negatively? Do you do the things that keep you up at night? Can you look at yourself in the mirror and say, this is the type of person I want to be? You must work with an organization whose values are compatible with yours, in order to be successful.

Where do I belong?
What are your strengths, preferred way of working and overall values? You will become a star performer by working in an environment that exploits your values. You should be able to decide where you do not belong as well as where you do belong.

What can I contribute?
How can you best improve or enhance an organizations output and performance. How can you add value to an organization? How can you maximize your contribution to an organization using your current skills and strengths. And, what has to be done to make a significant difference to an organization?

In short, it's this understanding of one's strengths and self-knowledge that enables us to accomplish rewarding and valuable levels of excellence within the project management field, by analyzing ourselves, and asking some of the questions listed above.