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?
Scope – the last frontier. We are on a mission where no business analyst has gone before. To explore strange new diagrams and to have the project scope clearly understood. Extra credit to those who remember which TV show that was from! Scope and context are the number one reason business expectations about a project are not met and projects fail. The business wanted a global CRM solution but all they got were pigeons and index cards. Yeah that is why context is important.
As Business Analysts and Designers, are we putting the "Fun" into our designs to make them easier to use and more utilized? Is it possible to take the ordinary and make it extra-ordinary and fun? Watch this video from Volkswagen on how to take the everyday and turn it into something special - and dare I say it - into fun!
To learn more about someone, you need to walk in a mile in their shoes. Or so the old proverb goes. Well hopefully not literally walking in someone’s shoes. I know there are a few pairs of shoes I wouldn’t want to walk in like Bomb Disposal, Neuro Surgery or Manure Spreader. Walking in the shoes of Broadway Singer, Best Selling Author, and Sci-Fi Geek is more my style. What that proverb is really saying is that if you really want to know and understand someone you need to walk in their shoes or at least follow them around in a non-stalker this-won’t-get-a-restraining-order-put-on-me sort of way.
Bob sits down with Dave Saboe to discuss how to be a badass business analyst and about his book "Little Slices of BIG Truths". Bob shares some hard truths about what we must be to achieve success in business analysis and other endeavors. Bob also talks about how to overcome discomfort and have crucial conversations, why it’s important to be intelligently disobedient and why knowing yourself is the first step in building a relationship with others.
That beautiful context diagram you created is truly a work of art. The color, shapes and words all carefully chosen and displayed like the Mona Lisa in Louvre Museum in Paris. As the old story goes, “You’ll have to forgive me I’m in a hurry – I’m double parked outside the Louvre”. If you are the least bit French, you’ll get it. It’s always faster, faster and even faster these days. So how do you communicate project scope or context in a world where everyone has a 3 second attention span?
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?
Special thanks to everyone at BA World Washington DC for a spectacular event! We hope you enjoyed Paul's presentation on Strategic Enterprise Analysis. We are shamelessly plugging our business analysis course "Strategic Enterprise Analysis" - hit the email button to learn more about our full 2-day course on Strategic Enterprise Analysis.
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.
Virtual online meetings and training have certainly gotten a bad reputation over the last few years. It was like you were listening to a radio station that wasn’t quite tuned in. You just couldn’t quite hear and see everything that was going on. You were being talked at but didn’t get to talk back or ask questions. The writing on the presentation was in tiny print and unreadable. There is a BETTER way.
