2 years ago, Red Gate hired its first Business Analyst (BA); me. I’d worked here for 4 years already in Admin and Sales roles before taking on the challenge of learning to be a BA, and building up the role. So 2 years and a lot of hard work later, here are my reflections.
Firstly, how does someone get a job in a role that doesn’t (yet) exist? Honestly I have no idea, as I don’t think there’s a precedent set for this at Red Gate. For me I’d been working closely with a Product Manager and our head of DevOps trying to replace a terrible sales system for a better one, and they recognised the soft skills I had for my role in Sales could be transferred to Business Analysis. They’d been looking to hire a BA for our DevOps team but really wanted someone who knew Red Gate’s style and culture. My domain knowledge of Red Gate was solid and the market could be learned, so all that remained was to teach me the technical skills of a BA – how to facilitate, eliciting and writing great requirements, documenting and researching, stakeholder management and change management.
A New Challenge
As I said my goodbyes to the brilliant team I’d worked in for years I actually started to feel really scared. I was top of my game in Sales Administration. I’d been doing the role for ages and knew it inside out, my boss trusted me to just get on and do it, and suddenly I was staring down a job I’d not heard of until a few months ago and was about to become a total novice with no-one else doing the same job here. The Product Manager who picked me for the job had managed to tie the job offer coincidentally in to my birthday and gave me a present; two books from the BCS – “Business Analysis” by Debra Paul, Donald Yeates and James Cardle, and “Business Analysis Techniques” by James Cardle, Debra Paul and Paul Turner. He said “read these, they’ll make you a great BA” and he was right, they became my bibles. If you want to learn about Business Analysis, these are the best start I can think of.
It would be a couple of months before I really got stuck in so my only tasks at the start were to learn Business Analysis and learn how our internal IT teams work. I had loads of help from the team to learn how they worked but there wasn’t another BA to teach me about the bits I was missing. I started with a lot of self-study, supported by my mentor (a Project Manager) and a colleague who took me under her wing. Soon I realised having the ear of a fellow BA was really important, so I asked our People Team to find me an external mentor. They came up tops with a really great mentor from a local software firm and we met or called frequently – we still do now, months later. To anyone looking to take on a new role I’d advise putting the feelers out for a local external mentor. Their objectivity and experience could prove really useful but also it’s the first building block for a network, which is handy thing to have when you need references for software systems or consultancies you may want to use at your workplace.
Giving my first lightning talk!
Once I felt more confident in the role I began to market it to the company – anything from talking about my job around the coffee machine to giving a lightning talk introducing the concept of Business Analysis to Red Gate and offering BA skills training for people to do a bit of it themselves. The best way to prove the role however was by doing it. I built up a library of templates (my “BA Toolkit”) to flick through when I’m short on ideas and also to make what I do more visual so people could see what I was doing on each project. My project work was paying off and other members of the teams I worked in were commenting that they liked having me to talk to the users and explain the requirements, and I was creeping closer to this experiment feeling like a success.
Community and Colleagues
A year into the role, I asked to attend BA Europe in London, a smallish conference by the tech world’s standard but the only one I could find dedicated to BAs, and the agenda looked fantastic (keep an eye on the 2014 page for updates about the next event in September 2015). Talking to other BAs and hearing sessions about the issues they faced and new techniques they developed really inspired me. But the best thing was realising I was living the BA dream – I could set up the role however I wanted! I had introduced BA to Red Gate exactly how the top BAs said you should, and that was being accepted by Red Gate. My colleagues supported me, attended workshops, filled out surveys, gave feedback (the good stuff and the stuff I could do better) and when I talked to other BAs they were jealous. Of me. Wow.
I found that there’s a really strong community in Business Analysis, it’s a fast growing trade and with communication being at the heart of BA theres’s loads of support. I was introduced to the hashtag #baot (Business Analysis On Twitter) where thousands of BAs from all around the world and the companies developing new technologies and techniques for us contribute to #baot so it’s a great resource and a good place to ask questions or advice from peers. Attending events like Business Analysis Europe also help you build a strong network and I’ve often dropped an email to a random contact I met months ago to ask “what would you do if you had this situation?”, so far they’ve never failed to reply.
But being the only person performing a role can be a really lonely thing. Especially as I was learning the skills and trying to prove not just to Red Gate but also to myself that I could be awesome at this. If I had an idea I knew it would be listened to, but I didn’t have another BA to run it by first. If I felt my stakeholders weren’t engaged, I couldn’t ask others how they kept those people engaged. When I was using a technique and couldn’t quite remember the detail or was running short on ideas, I had to consult books or call my mentor, and all of that took a lot more time and effort than just asking the guy at the next desk. But by far the hardest thing had been proving to everyone else at Red Gate that my role adds value, and that was a really slow process. Every successfully delivered project added confidence in the work I was doing, and every failure taught me something to improve on next time around. Every colleague on every team got to see what a BA does and luckily, they were all open to having me around.
Defining and Growing the Role
I feel now like I’ve reached that magic point: There’s still work to do but people talk about needing a BA on their projects and are asking me to give advice. I’m halfway through taking the BCS International Diploma in Business Analysis with two of the four qualifications under by belt. There’s more work than I can take on myself and ever more people asking about what it is I do. Being in demand is great and I love being requested for projects. I get a kick out of seeing a project proposal come to my team asking for us to research something, in no small part because it’s a change in Red Gate’s previous culture where research was not a priority. The best bit was a recent email that was forwarded to me and was hugely uplifting – A colleague had signed off his email requesting “what would Zara do?” wristbands to highlight to his team that BA skills could really help them. I feel a little bit proud now.
So what would I do if I had my time over? I don’t think I’d change much. But here’s a run down of the steps I took that I think really helped me to learn the role and raise it’s profile:
These are some of my ‘toolbox’ of techniques to call on when I’m short on ideas
Develop your soft skills further, they are fundamental to the role so focus on training in coaching and mentoring, interviewing skills, giving hard feedback. All things that help you build rapport, actively listen and communicate well with your stakeholders
Learn fast. The technical skills are well documented and well tested so use the BCS Books I mentioned above as simple to read guides that are full of helpful tools
Get yourself mentors. Yes mentors, more than one. Having someone in the building to fall back and to encourage me was important to not feel alone. The outside perspective of another person doing the same job was invaluable
Build your network, there is a strong BA community in person at events like Business Analysis Europe and online with the twitter hashtag #baot
Write down the techniques you find most useful in your role, create your ‘BA Toolkit’ so when you need inspiration you have a drawing book full of it and who doesn’t like to doodle
Get a stock of sticky notes and sharpie pens, you will need tons!
Most of all, believe in yourself so when you talk about the role you talk with confidence and positivity, it’s amazing how much that catches on.
So the next challenge? I guess it will be to grow the BA function in the right way. To make sure that when we hire more BAs, that that really works for Red Gate and improves the lives of my colleagues. And, my personal challenge? Be inspiring to other BAs and especially to potential BAs so that they want to take on the challenge too and come to work in really rewarding environment.
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