The Better Business analysis Institute presents the Better Business analysis podcast with Kingsman watch. You are everyone and welcome to this week's episode of The Bitter business analysis podcast with me, Benjamin Walsh, I will say, as a bit of a shout out again, that of you want to know more about what's happening in the be a space than please. Follow our page, the Better Business analysis Institute on LinkedIn or you can follow me or send me a connection.
I love to hear from all of you and what you might want to hear next on the podcast and if you're interested, I stood in being a guest, similar note to, I need to make sure I schedule some of those sessions as well. Now this week, we've got an interesting topic, a very subjective topic for some I think and it is around business analysis Mastery. So it's how to master business analysis and keep involving evolving your skills and we will touch on.
Yeah, five key points here, we're not going to go too deep but Plus, I've got over them and just make some points that I think a valid that you can come back to me and argue with me about of you, like they are, what are the real core skills of a business analysis? Business analyst, I should say. What is Mastery? And what do we mean by business analysis, mastery? What skills should you focus on mastering? What are the emerging future skills and competencies for business analysts?
And finally what and where can you learn those skills. So there are like some very broad key points that I hope that you can take away from today as you. Listen, and let's get into them. Let's start with one of the core skills of business analyst. East. And you might say Ben, I know what they are, and I'll say that's cool, but it's actually quite hard to step back and see what those skills are. What do they really? What are the skills that you Bob or Nancy have picked up?
What do you think you're great at? You don't really get much time as a ba to really focus on that you can look at the documentation you can look at the theory and say oh I think these are the areas that you need to be great at it. But actually what about individuals and M rating through? How do you know you're a master of those skills?
I would say that most business analysts have a range of different skills that they've picked up along the journey, from either falling into the career, which I hear often that a lot of people fall into business analysis, Or they've
transitioned from formal study. Each change program that you're involved in requires you to adapt to the scenario, to the business context, and the challenges that that piece of work requires you to turn on. You picked up, you've got your bucket of all these skills and if you're on a specific piece of work so it's a contact center tool. Roll out. You may need activate you.
The last time you did that, what processes were involved, customer-facing work, sear knowledge of cerium systems and so you activating those for that change program. So you're not even in control necessarily of the destiny in and schools that you refine. There is very little time in your working life, to step back and reflect on what actually are the core skills that you've picked up or developed as a ba.
And that is why, you know, we have institutions like the IAB a who has bull Bach and we have you know the Better Business analysis Institute the BB AI which I'm involved in well we have defined, what we think. The real core skills of business analysis are We talked about the fact that a skill, do you have skills and you have competencies and competencies are a collection of skills that you've learned.
And when we talk about competencies, which is how we're going to expose that information on job descriptions or we talked about, you know, things we do in business analysis. We talk about things like requirements elicitation, which is actually a whole lot of skills that are required to do that. Well, we had a workshop. We need have soft skills. We need have had skills. We need to know how to do. I don't know.
Process modeling. For example, could be a broad category, but that could involve knowledge of bpmn processes. It could have knowledge around current and future State analysis. Again, it could touch on the skills of workshopping and stakeholder analysis, and one-on-one, interviewing techniques, or grouping information, okay? So there was a whole broad range of On a lower level skills that you need soft and hard skills.
And then we have these things conferences, competencies and which are probably the best way we talk about it. So when we do out skills, where there are thousands of them and we apply that to business analysis in the word
competencies. When I talk about skills, here I am talking about these high-level groupings and the core skills of a be a, for a, for a, for a junior, for example, which is actually, it's it's easy to look at a junior, be a and defined the skills that That they need it's much easier. If you've worked with Juniors and when you know they have transitioning to this career path to understand core skills.
It's actually easier to talk about it with Juniors because you go all these are the first steps that you need to focus on. Whereas when you're a senior it's actually gets a little bit more waffle and you start to specialize. I always say that for a junior, be a, the first two core skills
competencies. If you like that, you must understand a master which defines you as being a ba versus not being a ba. And my mind is requirements, elicitation, the ability to extract requirements from your stakeholder to observe. Not to collect not requirements Gathering, which is the old word. We used to use requirements, elicitation and I harp on about this often how to do that which requires lots of different
skills. Eels as we've just talked about and the other one is process modeling. So these are the fundamental anchors of a be a, you know, able to get out information in the right way using lots of tools techniques skills, soft skills personality to extract requirements. And then the other skill is around process modeling, process Improvement and the combination
of those two skills. I think, as you know, we're a junior needs to focus their attention on and then By generating output from those two, those two skills in terms of requirements management, actual requirements. So generation of requirements and then generation of
requirements management. So when those two things come together and you might likely do that when you're in the junior space, and then of your intermediate, you then tag on another school, which is really that high level analysis. Your prior you're applying skills across the program. So you start to broaden those around content. Hicks and around, where in the process model, you might fit, you might go up. You might not just be around your your project but program level.
