Epilogue

Effective business analysis is a critical link to help organizations meet business needs, improve customer service, and maximize the return on project investments. It is no wonder that business analysts everywhere are increasingly expanding out of traditional, technical roles into leadership roles that share responsibility for the success of the project. Indeed, if you are a business analyst reading this book, it is very likely that your organization is expecting you to take on an elevated project leadership role.

This book will help you fulfill that role. Part II, for example, presented three key competencies that you as a business analyst must add to your technical skill set to be successful as a project leader: teamwork, communication and customer relationship management. Applying these skills on projects that encompass large-scale organizational change efforts will help you perform effectively as a strategic implementer, build a high-performing team, and prepare the organization to accept the new business solution.

An important next step after reading this book is for you to participate in a business analysis competency assessment to evaluate not only your business analysis competencies, such as requirements planning and analysis, but your general management, leadership, and project management competencies as well.

The results of a baseline competency assessment will help you identify opportunities for improvement and strengths on which to build your project leadership capabilities. As described in Chapter 3, the business analysis competency assessment should cover key skills and competencies across the business solutions life cycle and be mapped to a project leadership career path. Compare your current competency level with the industry competency benchmark for your position.

The results of your competency assessment should provide an indication of whether your current skill level aligns with your current project responsibilities. If you are working on large, highly complex projects, leadership skills are critical, so it’s imperative to seek out training and development efforts to enhance these skills.

Business analysis competency assessments, in general, are used by organizations to foster training and professional development efforts. Unfortunately, what most assessments deliver is a long list of opportunities for improvement and the associated training courses to address each area. A missing component of these assessments is guidance on which actions the business analyst should implement first, and which actions will make the most difference in the current workplace.

If you have participated in one of these assessments, you can use the results to help you prioritize the training and development efforts that will result in the most immediate improvement in your project performance. The more complex your projects, the more leadership responsibility you will most likely have to assume. Remember, building leadership potential requires a diverse development plan that includes training, mentoring, networking, participating in professional associations, and expanding project opportunities.

Organizations must commit to enhancing their business analysis maturity, too. To achieve business analysis and project management success, organizations often need to change their management systems. This does not mean trying to make drastic personnel changes or applying a one-step solution. Rather, organizations should establish conditions that enable people to work together effectively, with mutual trust. This creates an opportunity for the full expression of accountability, authority, and creativity in managing projects.¹

It is a long-term commitment for organizations to increase business analysis and project management maturity, because maturity typically progresses gradually and iteratively over time. Even if an organization follows a defined capability maturity model, it should expect false starts and relatively unsuccessful organizational improvement efforts at first.

Organizations tend to default to training when they want to improve the skills of their business analysts, but they often fail to realize that training alone may not provide the most performance improvement. If organizational support systems aren’t available to actually apply training concepts in the workplace, training alone won’t bring about intended improvements.

A business analyst center of excellence (BACoE) can help the organization continue improvement momentum, as described in Chapter 8. Similar to the project management office (PMO), the BACoE serves as a strategic asset to promote project collaboration, build business analysis skill levels, and reinforce the application of business analysis best practices on projects.

As you carve out your leadership role and begin to influence executives, you can encourage your organization to build additional components into its capability maturity plan to help you practice what you learn in training. Without this support, you will experience an increase in your knowledge and skill level personally, but your project performance outcomes may still be less than what is expected. This causes a gap between your current potential capability and current applied capability, and your projects may suffer as a result.

When you have difficulty applying business analysis and leadership skills on projects, it may be due to this capability gap. If so, it is important for you to understand the cause of the gap, whether it be lack of personal skill or obstacles in the organizational environment. Gaps caused by either situation create a range of personal feelings from resignation, apathy, and despondency to activism, motivation, and productive engagement as a change agent. A highly skilled business analyst, for example, who is unable to effectively apply his or her skills in the organization because of a lack of management support, may eventually experience resignation or apathy because he or she has limited ability to control project outcomes.

Despite any deficiency in the training maturity of your organization, strive to continue to build your personal effectiveness by developing your own self-efficacy—believing that your own knowledge, skills, and experience will enable you to achieve the defined project goals. Seek (or try to create) an organizational environment that is responsive and rewards valued accomplishments, fosters aspirations and productive engagement in activities, and provides a sense of fulfillment.² When a competent business analyst works in this type of environment, he or she is able to exercise substantial control over project responsibilities and professional development activities.

Your belief in your self-efficacy is critical to adaptive functioning and affects how you think, motivate yourself, feel, and behave.³ But your feelings of self-efficacy are influenced by a general expectation: your actions determine outcomes, or external forces beyond your control determine outcomes.

The belief about whether your actions affect outcomes is called locus of control. For example, an experienced business analyst with high self-efficacy who works in an organizational environment that rewards and supports project management will most likely feel like he or she has control over project outcomes. The business analyst will perform at a higher level of competence, gain personal satisfaction from performing work, and aspire to continuous improvement. The same business analyst in an unsupportive environment may initially intensify his or her efforts to make a difference in the organization, but when the organization does not respond, the business analyst may become frustrated and leave the organization, or change his or her performance expectations to work within the system.

The key message here is that as a business analyst and as a leader, you must take control of your own career development and work environment to minimize the gap between current potential capability and current applied capability. Building competence in your leadership skills and applying these skills on projects will help you develop and sustain a level of credibility that will drive change and maturity in your organization.

Make a commitment to increase your business analysis leadership self-efficacy by taking control of your training and development efforts, seeking out opportunities to effectively apply your skills, and negotiating for what you need to align your level of competence with the complexity of your projects.

The key is to take control of those things you can. Improve your locus of control by understanding the cause of the gap between your current potential capability and current applied capability. Establish a BACoE to influence the direction of business analysis and project management maturity in your organization. Educate your middle and senior managers on the value of effective business analysis and project management by exhibiting business-outcome thinking, developing creative solutions and options, providing vision and direction for projects, facilitating stakeholder collaboration, and contributing to the establishment of business analysis best practices in your organization. Are you up for the challenge?

Lori Lindbergh