5 Mistakes that I made as a Business Analyst when I started off my career (feat.impostor syndrome)

hi everyone welcome back to my channel so in today's video I wanted to open up to you guys and talk about my top 5 rookie mistakes that I made as a business analyst so oftentimes I get questions such as what kind of personality type do you need to have do you need to be an extrovert in order to become a good business analyst or what kind of skill sets or knowledge do you need to have in order to become a better VA and I think these questions are all very valid and very important for you to keep on thinking about in order to better yourself but I think it's also very critical for us to recognize that sometimes we're humans we make mistakes I mean a lot of the mistakes that we find are basically human error so in today's video I wanted to share my top 5 rookie mistakes that I made as a business analyst because I wanted to share this with you so then you're not always thinking about what kind of person you need to be it doesn't matter who you are as long as you are learning growing and learning from your mistakes so I think that's also very important for you to remember as well is it's okay to make mistakes but for me I always try to learn from it so my hope for you in this video is that you guys will learn from my mistakes and don't have to make the same mistakes as I did as you embark on your journey to become a business analyst so I hope you guys enjoy it and if you want to find out more then just keep on watching so the number one mistake that I made as a business analyst is feeling like I didn't belong there or lacking self-confidence and I think the term is called impostor syndrome so according to Wikipedia impostor syndrome is a psychological pattern in which an individual - their accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud so this is exactly how I felt from the you know from the first day of my work as a recent grad couple of years ago because I felt like I didn't belong there even though I made it to this amazing company that was willing to give me an offer letter to start my new journey as an implementation consultant I always constantly had this fear of one day then finding out that I have nothing to bring to the table and getting fired and he left me a comment saying that I have this fear of not being able to find a job and I think she's about to go to college to get her degree and it's really interesting because when I was in college I used to have that same fear but once I entered the workforce it was a different set of fear that fear of like I'm I'm a fraud and somebody's gonna point a finger at me and say hey why are you here you don't belong hairs but in general when you are a young recent graduate I think we tend to have this fear of not being in math and I think over the years I learned to accept for who I am and to really embrace myself for all my imperfections so this is something that I'm still working on it it's still work-in-progress it's not something that I've completely gotten over when but I've done a lot of soul-searching by reading a lot of books and that's one of the reasons why I actually decide to embark on personal development journey and I think sometimes you just have to love yourself more and despite all of these doubts that are in your head or all these little voices that are telling you that you're not enough you have to keep on believing in yourself and keep doing things that you know that you have control over and keep doing things that will make yourself better and I think in in return things will get better for you and and you know that includes feeling like you belong there as you make new friends and as you embark on new projects and demonstrate your abilities and your skills over and over again and the years of experience definitely helps when it comes to feeling like you belong so I think number two sort of relates to number one which is being afraid of asking questions and raising my hand so in my previous videos I've mentioned the importance of asking questions to clarify requirements as a business analyst and it's so ironic that when I first heard you my journey as a business analyst I was so deathly afraid of raising my hand and asking questions because I wasn't sure if it was my place to ask questions I wasn't sure if I if I was asking stupid questions I wasn't sure if I was the only one who had that kind of question so in my mind it is absolutely crucial for you to ask great questions and to raise your hands I think it's critical to become a great PA as well as to be good at what you do because if you don't ask questions it's hard for you to process the information it's hard to really validate whether or not you've actually understood what the other person has said right so now that I've been in this business and have a couple of years of experience under my belt I'm realizing that oh who asked questions or fast learners they tend to be fast learners because they tend to understand and grasp concepts more quickly they can actually validate their assumptions or you know clarify any kind of requirements so one of the strategies that I use in order to overcome my fear of asking questions when raised my hand was to do more research so what I mean by that is in preparation for meetings sometimes I would be going around asking questions to other people about you know what are the topics like what kind of things should I be aware of before this meeting so I didn't meticulous meeting prepping and just by gathering the the data and information in preparation for that meeting naturally I had a question or two so sometimes I would just write them down in my notes and then when I went into the meeting I felt more prepared I felt like I was more in control and if those questions that I had written down were not answer then I would raise my hand and practice asking questions and so over the years I felt more at ease and more natural and asking questions but it definitely didn't come to me naturally when I first started my job as I mentioned before this goes hand in hand with self confidence and I really wasn't comfortable and in my ability to understand and you know understand and obtain knowledge when I was starting out my career as a business analyst and I had to find creative ways in order to overcome that fear and my routine number three is actually I used to make a lot of assumptions and I think it's helpful for you to make assumptions to navigate your day-to-day life because if it weren't for those assumptions then you would have to ask millions of questions in order