It’s being discussed in several places on the net whether business analyst actually is or at least should be an internal change agent in the company. One may say, well, it depends on whether this business analyst has such an opportunity or whether his management would give him such responsibilities. It’s interesting, by the way, how many of us can boast that they are actually in the team which is leading changes vs. those who are in the teams that are implementing those changes. I, for one, consider myself as a change agent, not merely a change implementer.
A few weeks back, I happened to watch… please refrain yourself from laughing… Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix. Do you remember the character of Dolores Umbridge? Thanks to J.K.Rowling, this Ministry of Magic official who took the post of High Inquisitor of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry gave us several quotable sentences which may represent a mottoes for those of us business analysts who regard themselves as leaders of change.
Starting her term as Defense Against Dark Arts teacher professor Umbridge said the following:
“Let us preserve what must be preserved, perfect what can be perfected and prune practices that ought to be prohibited.”
Let’s put aside her motives and determination while gathering “business requirements” at Hogwarts and concentrate on the phrase itself. Is it not the essence of what business analysts should be actually doing?
I remember an interesting conversation with a friend of mine who made a laughing-stock of me when I expressed my opinion that BAs actually help businesses by refining, clearly defining and suggesting improvements. “Never heard of that” she said. “In big corporations BAs are summoned when all the decisions are already made. They [bosses] usually say something like… “OK, we’ve decided this and that. Now go put all that as requirements so that programmers could start working.” Does this sound familiar to you?
There is a wide variety of job types business analysts actually doing. But there are also many fixed notions in this regard. Some think that BA’s business is modeling. Period. Others think that BAs do software requirements and that’s it. From my experience, and I know that many of you will agree with me, that constantly developing methodology and tool sets of business analysis is perfectly applicable to different types of business activities. Depending on the level in organizational hierarchy, business analysts promote reinvention and re-engineering of business components or the business as a whole.
From this point of view business analysts are indeed change agents. But it still seems that in many cases they don’t have an opportunity to influence high level business decisions which are being made following narrow momentary interests of selected stakeholders.
Rephrasing words of another character from the same movie I’d like to ask you then:
“Did you actually believe, or were you truly naive enough to think that” business analysts would be given an authority to lead the change?
Concluding with this question I’d like to encourage readers to share their experience (both positive and negative) on being a change agents in their companies.
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By Yegor Filonov. Analyst and thinker by nature, engineer and marketer by education, entrepreneur and leader by business acumen, manager and consultant by professional career I made my way through various businesses and projects in diverse industries in multiple capacities. Approaching new assignments on learning by doing basis, I’ve been engaged in software development, marketing and advertizing, assets management and financial services, construction, retail and start-up development. Through numerous iterative stages of information gathering, requirements definition and analysis, activities planning and management, solution elaboration, implementation and assessment I acquired my knowledge and ability to act in situations with multiple unknowns, undefined business vision, inter-departmental contradictions, political instability and lack of legislation. View more blog posts by Yegor Filonov |
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I think you articulated very well the plight of many a BA. The label ‘agent of change’ insinuates a powerful role. Unfortunately, the BA, especially in large companies – at least the people with the title of BA – are only called on once the *decisions* have been made. The BA is told to put *that* in a requirements document or what ever format the standards have dictated.
Thinking about this, I wonder if the many BA’s are really *in training* BA’s??? And the true BA’s are the so called Agents of Change…maybe in titles such as Project Manager, Program Manager, Product Manager, Manager / Director of (insert department, software product, business area here).
Hi Oshun,
You raise a great question about job titles given the reality of so many BA positions. I have seen BA positions out there that are looking for real change agents (see today’s post for some thoughts on this) but many are looking for sophisticated “documentarians”. I think those as organizations become more lean (or agile) much of this middle man activity will fade. It’s a scary thought for the “BAs in training” as you put it. We all need to kick it up a notch and take our roles to the next level.
The challenge I have found in working with IT organizations to try to get their BAs more involved in improving the process (or working as a change agent) is that IT leadership is hesitant to “meddle” in the “business” process, because it is the “business” who owns it. The larger the company, the more prevelant this attitude is. The problem is shared between the business leaders who do not see this as an opportunity to improve, and the IT leaders who do not espouse this as an opportunity to improve (other than the new application) to the business leaders. IT leaders must be the ones to engage this conversation.
I agree with all my previous comments that a lot of times the leadership considers the BAs as sophisticated and higher paid documentators. But I would say that we as a BA should challenge the situation. We should dig deep into the requirements we are asked to document (even if they have been already collected) and start asking questions about where from the requirement is coming, who will be users of the applications, the business situations they will be using the requirements – many a times you will see that what the business needs is not the requirements they provide. In that case if you can guide the business to their real needs a few times, they will start respecting you for that and treat you more like a change agent/contributor rather than a “scribe for whom we have to pay a handful”.
I would agree that it is more difficult on the development side, many a times the techies say “Oh! we can only do this much” and demand that the system be designed by them totally and we just document the issues. Here if we have some technological background, it really comes to use. At least we should have a broad idea of the systems, databases, networks… used for the development and we should offer them of suggestions in technological terms like, “do you think we need to hit the database everytime we query or can you create a snapshot of the tables and query from those – won’t that improve the query speed to what the customers are asking ?” With possible alternatives suggested, we will have more contribution to the designs also.
I would say if BAs speak up, do the required research about the business process and technology and start asking the right questions again and again (this can be a lot of time) and keep on offerring the alternatives and its benefits, we can change the view of the technical and business leaders have about us(may be the first achievement as a change agent!).