I am a huge fan of hacking habits (quick and dirty ways to train yourself into a habit), and maybe I’ll write an article about that later, but for now, we’re going to focus on the creative habit, specifically, creative thinking to help solve problems.

For a business analyst, creative thinking isn’t the same as the sudden burst of creative genius we imagine artists or song writers to have. In fact according, business insider there are 4 Types of Creativity. For us, creative thinking falls into the “Cognitive” & “Deliberate” block in the creativity matrix. This basically means that we fill our brains with enough information, so we can mush it all together and come up with new and exciting solutions.

First, we need to dig deep down into the habit that applies to what we do. IIBA defines creative thinking as “the successful generation and productive consideration of new ideas” and “the application of new ideas to resolve an existing problem”.

Hacking Your Creative Brain Muscles

There are three methods that I use, to help the creative thinking process along in generating new ideas and using those new ideas to kick current problems in the butt!

Constraint-Based Thinking Exercises

After you define a problem, think up one solution. Next, think of constraints (real or made up)  that would eliminate that solution. Then come up with more solutions taking that constraint into account.  You keep adding and removing constraints. The end result will be that you will have so many different ways to solve the problem and the final solution will likely be a hybrid of several of the solutions that you came up with, which will hopefully be better than any one solution.

Constraint-based thinking helps foster outside-the-box thinking and it’s actually very similar to the next exercise type.

Resource Based Thinking Exercises

Another approach is the “work with what you got ” approach aka “the MacGuyver” approach (I just made that up). This can be fun and challenging. For example, if you are working on documentation and you want to create a process flow to add to your document and you don’t have Visio.  What are your options? You can…

• find an open source solution
• use MS paint
• use Powerpoint
• draw it and take a picture,
• use excel to visually display sequence.

Basically you take a tool that wasn’t designed for process modeling and use its features to accomplish the goal (Sort of like Using SharePoint for Requirements Management) . The more comfortable you are with any one of the solutions, the better equipped you will be in applying it to meet your new need. This is a basic example. A larger-scale example would be “Your business analysis team needs a better process for obtaining and storing approvals. The budget is limited, so the leadership team would like you to utilize existing systems”

Analogous Thinking Exercises

Thinking in analogies is my favorite way to find solutions. Finding similarities in different issues will help you find similar solutions. I personally use analogies all the time. In most cases, I use them just to help me conceptualize things and make them easier to grasp. An easy example:

Your requirements documents are difficult to consume, so stakeholders tend to be unable to fully grasp everything your explaining, so you get half-baked approvals that usually results it lots a defects and changes later on in the life cycle. The issue, you have lots of information that you need your consumers to be able to easily digest. Who else has this problem? Web designers, marketers, etc. How do they solve it? Taxonomy, navigation, incentives, and so forth.

Having a clear definition of the issue is very important to use this method effectively.

Practice makes perfect

Practice using these approaches in everyday life. Whether it’s creatively finding ways to get more exercise into your everyday routine or finding better solutions for the companies you are working for, the more you do it, the more of a habit it will become. After all, we are the sum of our habits, you might as well have awesome ones!

Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness -Jean Vanier

Being a great business analyst is more than just jotting down everything your stakeholders may want. It takes skills that many people just fail to take the time to learn. A lot of people think these skills only come with years of experience, but you’d be surprised how quickly you can gain some skills with a simple shift in the way you think about things.

Below is a reading list that opened my eyes to new ways of seeing the same problems. Not only did they make me a better business analyst, but they also just made me an all-around better person. I know for sure that this material has given me a head start on many aspects of my BA career and just life in general. I’ve already read everything that’s listed here, so good luck catching up with me! Also, if you have any other great reads, let me know in the comments section!

1. How to Win Friends & Influence People

This book is gold! It is about understanding how people work, so you can work better with them. The most powerful sections, from a BA standpoint, are learning how to tell people they are wrong, without making them hate you, as well as how to inspire people to welcome making changes for the better. If you are going to read only 1 book from this list, it should be this one. 

2. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

You make decisions every day, and you would be amazed at how easy it is to quickly make good ones on a regular basis. Unfortunately, everything you have experienced in life makes you blind to your own biases in making those decisions. Decisive helps you break out of those biases and to make you a more efficient decision-maker.

3. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

Creativity is not genetic. It is a trainable skill. This book essentially breaks down the creative process that comes naturally to some, so it can be accessible to anybody. So if you want to take on the challenge of being a more creative thinker and problem solver, then this is a must-read.

4. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Most people believe the best way to motivate is with rewards. That’s a mistake! A Huge One. If you can understand why people do things, then you can more easily understand how to help them do things better!

]]> 153 https://metabusinessanalyst.com/can-a-skilled-business-analyst-do-better-than-an-experienced-business-analyst/ Sun, 30 Oct 2022 21:18:46 +0000 https://metabusinessanalyst.com/?p=104 Many Experienced Business Analysts…

…rely on their experiences to help them on the job. These business analysts may come from other related areas (Developers, Project Managers, or a Business Unit). Too often they don’t bother ever going back to work on the true business analysis skills they may not have ever trained on. The result is your average experienced business analyst, still lacks some key skills to really produce high-quality, industry-standard deliverables and work products.

New Business Analyst On the Other Hand…

… have no previous experience to lean on.  Maybe a few basics, but in general, you have a lot to gain, and only a short period of time before your performance is going determines whether you are a keeper at your company. The mistakes you make in the beginning will be overlooked, but that won’t last forever, and you won’t have any experience to fall back on. Your lack of experience, if you are motivated enough, might force you to channel other ways to become a competent business analyst.

Great Business Analysts Don’t Need Years of Experience to Be High Performers…

Gaining experience takes time and there isn’t much you can do about that. Skills come from practice, and practice is something that can be done efficiently and effectively to allow you to gain and use the skills fast.

So what kinds of skills are we talking about?

• The ability to learn, analyze, and associate information quickly and easily
• The ability to transform abstract ideas into digestible and easily understandable material
• The ability to quickly build trust and rapport with your stakeholders

All with little to no experience.

Check out my course on Teachable  to learn more about producing high-quality business analysis deliverables

After getting my certification (CCBA) from the IIBA, I had no intention of jumping ship and doing the BA certification from the PMI group, PMI Professional in Business Analysis. I didn’t want to have to learn a new structure of information if I ever decided to go and get the next level of certification for myself (CBAP).  However, I decided to check it out to see how different it really is. Here is my at-a-glance analysis comparison of the two.

1. The big picture structure is generally the same

2.  The Flow of information is completely different

BABOK Flow

BA Practitioners Guide Flow

Conclusion

One of the most technical skills for a business analyst is learning how to use Structured Query Language abbreviated “SQL” (pronounced sequel). When browsing business analysis job listings, it is one of the few technical skills listed for the role. One question that gets asked often is “Do you need to have it”. So in this video, I quickly describe what is it and if it is actually that important.

If you want to learn or practice SQL, check out LearnSQL.com. They have a set of over 65 hands-on SQL courses. No need to install anything on your device, everything happens through your browser. All LearnSQL.com courses are interactive and based on real-life business scenarios, meaning you’ll be writing SQL queries and seeing them in action instantly.

LearnSQL.com

I’ve broken up this quick guide into three parts that I believe will help you cruise through your certification. Including the things I wish I had done better. I did pass, but doing some of these better could have spared me a lot of anxiety during the test.

Hint: Watch the video if you’re too lazy to read, same stuff

Part 1: What You Absolutely Must Know

Memorize the knowledge Areas

I am NOT a memorizer. I am a conceptualizer. I hate memorizing. In school, I always did well by mastering concepts, not memorizing facts. I always felt that if you master a concept, then the facts will fall into place. That was always my philosophy and I had to let it go to pass this exam and I’m glad I did.

The BABOK® Guide organizes its core themes around six knowledge areas: Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring, Elicitation, Requirements Management & Communication, Enterprise Analysis, Requirements Analysis, and Solutions Assessment & Validation. Each has around 4-6 tasks that make up the knowledge area. Each one of those tasks has an…

• Input: Stuff you need to start the task
• Elements: What you do to complete the task
• Output: What the task produces
• Recommended Techniques: Different Methods to Complete the Task

You need to memorize all of these, for every task. Seriously. You should be able to recite the 6 knowledge areas, all the tasks in every knowledge area, and the input, elements, outputs, and tasks for each. I know it sounds brutal, but it will save you some serious anxiety on the test.