to get clarification as to where you need to be what you need to do and who you're supposed to meet right so I think it is good to have expectations and making assumptions in your everyday life but when you put on a business analyst hat I think it's important for you to not not make certain assumptions because oftentimes as a business analyst your job and your projects that you work on bring about a lot of changes within organized and mostly a lot of those changes involve technology or involve new business processes so you can't make assumption that just because Amanda used to be the person who owned the business process doesn't really mean that she's gonna be the one who's gonna be owning the process after the fact you have to ask that question you know we currently understand that Amanda is a business process owner you know you know to enter at the time for her her department but is that also going to be the same once we implement this new time module right so these are some of the key assumptions that we cannot overlook and when I first started off as a business analyst I didn't know any better so I used to make assumptions and ask questions and make her all and found out that it was actually absolutely not true so this is something for you to remember that when you put on your business analyst hat then it is important for you to clarify and not make any assumptions and if you have any questions you can always follow up with your customers or clients to make sure that you capture the right requirements and to eliminate any kind of false assumptions so number four the fourth routine mistake that I make it as a business analyst was to think that users know exactly what they want now I know this not to be true a lot of the times end users or your customers don't really know exactly what they want they have an idea they have this this idea in their head but they can't sometimes they have a really hard time communicating that or they just have a general high-level idea but as you dig deeper and then as you capture more requirements you'll realize that sometimes your customers don't know exactly what they're looking for this used to be my assumption back in the day when I first started I first started off as a business analyst was to think that people know exactly what they want so when I used to sit down with them to elicit requirements and to ask them questions of a product and what they're happy or not happy with and what kind of enhancements that they wanted to make people used to tell me that they wanted this special custom enhancement to wipe out the number of receiving entries because they wanted to make sure that their warehouse people would physically go around the room and count the number of boxes or inventory so they instead of the system just automatically generating the number or the inventory count they actually wanted an enhancement to what that feature out and so you know thinking that you people know exactly what they want and users know exactly what they want so we went ahead and built that special functionality and it turned out that warehouse people absolutely hated it because he just created more manual work for them manual entry so they actually ended up reverting back to the original product to where the number of inventories or counts would just automatically pop up and then people just have to click confirm' so this was an important lesson for me because I used to think that people are exactly what they want and you know they know what's best for the business but sometimes it's not true and this is also the reason why it's important for you to not make any assumptions and to really ask them questions to make them think it's because people change your mind all the time you'd be surprised by how many times people have asked for for a and then you changed it to B and then into C and then to D oh this is the tree diagram that my professor showed it to me when I was still in school and I think it's still very relevant and explains as to why asking questions and communication skills is so important is because this tree diagram really truly explains the gaps between people's sandi right I mean it's the same you know this is what exactly customer I explained it to me but it just can be interpreted in so many different ways and I always laugh and chuckle at this because this is exactly you what we're supposed to be doing as business analyst is to mind the guests and to really assess and have an open mind be critical minded and examine every business requirement to make sure that we don't end up delivering something completely different than what was envisioned by customers and last but not least I used to not know how to work collaboratively with my colleagues and to work more efficient so for example as a business analyst a large portion of my job is actually spent on testing products and making sure that they meet the requirements and doing quality control check before we pass on the product to our end users for their acceptance testing and I used to just work in silos and just do my part but over the years I've learned that there is a lot of Integrative testing points that you can actually work with other testers to make your and streamline your work faster so for example if I'm doing this part a and then I know that somebody else can do Part B maybe there is ways in which we can shorten our testing to make sure that we don't test the same thing but we sort of test more efficiently and think of test scripts that can be integrated so that instead of us doing silo testing we can actually streamline them together so I'm gonna go into this testing methodology more in details and follow-up videos but I just wanted to give you an idea that instead of working on in silos and just doing your own testing I realize that there are so many other ways that you can work creatively and collaboratively with other people so then you can actually make your job a lot more manageable and and a lot more if so that is it for today's video I hope you guys enjoyed it and let me know if you have any questions in the comments below and I'll see you guys in the next video bye

Channel: Rich Millennial Mindset

Views: 52,834

Keywords: business analysis, mistakes, business analyst channel, business analyst tutorial, business analyst training, best business analysis training, learn business analysis, professional in business analysis, pmi business analysis, free business analysis training, learn business analysis training, business analyst, impostor syndrome

Id: 4EO1EZEogDw

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 26 2019