NLP for Business Analysts

Developing agile mindset and behaviours

Peter Parkes

• Publisher: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781780172835
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Method and process are important in business analysis, but knowing how to use them is even more so. As a business analyst you can increase your effectiveness most by developing your soft skills, recognising that finesse can be more effective than force. Once developed, you will find that these skills are transferable across project types and whole industry sectors. This book illustrates the application of NLP to develop competencies - better equipping you to communicate across cultures, reframe problems, manage stakeholder groups, resolve conflicts, motivate teams and become an even better leader.

PART 1. THE WORLD OF BUSINESS ANALYSIS

As described in the Introduction, this Part will focus exclusively on the evolving role of the BA. We will not look at application of NLP to behavioural competencies identified through the review in this chapter until Part 3, after we have laid the foundations of NLP in Part 2. If you think that you already know where business analysis is going, then you could go straight to Part 2 or 3.

Rather than merely develop the business case for a stronger focus on behavioural competencies, which I believe is already well established in the executive layer of most organisations, I go further and map the evolutionary direction of the profession. Not long ago, some looked on it as an administrative role of listing and analysing customer requirements. A few still do. The weight of evidence described here, however, points to it becoming an agent of change, underpinning survival in this age of agile organisations.

In order to work in an agile environment, the modern BAs need to develop corresponding agile mindsets and behaviours.

Brian Wernham, author of Agile Project Management for Government, 2012

I will review emerging trends, current thinking in the bodies of knowledge and the increasing focus on behaviours in competency frameworks. The increasing weighting of behavioural competencies in the growing raft of professional qualifications will become evident, and we will look at ways in which behavioural competencies, as against knowledge of processes, can be assessed. In doing so, I will demonstrate the equivalence to the emotional intelligence framework, which provides a much more stable and useable platform than often vague and disparate lists of behaviours developed independently.

1.1 BUSINESS ANALYSIS UNDERPINS EFFECTIVE DELIVERY OF CHANGE

Research on why projects fail typically leads to a realisation that there were poor or incomplete requirements.

Chuck Millhollan¹

Successful business change is underpinned by competent analyses of problems and formulation of solutions. The role of the BA is key in that process, though often overlooked, with parts of the function falling to subject matter experts (SMEs), technical architects, project managers (PMs), change managers and account managers. Many holding the title of BA are still, at best, qualified through experience rather than formal training and development of supporting behavioural competencies. Is this lack of continuity and capability across the business analysis life-cycle part of the reason why so many projects still fail to realise their business case?

Having grown up with books such as Reengineering the Corporation,² and been involved as both victim and perpetrator in various organisational ‘down-sizing’ and ‘right-sizing’ initiatives,³ historically for me the main focus of business analysis was organisational design and process re-engineering. Moving on to become involved with, and then lead, outsourcing programs driven by public–private partnerships (PPPs), the focus at the front-end during the bid process was due diligence on the ‘as is’ situation across the whole organisation, followed by financial modelling of options for ‘to be’, involving various degrees of organisational transformation. Thus, the focus remained on process effectiveness and then efficiency, even when we were putting in a raft of IT and customer service projects under Tony Blair’s ‘Transformational Government: Enabled by Technology’⁴ and e-Government initiatives.⁵ Training for BAs employed in my own company reflected this focus of trying to understand what the business was trying to achieve and then working out how to get there – the classic ‘as is’ to ‘to be’ approach.⁶ In many instances, however, the scope of business analysis engagement may be restricted to the specification of systems, missing the foundation for realisation of business benefits.

It was not really until I started working in central government with very large systems going into test phases that I realised how poor our requirements gathering phase can sometimes be, with deficiencies often only manifesting themselves in the testing phase late in the life-cycle. As you may be aware, the cost of fixing stuff increases markedly as we progress through the life-cycle, with an order of magnitude cost increase for each stage often cited (see Figure 1.1).

More alarmingly, having worked as a Gateway™ Reviewer on high risk major projects for the UK government,⁷ it is my experience that misunderstandings incorporated at the start of the project are often evident in reviews carried out late in the life-cycle. While presenting to the Association for Project Management (APM) annual conference in 2010, Sir Peter Gershon, former CEO of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC, now incorporated into the Cabinet Office), said that for some major projects it was fairly obvious at the outset that they were doomed to failure. There is probably a long list of projects in this category, and if you want to focus on failure then you might want to follow the annual ‘Chaos reports’.⁸ More productively, you may want to think about carrying out a project autopsy before you start, using the ‘pre-mortem’ technique described in Section 3.8 of this book.

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Figure 1.1 The ability to influence a project over time

Throughout this book our focus will be on success rather than failure. Gerry Murphy, an assurance executive from the London Olympic Development Authority, said that they were able to have all the venues available well ahead of time because the Olympic governing body carried forward specifications for all venues and activities from one event to the next.⁹ Thus, they were able to brief their delivery supply chain while their stakeholders were going through classic ‘Form, Storm, Norm and Perform’ stages.¹⁰ Not only were the Olympics a great achievement for British athletes, they were evidence that we can do big projects really well when we understand the business goals and get the requirements right.

What we have already learnt is that Britain is actually rather better at organising big projects than we often gave ourselves credit for.

Business Secretary Vince Cable MP, The Times CEO Summit, June 2012

1.2 EVOLUTION OF THE ROLE OF THE BA

In this section we will look at the different definitions of BA and, perhaps more informatively, how definitions have evolved from a technical role towards a facilitator of change.

1.2.1 Evolution of definitions

In the BCS publication IT-enabled Business Change,¹¹ Sharm Manwani reproduces the definition of the role of BA from the website of the OGC:

Business Analysts are responsible for identifying and documenting the functional and non-functional requirements for meeting business need. They should have a good understanding of the business area and be able to identify opportunities for effective use of IT.

Perhaps not intentionally, this somewhat reflects a common narrow view of BAs – they are there only to document requirements as a kind of scribe and add little further value.

The II...