Personally, I stopped at 6 knowledge areas and tasks. I tried to focus on the conceptual aspect of the actual inputs, elements, and outputs and my punishment for that was having to guess on more questions than I would have liked. You will find lots of answer choices that sound like they could be correct and you won’t be able to distinguish between them unless you have this all memorized.

Next, Know the Techniques

Understanding each of the techniques and how and when they are applied is important. There are a lot of techniques and there will be some that you think you understand better than you actually do. Don’t make that assumption. Read through all of them, understand how they work, and try them all out. Use old notes, data, or whatever, but make an attempt.

Each technique has its own usage that makes sense. Practicing actually using the technique will make it easier to answer questions about the technique.

Organizing the Competencies

The competencies are the easiest to understand on their own because they aren’t specific to business analysis. They are generic competencies for the most part. What’s important is understanding how they are grouped. A good example. “Is teaching considered an interaction skill or communication skill?” Most of us know what teaching is, the important thing to know is how the IIBA sees and categorizes teaching.

For this, you should be able to name all 6 top-level competencies and all the skills within those competencies. Understanding each of them (not memorizing) should be enough because most are things you are probably already familiar with and can easily grasp.

Don’t FORGET! Follow the link to Part 2 below to see exactly how I used the study materials to pass!

Part II: Bench Marking Your Progress >>

Practice Makes Perfect

The best way to know if you can do something (like passing a test), is actually doing it. In the past, my strategy for taking practice tests was to answer all the questions, then review all the questions with the material to see which I got right or wrong. This time around I tried something different.

I Studied Like A Sprinter!

Well, not really like a running sprinter, but like an agile sprint. Instead of seeing what I got right or wrong, I just checked the score. Of course, it helped that I had an automated test engine (which came with the book) on a CD, so it did the grading for me. My methodology was to read through a section/chapter and then take the section practice test. I did this for every section, and if you just read the section (I also outlined as I read to more actively study) you should do fairly well on the section test. You can either do the automated ones on the CD or use the questions at the end of each chapter. After I got through all the sections, I took the mock exams (50 questions).

This is the study guide I used that had better than awesome practice tests >>  CBAP Certification Study Guide w/ Test Engine CD

The study guide I used had 4 mock exams, 2 for the CCBA and 2 for the CBAP. I focused soley on the CBAP exams because they were harder. The first time around I got around 60%, which is terrible, but I used it as my benchmark. I didn’t check any answers so I was never sure which I had gotten right or wrong.  Then I would study for 3-7 days and take the other exam. I kept redoing this cycle over and over and my scores started increasing. It was also a way for me to gauge if my study techniques were effective.

My Study Methods

I had two primary study methods. The first was flash cards. I had two sets. I had handwritten note cards for all the terms in the glossary. I preferred to use the definition side, as my question so I could start learning all the BABOK terms, so I could recognize them during the test. My other set was via StudyBlue which is an awesome flashcard site that has apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android. It scores you and tracks your learning progress too. This set grew gradually as I memorized. I used a snowball style. It went kind of like this..

• Round 1: Name the 6 Knowledge Areas and 6 Competency Areas (round 1 didn’t take long)
• Round 2: Name all the tasks related to knowledge Area
  • Front: Knowledge Area
  • Back: Related Tasks
• Round 3: Recognize the inputs, outputs, techniques, and elements for each task
  • Front: Listing of all related items (for example all the inputs of a particular task)
  • Back: Task + Type (input, output, technique, or element)

For example, it’s easier to see three items and know that it’s the input for a particular task than it is for me to give you a particular task and you spit out the 3 items. The smart thing to do is start the easy way, then switch to the hard way. I didn’t, and I’m sure I lost a few points on the test because of it.

Every time I got through a batch of cards, I retested myself.

The Weekend Before The Test

Before the test itself, I walked through the entire book again outlining from scratch to get all the relationships, side notes, and so forth fresh in my mind.

<< Back to Part I