We are finishing up the week with Barbara’s final thoughts for hiring managers on choosing a business analyst.
In part 1, Barbara introduced the common mistakes business analyst hiring managers make.
In part 2, Barbara shared her views on business skills and soft skills for the business analyst.
Technical Skills
Technical knowledge is the knowledge and understanding that a person has in the technical horizontal of the particular project. A person going to work on a project to design a new point of sale (POS) system might have previous experience in designing a POS system for another client.
I do put some weight on technical knowledge, but not to the point of excluding analysts with the ability to learn and adapt quickly to whatever you throw at them. This includes technical knowledge. What I do look for is a diversity of technical environments and tools. This provides me with insight into the person’s adaptability and ability to learn quickly.
As far as individual technical skills go, the list can be as long as the list of projects. The best indicator of a business analyst’s success is to have a basic understanding of how development occurs, how data is stored and retrieved, how processes are automated and the basics of systems architecture. Each of these is a piece of the complex puzzle they will be tasked with solving during the project.
Career Level
As a person grows in their career, they move through various stages. The Resource Maturation Model (RMM) illustrates the stages of learning individual tasks, improving at the overall job, excelling in performance and contributing to innovations within the practice. Not everyone will achieve all of these levels, but it is still important to recognize and understand the level of your candidate.
Hiring a new BA that comes in as an innovator, doesn’t meant they will not still need some time to ramp up into the new role, project or environment. They will need time to ramp up, so understand what you can do through training and orientation to mitigate and reduce this.
Skill and career level of the BA indicate the kind of participation you can expect. This means more than hand-holding juniors and letting seniors loose in the shop. It means you have to temper your projects needs with your budget and ability to mentor and tolerance for risk.
The truth is that while interviewing, managing and working with BA’s from newbie to off the chart advanced, I found the single biggest group of contributors was the junior to intermediate group. They were full of motivation to improve and open to being mentored.
The RMM shows that innovation and shaping the practice comes at a higher level, but this does not mean that people at lower career levels don’t contribute to this. The difference is that the senior knows what they are seeing within the context of the project, practice and environment and has the ability to document the innovation in ways that effectively transform the practice.
Resume
If you can’t put together a well-formatted resume, I wouldn’t consider you for a role as a business analyst unless it was a junior role. I’m not saying you need to know how to navigate Word with the deftness of a surgeon conducting brain surgery, but you should know how to use tabs without hitting the space bar or the tab key a hundred times. You should also know how to put together a decent sentence and paragraph and get across a clear message of what you are looking for in your new role and what you have done in the past. If you can’t sell yourself on paper…
The truth is I’ve read so many resumes and conducted enough interviews to know where you’re at in your career and where you want to be by the kind of language you use to describe your previous roles. So much of the role of an analyst is about documenting processes, business cases, use cases requirements, issues, risks and gaps, that if you can’t put together a resume that reflects your ability to put together a well defined document, I’m simply not going to hire you.
Final Notes
It is important to remember that each project, situation and candidate are unique, and that while you may think BA’s are a dime a dozen, it is simply not true. The truth of it is that it is like choosing any other employee for your company. Done well, it can contribute to the positive growth and evolution of your organization. Done wrong, it can turn into an unhealthy relationship. Utilizing tools like the interview matrices will assure a degree of success in hiring but there if one final consideration to make. The person conducting the interview: ensure you have a standard process for multiple interviews using the same techniques and then analyzing the gaps between the two results. When the results are consistent, there is no issue. When the results are inconsistent, you need to understand your tolerance for risk and consider having the person undergo a third interview.
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By Barbara Davis. As a Business Analysis champion, Barbara Davis has pioneered new ground by defining new training programs, methodologies, and authoring numerous articles. As President of E2 Consulting Inc, she is working to unite the BA community by formulating a standardized practice through networking and training initiatives. View more blog posts by Barbara Davis |
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