You have the permission to change your story. You can live a different one, one that’s shaped around the stakeholders you seek to serve.
You have the permission to change how you spend your time. You can let go of the documentation and find the guts to do thinking work instead. You can plot your own course and do what others aren’t doing.
The most frustrated business analysts I know are the ones who take it as a given that because they are put in a box, they have no permission.
And so functional analysts hustle for requirements and do what they see other analysts do.
And so process analysts map slightly changed models and sidestep the chance of influencing stakeholders, instead of realising how many improvement options there actually are.
And so we hop on the project merry-go-round, attending our meetings, taking our notes, and creating ever more documentation in the hope of ‘bridging the gap’. There are so many better ways to make an impact and build trust.
Much of what we are hesitant to use in our business analysis toolbox has been considered good-practice for a few decades now. It’s worth discarding the one-size-fits-all approach that we created and replace it with more generous techniques.