And so, as you as when you're an intermediate, you're really practicing those skills and intermediates around getting a snap experience until you become a senior and Senior really, you do move slightly and you do acquire new competencies that are over and above the ones, we've just talked about and we dip into what we call Enterprise and strategic analysis where we
look externally. It and Enterprise internally at what are the needs of the company organization were working at. So that's around the highest level processes and objective level. So, as an intermediate, you as a junior may have looked around the detail, like, mucking around with data mapping and the lower level kind of requirements management lifecycle intermediate, your kind of more looking at the high level requirements before you get down to the solution.
And then a senior is getting I'm way more in terms of even before the project starts and I would say master is really good at that high level strategic and Enterprise analysis. Where the value is first defined and captured. So that's really important. And then you have other skills of course, which comes to seize it in, which might be a specialization like continuous Improvement or business Improvement person which is after the products been
released. So you save, you your Enterprise and your high level and your detail in there maybe You've got your release management requirements management, and then at the end, you've got the continuous Improvement side. So they are the core skills on the ba and you can see that in a linear or looped around approach.
When we talk about Mastery and what that what we mean by mastering skills for a ba we could we could look at two authors that I love to read Malcolm Gladwell who wrote blank and Tipping Point, really great author to kind of from us sociology and a psychology point of view and the other one is Tim Ferriss and I like both these authors, but you always need to take their interpretation of life with a bit of salt, right there. Trying to provoke the trying to provoke. Conversations.
So last week we talked about Lean Startup definitely a book you should read but also I would suggest that you read some of Malcolm gladwell's books and Tim Ferriss at least the four hour work week. If you haven't read it, it's quite a good book to read, Malcolm Gladwell. Kind of popularized, the belief that to master a skill. You need to practice for at least 10,000 hours, okay? And in his book, he talks about Bill Gates and how he became.
Really good at what he does and how he used to get access to the computer lab and he used to go in there and program and program and program. And you know this, the idea that if you've done something for at least 10,000 hours, so long time, you will be a master, but I think that simplifies how we learn because not all learning time is efficient time. Tim Ferriss who's on the other end, who writes books around spinning like, you know, for our chef and for our body and 4-Hour
workweek as around learning. Something very rapidly gets Really deep and learning things rapidly. He's another like I said, favorite author of mine suggest that you can Master a skill in as little as six months with the right training of focus. Now here's a particularly unique individual that goes all-in and I don't know, you know, and
that's his job actually. So he has a lot of time and I don't think um, you and I necessarily are able to just drop everything and focus on the skill but there might be true for him. I think most researchers in the field of Mastery and skills management and learning suggests that the real figure is around two years to master a skill, which is not a long time. When you consider that, we kind of suggests that from a years of experience, a senior be as five
years, you know, minimum. So two years to master a skill and however, they premise that by saying that you're in order to master that you might not Tim Ferriss it As in just go so deep that, you know, it's it consumes you. But with deliberate, what they called, deliberate practice, deliberate practice, you can learn a skill and about two years. So you can think of deliberate practice like studying for a specific course at University or specific topic by all the discipline around it.
But for two years of you were in that cycle, you would master that skill. And so that's the the effort required if you like and the duration might be Longer than that of, you have dipped and dipped out. So we know the time frames were talking about before but you really need to focus on that skill, doing it again and again looking at new ways of applying it and one of the ways that, you know, that you're great, it is that you need to be able to
teach that to other people. And one way we say that good premise or a good way to measure whether or not you're a good teacher, as you can teach an eight-year-old, okay, you can teach a ten-year-old or whatever, an eight-year-old at school. What the skills about? That means that you have actually mastered it. If you can't explain to your ten-year-old or in, if you some kids at school that particular skill in details so such that they understand it, you probably haven't mastered it.
