I’m Laura Brandenburg with Bridging the
Gap. Today, I’m going to talk about what I like
to call the “chicken and egg” problem in business analysis, which is, almost all
roles require business analyst experience, but how do you get that experience if you
aren’t a business analyst? It can feel like the chicken and the egg. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Who knows? What comes first, the business analyst, or
the business analyst experience? It’s frustrating for those of you who are
looking to get started in the profession, and just don’t know how to break through
that egg. Let’s talk about it. Here’s the thing. When you start to ask people in the profession
how they got started into business analysis, a lot of times those who didn’t go to school
for business analysis, those who have been around for a while, before we had programs
for business analysis that trained us how to do this, they would just tell you, “Well,
I kind of just fell into the role. Like one day I was on a project and it was
kind of cool, and they needed a subject matter expert, and then I learned about this thing
called requirements, and I started doing more interviewing and elicitation. I discovered business analysis. It’s this name for the career I’ve been
doing all along.” That’s my story, too. I was a QA engineer before I was a business
analyst. I got stopped in the hallway by a senior business
analyst who said, “Hey, there’s a new position opening up on our team. Would you like to apply?” For so long, I had internalized in my head
is like, how do I become a business analyst? I was just walking around in the hallway. But then people, when I started Bridging the
Gap nine years ago, started to email me and say, “Well, Laura, how do I get started?” And telling them you just walk around and
hope that somebody offered them a business analyst job wasn’t a good answer. So, we needed a new answer, and then I started
doing the interviews and I felt like a lot of people had this same answer I had. It just kind of happened. And, so, I knew that people who were trying
to make this happen for themselves, they needed a better answer. The reality is that you can orchestrate your
“fall” into business analysis. You do it by, essentially, following the path
that I took, and follow the path that thousands of others have taken into business analysis
by just starting to do the work, even if nobody’s asking you to do it. One opportunity tends to lead to another. You just start doing the work in your current
role. Now, this is something we can talk about for
hours. We have hours and hours of training programs,
teaching new people how to do business analysis, or people who are either newly in a BA role,
or who are not even in the BA role yet, how to do business analysis. But I want to give you some quick tips in
this video so that you have some takeaways and you can go try and experiment with this
for yourself. One obvious way to look at it is to look for
business processes that you can analyze. Business process is just a step-by-step set
of activities that happens in a pretty consistent way. You do work again and again in your business,
like servicing a customer, or setting up a new account, things that happen pretty similarly
time to time, and analyzing that as a process and writing down what that process is. A very easy way to get started. Other ways are to look at the software that
you use as a business user. What are the requirements of that software? How does it work? Create a use case or a set of user stories
describing the functionality of that software. Or if there’s a change that you want to
that software, create a wireframe and annotate, “Hey, I want this here instead of here,”
or maybe information’s on two different screens and you want it together on one screen. Create a wireframe mockup of what that would
look like and share that with a developer and see if they can maybe help you create
that kind of screen or create that for you. Just simple ways to get started. Analyze the data. Data seems more technical, and it can be,
but it could be as simple as creating a glossary or a high-level model describing the terminology
in your organization so when everybody says account, or customer, or order, those words
tend are deceptively simple in that everybody thinks that they’re saying the same thing,
but they’re saying something different. Can you be the person that creates the glossary
or clarifies definitions when we’re talking about those things in a meeting. Again, you’re starting to do business analysis
work. So, business process, software requirements. We talked about use cases, wireframes, and
data models. A third area to look at is communication. Being a business analyst, a huge part of that
role is being a good communicator. What you want to do, you can practice communication
in any role. You could take notes in a meeting so you’re
practicing hearing what people have to say. You can practice asking questions and getting
feedback. “Hey, what I’m hearing is this. Did I get that right?” Or, instead of spending a lot of time researching
the answer, go and ask somebody the answer. If you’re on the technology side, go ask
a business user for input. Present them with a wireframe and ask for
their input and feedback before you actually build what you’re building. You’ll be doing a little bit of business
analysis if you do that. Documentation reviews, or any kind of documentation,
how can you review that documentation so it’s more clear, more complete, more concise? Again, a large part of the business analysis
effort is creating some sort of documentation that’s usable and clearly understood by
the whole team. Those are just some quick ideas to get started. What you’ll find, the cool part of just
like starting to do business analysis is that your work, especially if you’ve been frustrated
or bored or feeling like you’re kind of at a dead end in your career, the work automatically
starts to become more fulfilling. There is salary and other benefits that come
with being a formally sanctioned business analyst with the job title and with that level
of responsibility assigned to you. But you can get some of the benefits just
of having more challenging fulfilling work of making your organization better just by
getting started applying those techniques in the role you’re in today. What we see, I call it the “virtual cycle
of business analysis.” You take just one of these steps and you take
that step forward, and that opportunity leads to another opportunity, leads to another opportunity. The first couple of steps, you’re going
to have to do some of the heavy lifting and make them happen. And put more effort in consistent driving
forward to get it started. But what starts to happen when you do that
is opportunities start to come to you. People see that you’re contributing to meetings
in new ways and asking the tough questions, or you’re taking notes, and everybody needs
somebody to take notes. Maybe you get invited to more interesting
meetings and problem-solving discussions. In that meeting, you can volunteer to create
a document or to do something extra that would help move that problem or that discussion
forward. It’s just like one thing leads to another
and all you have to do is take the first step. That’s my call to action to you. Leave a comment below with what step are you
going to take. What one slice of business analysis will you
use in your work this week, and how are you going to make that happen? Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear about it. If you’re one of our veterans, we have lots
of people with lots of experience that still listen into our videos. Go ahead and just let somebody know something
unusual that you did as a business analyst. Or maybe the very first thing you did even
before you were a business analyst, and share your story. It can inspire a lot of other people as well. Again, I’m Laura Brandenburg from Bridging
the Gap. We help professionals like you get started
in business analyst careers. It’s all about just taking that first step
and letting the virtuous cycle start to create momentum for you in your career. This is how you do it. This is how you get started as a business
analyst with no experience, and you break the egg by creating the experience, and creating
the success for yourself. Again, Laura Brandenburg. Thanks for watching. Talk soon, everyone.
