Analysis certification is life changing as it demonstrates your commitment to the analysis skill set, opens doors to new opportunities, gives you more meaningful work, and adds to your paycheck. Certification is taking center stage in analysis careers.
Check out this article from strategy+business on the principals of leading change management. Since the mid-2000s, organizational change management and transformation have become permanent features of the business landscape. Yet according to a 2013 Strategy&/Katzenbach Center survey of global senior executives on culture and change management, the success rate of major change initiatives is only 54 percent. How change change to your organization be more effective and less costly?
Being a good collaborator means sharing the knowledge you have gained, lesson learned and how you overcame roadblocks. Sharing our knowledge gives our colleagues a leg up so they can learn from our success and failures. How can you be a better at sharing your ideas to get buy-in and agreement? Sharing is caring!
In business we are told from the very first day on the job that failure is bad. Avoiding failure is more important than succeeding and we go to great lengths to avoid it. We put ourselves into a make believe world where no mistakes can be made and we over work ourselves to the point of exhaustion all in the name of 'not failing'. Deluded in the belief that failure isn’t an option, we are at a loss on how to handle failure. How can we fail but still succeed?
We get busy. So many details are flying around that cubicle. Knowledge and information gets gathered up into emails and files on hard disks. The amount of information that we human beings produce on a daily basis is staggering. So how can we collaborate and share information within our teams and with our stakeholders more effectively?
As business analysts we face the question when setting up a meeting for discussion or decisions: “Who really needs to be here? Who has the power to make the decision?”. Good communication and effective meetings require those questions to be asked but that invitee list could wind up being hundreds of people in a large organization. If you are looking for a specific decision to be made on a specific issue or capability, then getting the meeting down to a small core team is important in order to ensure the decision is being made quickly. This is where Minimally Viable People comes into the picture. Minimally Viable People is the concept that a small group performs better by making decisions with higher quality while being representative of the larger group.
Being required to produce documents that create massive information bloat and don’t add value is frustrating as it slow projects down and creates additional project cost that isn’t needed. It’s a headache for Project Manager, Business Analyst and everyone on the team. What information or deliverables do we really need for the project but that won’t bury us in information overload.
We all get that impression or vibe sometimes that just nags at us and says “is this person real?” You can’t always put your finger on the exact reason you feel that way but it causes you to not trust that person. Authentic should be just as important for works of art or salsa as it is for people. People need to be authentic to themselves. It's time to get authentic with yourself.
We hear those words constantly: We need to be more competitive. Competition is good and competition is bad. When it’s your company’s product against another companies’ product it’s good. When competition is within the team things go bad and teams become less than productive. Team Members are so busy trying to sabotage and undermine each other they forget the reason they were all brought together in the first place – to make things happen.
Bias is a business analyst’s and organization’s worst nightmare. It leads to a decrease in product quality and creates a bad environment in which to make decisions and leads the project team to see the entire world through rose colored glasses. Bias can cause a chain reaction of bad decisions and miscommunications causing all sorts of problems on your project. Bias also creates a world in which change and innovation becomes nearly impossible.
