[Become a BA #5] Finding Your Inner Business Analyst: Elicitation

Across all the interviews I’ve done with now senior-level business analysts, the story essentially remains the same. They say things like: I didn’t start out trying to become a BA. I didn’t take a course and find my first job. No, I woke up one day and realized I was doing something very different than I had been doing before. I discovered that I was a business analyst when I filled “X” role on a project. And most of them have never looked back.

I am one of those professionals who sort of fell into their first opportunity. I was walking down the hall and a colleague suggested I apply for a new BA position that was opening up. This is how I understood the opportunity at the time. Since I’ve started helping others become business analysts, I’ve started to see that how I approached my QA role positioned me as a BA-in-Waiting. Read my story.

You might be a BA

The thing is, this could be you. You might already have BA experiences but not yet appreciate the value of them in the context of your career change. You might be a BA and not know it. And, very likely, you are more of a BA than you give yourself credit for today.

And because every year of paid business analysis experience equates to $923 in annual salary, your as-yet-undiscovered BA career background could be a goldmine.

Each knowledge area of the BABOK can be thought of as a focal point for identifying what you might already know and what experiences you’ve accumulated.

An Example: Requirements Elicitation

Let’s take an example. Requirements elicitation is one of the most fundamental BA tasks.

In its simplest form, elicitation is the process of discovering requirements most often, but not always, through conversations with business stakeholders.

And let’s not let the words trip us up. “Business stakeholders” is just a fancy word for people who know something about the project. Stakeholders might be users of the system, customers, product managers, or “subject matter experts.” Anytime you ask someone a question about the project and do something with the answer you receive that helps create clarity, you are eliciting requirements, at least in a small way.

What knowledge might you have about elicitation, even with no formal training?

• Do you know how to ask questions?
• Do you know how to listen to the answers?
• Can you probe deeply into a topic?

Opportunities for experience abound as well. Asking your boss to clarify their directions to you for a project is a form of elicitation. Sitting down with a team member and asking them about what they do is an interview, the most commonly used elicitation technique. Facilitating a brainstorming session about a problem could be an example of elicitation and analysis. Surveys are an elicitation technique. So is careful reading of a document to discover its meaning and implications.

Elicitation doesn’t have to happen in the context of identifying software requirements. Anytime you want to understand what is expected of you or how to perform an activity, you are performing a bit, albeit a small bit, of elicitation. You have kernels of experience that can be your building blocks of a business analyst career.

Your next step

Take some time and write down all the elicitation experiences you can identify in your career or business analysis skills you’ve accumulated. Don’t filter this too much. Even if you think something might be a business analyst experience, write it down.

You might go back to the 3 project experiences you identified in Lesson 2, the ones that highlighted your soft skills. Can you think of any elicitation experiences in that context?

Additional Bridging the Gap Resources

• What questions do I ask during requirements elicitation?
• Elicitation in the Dark: Finding Your Way to Success in a New Domain
• How to Become More Confident in Requirements Elicitation

Rinse and Repeat

You can go through a similar process with each knowledge area. You can actively reading of the BABOK, highlighting and noting the knowledge areas and activities that you have experience with. For new BAs with less BA experience, I often recommend side-stepping the BABOK at first and using a more accessible text, such as Ellen Gottesdiener’s Software Requirements Memory Jogger.

While both of these texts are excellent resources for the new business analyst, you’ll have to do a lot of thinking and analysis to apply them to your career background. It’s definitely possible, but it’s not simple.

I help participants in My Business Analysis Career Choice  get a framework in place to perform such a self-assessment. Before diving deep, we help you look back through your career history and pull out relevant experiences. Later in 2012, I’ll also be offering a career development course to help aspiring BAs perform an experience-based skills assessment. Stay tuned.

As always, wishing you the best in business analysis.

Best,

Laura Brandenburg, CBAP

• Your Host, Bridging the Gap
• Your Instructor, My Business Analysis Career

**Interested in learning more? Check out My Business Analysis Career Choice, a virtual, instructor-led course designed to help you map out your business analysis career change.

***Get here from a link from a friend, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter? This lesson is part 5 of an 8-part free email course on becoming a business analyst. Learn more about it and sign up here.