Building efficient communications for the successful Business Analysis
Soft skills are a hot topic nowadays. But what stands behind this term and can it be boiled down to just practicing “mutual respect” and the need “to listen to each other”? In this piece, I’d like to mention some other not that obvious aspects of soft skills. As well as to show how they are to be applied in practice.
One renowned army surgeon who went through two of the greatest wars of the 20th century confessed in his memoir that the hardest ordeal for him had been not tiredness at operations or terror while shells and bombs fell at him, but the so-called “sorting” he had to follow at almost every day of heavy fighting.
The medical “sorting” is one of the gloomiest duties practiced at the field hospitals. When hospitals are overwhelmed with the number of wounded and mutilated, they have to follow a special protocol that makes them make a choice as to whom shall be provided help first, and who shall be set aside with anesthesia. According to this protocol, medics must first start helping the ones with moderate wounds, then those with light ones. Only afterwards, if there is still an opportunity, do they tend to the most seriously wounded ones (if they are still alive by that time).
At first glance this unfair practice has a very strong reasoning. If surgeons start work on the most serious wounds, they may take a lot of time, while there is no guarantee for success. What is much more important, is that the same time could be crucial for many of those whose wounds are less severe. They may just die without timely help. (In social psychology studies, the kind of similar scenario is referred to as “the trolley dilemma” but in the field of medicine, it was (and is) the established practice).
Thankfully, Business Analysts (BA) are not burdened with such a hard and stressful choice, but nonetheless, there is a special kind of “sorting” that we must practice too. I’m implying to aspects of interviewing at all phases of the requirements solicitation and validation phase.
The BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) guide mentions “interviewing” as just one of many (about 30) techniques for requirements elicitation and clarification processes. But we have to understand the term “interview” in a much broader context and re-assess its real value.
Documentation is either obsolete or not detailed enough, and in the majority of cases, both. (For average software product requirements or details of operational context change at a rate of about 10% per year).
Way too many managers and IT folks interpret Agile as a “priority of verbal conversations over documentation” or sometimes “the code must express itself”. As a result, hours and days wasted in the “architecture and workflows related artifacts rediscovery process”. (Not to mention tons of nerves burnt in the discussions). But this juicy subject (knowledge management) does deserve separate consideration.
Even if/when a BA has related business domain experience, there could be thousands of pertinent issues to the particular organization details, or specific workflows, and so on.
So, what does it leave us? This way or another we have to agree with the Greek philosopher Protagoras — “The human being is the ultimate measure of all things”.
And in order to succeed, an analyst must learn how to identify and properly sort out access to available contacts. Which may be the sources of most valuable information from those that create “informational noise” i.e. a BA has to properly identify people he/she shall talk to, determine how to talk (about what to talk), when to talk, in what sequence to approach, what to listen for, and also how to capture and process obtained information.
What are the three main aspects a Business Systems Analyst MUST cover?
1. Breadth (implications and interdependencies) — information discovery (within the particular context)
2. Depth/thoroughness — validation and concretization
3. Reconciliation and obtaining mandate on the changes
Thus, to succeed in your interviewees you must quickly find out who of your contacts is a visionary, who is an expert, who is an influencer and from whom you shall get final approval (i.e. sign-off) (approver).
Before starting interviews — do your homework. It is assumed that an analyst has some background in the business domain and is fluent in domain-specific language and professional jargon. Otherwise obtaining this knowledge becomes the major pre-requisite.
a) Gather some background info on the people you need to talk to.
b) Try to comprehend the profile of each of them (not a trivial task, by the way) i.e. who is who? Visionary, Expert, Influencer, Approver?
c) It makes sense to draw kind of a map before you start scheduling your communications. Especially when you need to approach more than 2–3 people.
d) Obtain authorization (if required) and then schedule meetings.
In order to achieve maximal efficiency, and at the same time lower the potential tensions later on, try first to meet with the influencer. Consider this as a kind of “etiquette”. Be advised that the majority of influencers possess explicit or implicit “veto power”. Ignoring or informing them “post-factum” may create a lot of problems. On the other hand, an influencer may provide you with very valuable insight on the links and interdependencies with other projects.
Next on your journey for knowledge is the Approver. Goals for this first meeting are quite straightforward: get criteria of success and clarifications on strategic objectives. If the problem statement is not clearly defined — at least obtain more insight on it.
The Expert shall supplement you with all the required details on underlying processes and their peculiarities; by this time you’ll have a list of questions.
After meeting with the Visionary all pieces of the puzzle will fall into place and you should be ready to compose a solution to a business problem.
Before presenting your solution to Approver(s) (aka stakeholders), consult one more time with the Influencer and polish the details as per her/his feedback.
A few general pieces of advice:
Even if a person you are going to talk to claims that he/she is comfortable about being recorded — avoid it. Try to capture everything on paper (even typing along is not that efficient in establishing contact as just scribing on a piece of paper. You may quickly jolt some diagram or suggest the interviewee visualize something. Just have your notes in a uniform and structured way.)
Always obtain feedback on the results of your session. This is quite often an overlooked part. Not later than on the next day — compose a summary of the discussed topics and send it back to the person(s) you had a meeting with. Ask them if everything was captured correctly and thoroughly. There is a huge difference between how people assess verbal information and the same but in writing.
Avoid the temptation of attributing pieces of the retrieved information to concrete people. The best approach: mention your sources in alphabetical order in the informational artifact you create.
Regardless of whether the project is short or long, treat your sources with respect and be sensitive about their individual preferences and traits.
Also, I have to warn you about some caveats:
a) You will run into a “know everything” type of person who doesn’t have sufficient competence in the particular area;
b) Developing the psychological comfort of obtaining information from the most available source(s) instead of the most appropriate ones;
c) Biases of different kinds (yes, this happens to all of us);
d) When information is captured within a particular Domain-Specific Language — its meaning could be lost in translation (especially when more than one DSL is involved);
e) Jira and TFS are not the knowledge management systems! Consider Confluence, or Sharepoint, or any other centralized storage for the documents with the options for collaboration;
f) Don’t get lost in multiple versions of the same document with changes made by multiple contributors.
Good luck with setting successful and valuable interviews!
