Divya is a business analyst – working with clients, understanding requirements and ensuring that is understood by the team when they build. She has eight years experience and has been working in teams that you manage for the past couple of years.
She has reached out to you, and as part of the conversation you find that she is bored with the usual cycle of writing requirement documents and getting them signed off and then working with teams only to face questions, ideas, suggestions from the team and clients – many of which she had also expressed during the initial stages.
She thinks her only next step is to start slowly managing teams; but prefers to work on solutions than managing projects. She then proceeds to ask what she can do differently in her role.
You and she are planning to catch up in another couple of days. Can you give her a ring-side view of what she can do differently in her teams and what kind of skills she can plan to pick up, to enjoy her business analyst role better?
Suggested solution:
While the traditional role of a business analyst has been reduced to collecting requirements from clients, documenting them and then coordinating to get them developed by the team – things are changing pretty rapidly.
Business Analysts will now need to don the role of facilitators in the solution development space. For this, they will need to actively develop these new areas:
1. Facilitation skills – Bringing teams together, so that relevant stakeholders agree on problems and solutions, with each stakeholder (development, product owner, sometimes end user too) providing their perspective – ideas, approaches, risks, challenges
2. Design Thinking skills: Techniques that help in unearthing problems and validating solutions end to end, thereby reducing wasted software creation
3. Release & Development Management: As the proxy owner of their project from a functional perspective, Divya can and must develop abilities to come up with options on releases that will create value to end customer (not just based on constraints in development)
These are areas where traditional Business Analyst role is not taken in to; and will require focus on developing skills in multiple areas. Apart from this, is the ‘taken for granted’ domain awareness (I , however, feel this awareness is confused with expertise, which may not be necessary)
9 Responses
An interesting “angle”! There is usually an emphasis on empathy among team members for better team work and self-organization. Would teams truly consider the manager/leader also as part of the team? Needs some mindset change. I think Emotional Intelligence training/coaching should bring out this aspect – that EI (Empathy being part of it) does not draw boundaries of applicability! Enjoyed reading a refreshingly different blog…
Thanks, Shiv. Yes, completely agree with your point on EI’s role in this regard. Gopal
Nice angle! And nice twist in the title of the blog!
Good perspective, which is normally missed.
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Nice article, Gopal.
We all know one filed where downwards empathy is hardly ever seen, but upward empathy is expected and demanded. Politics.
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Nice article, Gopal! Very good insight. Practicing Empathy needs an effort as it needs seeing the world from the perspective of the another person. It is all the more difficult when you do not see everything that the other person sees. I remember one instance in my life when a manager reporting to me was promoted to senior manager’s post and moved away from me on a new, higher level assignment. After a few days she came to meet me and I enquired how she was doing on the new role. She said, “Milind now I know the kind of pressure you faced from above. You never passed that onto us and kept us shielded. Now I know how difficult your role and life is. I am trying to be like you!” So, the true empathy comes out of having experienced similar situations yourself.
So, Milind is the message “a little empathy is better than a late empathy”?
Gopal,
Nice blog.
This is a very valid and necessary perspective that everyone should have.
Somehow, in most organizations, just like ‘agile’ is considered as something for the teams and team members, these may be labeled as management and only for managers – as part of the leadership development plans.
Some ways how I have contextualized this in some situations:
• At an individual contributor level: connecting to empathy as a key skill for design thinking [observing and understanding users]
• At a team level: the togetherness and one-team idea [teams making commitments, the huddles in cricket and other sports etc], to use daily standups, for example, to recalibrate oneself after sensing how the others feel on that day or in a particular situation
• For managers: understanding and doing what they can, to make their managers successful, particularly when the complaint is that my manager does not understand me or my needs