Comments for Redvespa. Your business analysis partner

Comment on Say it with numbers… by David Morris

David Morris — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:37:46 +0000

A great contribution to thinking around the development of business analysis practice. I’d like to see far more of this, because you only know for certain you’re effective or improving when you have some way of demonstrating that.

I’m not sure I would class all current business analysis thinking as “soft-core” or want to describe business analysis as “primarily an engineering activity” either. As in all things, the way to approach business analysis is a balancing act, yes we need to understand how to communicate, facilitate, negotiate, and so on — and we also need hard technical skills, systems thinking, how to model process, data, and behaviour, etc.

The background of business analysis from the hard systems school, meant that analysts were often more comfortable sitting with the IT team, studying reports and screens, and not entirely effective when it came to interacting with business people (especially senior ones). The thought of facilitating a workshop and negotiating a ‘third way’ in a group of people where one or two normally get their way (due to their job title) was enough to bring them out in a cold sweat.

It was to lift the effectiveness of the discipline overall that a focus was brought in on the so called ‘soft skills’ (I’m not a fan of that label, because they still require hard work and discipline).

As with the evolution of anything, though, there comes a time when the focus on one aspect of skills leads to a deficiency in others, and it can be somewhat shocking, these days, to meet a business analysis team where not a single team member knows what a data model is or why that’s important for them.

The balance needs redressing, certainly, just not to the exclusion of being an effective people-person too.

Comment on Developing your Business Analysis Practice – Reaching for the Stars by Blair

Blair — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 21:25:29 +0000

Great article by Kupe Kupersmith http://www.batimes.com/kupe-kupersmith/why-bother-with-a-business-analysis-center-of-excellence.html

Nice to know we are on the same wave length.

Comment on IIBA and all that by David Morris

David Morris — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:44:35 +0000

Bruce, I don’t think there are many who would disagree with your position that significant experience counts more than a piece of paper – even the people in Toronto (where IIBA was founded and still has its headquarters). However, as well as saying that someone successfully sat and passed a 3.5-hour exam, proving they can regurgitate a bunch of facts from the BABOK, the CBAP also says that they have 7,500 hours of hard-core business analysis.

So to turn that around, the CBAP is a valuable accreditation precisely because it attests to someone’s significant experience, that two people have been willing to give a reference, and on top of that it also means that the they have good recall of a standardized body of knowledge.

That counts a lot to me, and increasingly for employers in New Zealand too, where I am starting to hear more and more that candidates are being filtered on whether they have professional qualifications.