Month: June 2020

You’ve defined something amazing. The business needs to increase revenue. Your department head wants to improve efficiencies. The organisation is at risk of legislative non-compliance. You have a career to grow. You want the sponsor to approve your ideas…

Why isn’t it working? If analysis is the point, if eliciting and modelling and defining are so fun, why do we even care if our work is read, reviewed, understood, accepted, or otherwise appreciated?

Business analysis is the act of making change happen. But making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone.

• Changed your sponsor’s mind.
• Changed how the business system works.
• Changed the customers experience of your product.

You can do this by creating and then relieving forces. By establishing driving forces. By seeing the existing beliefs and helping to change them (or maintain them).

But first, you need to see it. Then you need to choose to work with stakeholders to help them find what they’re looking for.

When you determine the business strategy, you’re doing business analysis.

When you identify key performance measures, you’re doing business analysis.

When you assess costs and benefits for that new idea, you’re doing business analysis.

And yes, when you’re structuring how the department will operate, that’s business analysis too.

For a long time, during the days when business and IT systems analysis were the same things, business analysis was reserved for executives and management consultants with a budget.

And now it’s for you.

The best options aren’t instantly embraced. Even the obvious course of action requires a good, hard shove to catch on.

That’s because the best options require significant analysis and change. They fly in the face of quick wins, and the Executives’ feeling of inertia is uncomfortable.

Because there’s a lot of noise and a history of failure, projects are risky.

And because people often want to jump to the solution.

Your most generous and insightful work needs to analyse and define the best way forward for the stakeholders it’s meant to serve. And your most successful work will be heard and understood because you crafted it to be.

That’s what most people seem to care about.

The fastest time, the fewest resources, the lowest rates.

Too many organisations spend their time running a time/cost-saving show, trying to get just a little more bargain out of the delivery team.

The thing is, if you want it quick and cheap it won’t be good. And without good, stakeholders are compromised.

Business analysis is about the stakeholder. About delivering your best work to satisfy the needs of those you serve. It’s about delivering remarkable benefits, by giving value you can be proud of. And it’s about being a driver of change that sticks, not simply sticking the change to them.

We can do work that matters for people who care. And if you’re like most people I know, I don’t think you’d want it any other way.

There are three choices when it comes to participating with content.

(Whether it’s a book, an article, a blog, a podcast, a whitepaper, a presentation, free training or a webinar, etc.)

1. You can read/listen and absorb pieces – by consuming content for your own interest.
2. You can recommend to others/join in discussions – by curating content with the gesture of a like, a reply or a share to your peers.
3. You can start/craft the conversation – by creating something generous of yourself because you care enough to raise your hand and speak up within your industry.

Content is a mutually-inclusive pyramid economy – with a 90:9:1 incline.

It’s an opportunity for us all to participate in the consumption (90%), curation (9%) and creation (1%) of content, simaultaneously.

But whether we’re turning up en masse with the interest to consume (silence) or showing up atop the steep slope with the generosity to create (voicing), it’s the small gesture of our curation (feedback) that helps to shape where the content economy goes.

Because taking a moment to give constructive feedback says “Thank’s for this view/Here’s what I think/Let’s keep going,”.