I guess the way we got around this, is that our three Business Analysts were also three of the four people who really worked on a lot of our parties and potlucks. So it is a lot easier to be forgiving towards those who helped you have fun and a more fun-and-enjoyable job. It was easy to get along with those you spent non-work time with at said parties. The M&M’s and other candies on one BA’s desk didn’t hurt either. (BTW: Our monthly potluck was an idea or “Try This” that we came up with at the end of one interation meeting, though others might do this in some kind of retrospective meeting, depending on the “agile” methodology being used–ours was a hybrid.)

PS. Hope my numerous posts are not making me difficult for somebody out there, Laura included. Thanks for the blog!!

My personal experience has been to align with an operational leader who “gets it” and ensure I’m communicating with him/her regularly. Another strategy has been to job shadow, participate in business-user training, ask for demos…essentially anything I can do as a BA or technology leader to ensure I understand not just the ins and outs of the daily business processes, but why they are the way they are.

I’d be interested in hearing more about what about the SAP IT team in India: Did they take on operational responsibilities? How did they ensure IT excellence? And from a leadership perspective, did the mindset of their executive transform into a bit of a business-oriented CIO? I would think this might evolve naturally from being responsible for IT staff.

Best,
Laura

I recently was in India and had opportunity to visit with a company that had recently migrated from Bahn to SAP. The IT leadership there did something brilliant, in my view … they took their SAP experts and caused them to report directly to business line leaders so that IT could both develop the run-the-business knowledge of IT, and so SAP expertise could become well integrated in the daily conduct of business.

Pretty interesting step. AND it highlights a problem with today’s IT people … and BA’s often are grouped into that crowd … that BAs (and IT staff) often do not have business operational experience. What seems like a wonderful idea actually may have been conceived of elsewhere and abandoned because of some undocumented reason.

Clearly this experience gap – together with the typical “us and them” relationship between IT and the rest of the business – sometimes makes it difficult to not be perceived as a “Brilliant Ass” (nice! … ). Have you seen ways that BAs can actually become part of an organization and gain business knowledge?