Hi there, Matts Rehnstrom here, Shaper of Business Excellence. I’m sitting here in the wonderful, as we call it, winter-spring. A lot of snow, but also a lot of sunshine.
Anyway, I was about to talk today about the Business Analysts, and where they come from, and I divide it into two categories. One is from within the business, and those Business Analysts who have worked with the business doing whatever they’re doing within that particular organization. Or they can come from outside; it could be a consultant, it could be from the IT department, it could be from different parts of the organization or outside the organization. But it’s not within the business.
So if you focus on the first part, those that come from the business, I took four things that it’s vital to understand and to think about when you work as a Business Analyst coming from inside, or if you’re from the outside and work with those that come from the inside.
The first thing is that people in the organization don’t really tell you the things that you need to do, and that’s because they think that you already know it. And if you work within the organization for five or ten years, they expect you to know a lot of these things, but that’s not really the case, is it? You don’t really know everything of your organization. So therefore it’s vital that you make all the questions that you can, even though they think that you know it.
And that leads us into the next part, and that is that you might not ask all the questions that you need to ask, because you think that you know the answer. And if you work there for five or ten years, you might not really feel comfortable of asking things that you should know, because people expect you to know it, so it feels awkward to ask the questions that they think you know everything about. But you have to go pass that, and you need to ask all the critical questions. Look at the business as it was your first time there, you need to ask all those critical questions.
That leads us to even the next one, and that is the critical questions, you might not feel comfortable asking them because you know that it’s a sensitive answer. So the answer you’re looking for in the organization you know that someone may feel bad about you asking those questions. It might be sensitive between two different individuals, or it might be sensitive from the manager’s perspective, or something like that.
But here it is vital that you actually ask those questions, so you can go to the bottom, you can drill down in those things that are sensitive or that you already know. The thing is that if you ask the critical questions, then people will start, in that workshop that you have, they will start discussing those things, and then you will find out that not everyone knows everything, and that’s true in the business as well because people do things in different ways, in different parts of the department. It could be that this unit does it in a special way, or that unit does it in a special way. Everybody thinks that everyone knows what’s going on, and where the problems are, but they don’t. So that’s why it’s so vital to discuss them during a workshop for example.
And it’s also important that you ask the questions because you think that you have the answers, but you don’t. If you then continue to drill down you will find a lot of new perspectives in the business that you never thought about before.
The advantage by coming from within the business and doing business analysis work is that you have a lot of knowledge about the details in how you handle certain cases or how you calculate an invoice, or something within building, or whatever the business is working with. You have a lot of knowledge about the business itself, and that is an advantage with coming from inside the business.
So, those are the ones that I sorted out for the group that comes from within the business, those people that have worked within the business as a clerk, or an administrative officer, or something like that. So, if you liked this, please like this, click like on this video, and go and visit mattsrehnstrom.com because there you will find more free material like this one. Talk to you next time, bye.