So it's a really good yardstick and of course, I would say that learning a skill requires practice as we talked about learning it, applying it. So if you've applied it, you can talk about it at a seminar. If you could apply it to different business context, regardless of, you know, the Next project Iran if you can use that skill again and again and again or notice that you are, then you probably have come to a
point of mastery. We, as business analyst, I think should first Master those core skills in our requirements, elicitation process modeling, continuous Improvement, requirements management. Well, you know, that, that part of the release going into, continuous Improvement, and enterprising, strategic analysis once we've mastered those areas, okay? So that's your senior level then we can move out. Those core skills, you know out
of the onion onion. Diagrams of used the word onion there to the next level supporting skills. So they're things like sufficient change management. For example, agile business analysis would be another example, going deep with data, mapping, or data analysis. So those skills are supplementary supporting down, not necessary core skills. That make you a great be a, but they do allow you to specialize in understand other areas. So, So maybe knowing more about crms or Erp systems.
So for me to be a master, be a, it's more, the core Focus. It's not necessary to specify from measured by your specializations, but it does move us on to one of the merging. What are the emerging features skills and competencies for Bas? What do we need to know about? We just talked about generative AI last week around the fact, you do need to understand. I Ai and machine learning.
And you need to understand data science and all The input that goes into that as a ba because that's where that's going to have a great impact on our, the requirements, elicitation, the requirements processing, and the process modeling. That's why we need to understand these things.
If we engage our continuous learning and, you know, continuous Improvement, learning mindset about what the future skills and competencies we need to understand and add to our bucket and even replaced the tools and techniques we've got today. Then, you know, we need to look at what are those? What are those skills? And not only are we looking at emerging Technologies or fields that we can specialize in, we adopt other technique. So, I've already talked about many times Times.
And we've actually Incorporated some of the stuff into our framework here at the bit of business analysis Institute, we take learning from Lean Startup. We take learnings from design, human-centered design and we apply those to be a, we add them to our toolkit replacing old ways that we used to do things that just haven't evolved fast enough or just stagnant and just aren't as good. So we replace our toolkit.
So we need to replace some of the things we do is be as if we see a better way of doing it. So, that's a really good - It's around just understanding emerging skills and other fields that we can apply to business analysis and then within business analysis, we see some of these kind of specializations that come out and I think some of the specializations are agile analysis. So how do you do things quickly?
How do you work in a scrum team, understanding scrum, for example, how to rapidly do things through the Lean Startup. How do you spend a little bit of money? Product management is part of that? The other one is but what I would say, business data analysis as opposed to You know, slowly will system how to apply data to make greater decisions, how you feed them into machine learning models. You really need to understand
how to visualize data. I think that be as need to understand that if you're one of the tech areas around cyber security and access to information is really important. It is not something that particularly excites me, but I do know that needs to be done. Well, there needs to be be as who operate in that space really well.
And the other one is around. Probably The product ownership because it has you know had a huge impact into the would have be a and again I think getting your scrum service probably the best place to start or your product owner certification offered at Scrambler or very cheaply for you to understand how that work. What I recall release and requirements management works. Okay? So it's around, sorry delivery and requires management.
I should say, it's around the delivery cycle of the delivery team, and requirements management, and how that works and a distinct way. A within the agile environment and I would argue that, that model could be used in any environment when it comes down to delivery. So, learn those skills. I'll repeat them. Again, you need to understand agile to a tee. At least scrum. What?
And combine business data, analytics AI generative Ai and just discriminative Ai. And what that means cybersecurity if you're working in that space you will touch it as a ba. You do need to understand around print. The Privacy Act, how to look after people's information. That's that's that's obviously the you know, privacy side of things and then this is cyber security side just making sure I see. Systems are robust to deal with you know, hackers and access to
information. And then the other one is just really, really know your delivery and requirements management processes. Which the, which were you could say, is to find quite well, by the product ownership role. It's going to stink subset of business analysis. To be continued skills and human centered design and II that will continue to change the way that we work as Bas.
So just having that learning mindset and being curious when you read something on LinkedIn or another article and then going and learning about it as a ba, is the best way to broaden out some of those supporting skills. But make sure that you go back and you just reflect on how good you are at those core skills. If you're not that great, Look it's look we a lot of us have done lots of projects.
You don't control necessarily what types of projects because you can get Typecast a little bit and be a. And so for example you may be just not that great relatively at writing. I don't know. You are user stories. So if you're not then go and learn it. There's plenty of reasonably. Researchers is some shame and saying I'm a senior be a and I'm actually not that good at writing user stories of not as
good as my junior. So I'm going to go learn and refine my My core skill and that for me, if you refine out those core skills and understand enough of the specialist skills and supporting skills and start to have a learning mindset and focus on those emerging skills, that's what makes your master. I've just thrown at you and yeah, come back to me with any questions. I've just thrown at you and yeah, come back to me with any questions.