Table of Contents
ToggleHow Business Analysts can avoid repeating past mistakes and improve in their careers.
How Business Analysts can avoid repeating past mistakes and improve in their careers.
Below, we give you 5 simple ways to avoid repeating mistakes made on previous projects.
1. Clarify on Your Role
One of the most detrimental mistakes business analysts can make is creating assumptions about their roles, so never assume always be clear. Often it makes them overlook their responsibilities and areas of expertise. When you are not clear on your role, you may end up trampling on other project team members’ roles, or following the business analyst job description which is given in the letter only, to find that your team needed something extra that wasn’t explicitly asked for. The end result? You fail to deliver what is expected from you.
There is so much debate over the, What exactly the role of a business analyst should be. To make matters worse, jobs vary so widely across the different companies that we sometimes layer the expectations on ourselves, or overlook what a certain organization or the team considers important.
Overcoming this shortcoming is relatively simple. All you need to do is clarify your business analyst role and ensure that you have a thorough understanding of it. If you feel that something is not clear or you are not able to understand then , do not hesitate to ask questions. Inform your manager and team of what you will do and when you’ll do it, and then deliver on your promise. Develop this habit & do practice and be consistent throughout the project.
2. Involve Key Stakeholders
The second mistake that business analysts make most is trying to move forward without involving all the relevant stakeholders. A myriad of reasons can be attributed to this. Stakeholders could be lurking in the corner, they don’t have time to meet , too busy to meet with us, or perhaps we just prefer not to meet with them, the list is endless. Whatever the case may be, not having all the relevant stakeholders on the board can prove catastrophic.
When you start working on a project with new stakeholders, you should go out of your way to ensure that you get to know who they are, what’s important to them, and under what circumstances they work best. Even if you already trust and know the stakeholders you are working with, you should look at every new project as an opportunity to deepen that relationship and come up with ground rules that ensure you don’t repeat past mistakes.
Regardless of whether you are facing the pressure of a deadline, or running short on time,or a task is not complete in a given time frame, engagement is key. You must ensure that everyone is on the same board in every step of the way. Or else, you will only be setting yourself, and your team up for failure.
3. Don’t Expect Perfection
One of the shortcomings of being a business analyst is that you will tend to demand perfection in every project. This isn’t necessarily bad. However, when you focus too much on what’s missing, you will fail to see what’s working.
vThere will be times when your project won’t meet the original scope, quality, goals, or timeline but still deliver great value to the business. If you focus too much on perfection, the chances are that you will miss out on such successes.
Perfection also comes into play in how we view our relationships, meetings, milestones, and deliverables. It is illogical to expect that our stakeholders will provide us with their all types of requirements, to the last level of detail, or to expect that our tech team will never stray off from the track once in a while when they get excited about new technical prospects.
Rather than demanding perfection and getting buried in an avalanche of frustration once your project misses the mark, loosen up and accept that things won’t always be perfect.
Sometimes there will be missteps, mistakes, and diversions. Learn to anticipate these barriers or roadblocks so that you can quickly develop a strategy to get back on track if you stray. To be successful in a project, you and your teammate need to remain steadfast when dealing with problems and challenges that come up along the way.
4. Focus on the Business Outcomes
Most of the problems and challenges we face when executing a project arise because of having lost sight of a big picture. As business analysts (BA), we ought to keep first things first, and that means achieving the desired business result or outcomes. We also need to ensure that achieving these results and outcomes takes priority in the minds of the project’s sponsors and stakeholders. Without focusing on the desired outcomes, we risk spending our time doing impertinent things and dooming our project to failure.
If at any time you find yourself in a project without well-defined and understood outcomes, it is imperative that you bring this level of clarity to the project sooner rather than later.
5. Be Positives to Build
It is important to realize that , there is always something positive to build on regardless of the outcome of a project. Perhaps, you established and engaged a relationship with a new stakeholder, leveraged a new analysis technique, or learned a new software program. It could also be the case that despite not achieving the desired result , your team created the underlying infrastructure that will pave the way for the bigger and the better things.
At the very least, you will have learned why a certain project was a failure and discovered what doesn’t work so that you don’t repeat it in the future.
Take the positives with you and build on them. Leave failures behind, because that’s where they belong. Your next project is not doomed to be like your last. You have the power to assess the failure and grow from it. Determine what works and drop what doesn’t. This is the way to success.
So get your business analyst certification or attend business analyst course from the IIBA endorsed organization because it helps you to get a better Business Analyst job and learn new business analyst tools. MCAL Global Provide you the best training in Pune and Mumbai or provide you the online training which you will access from anywhere . The Master Business Analysis Training Programming is MCAL Global flagship business analyst course. They trained 1000s of professionals on the business analysis processes, concepts, tools, techniques, best practices, business analyst certification, and software tools via this program. Through active feedback collected from individuals & corporates, they have perfected this business analyst course via numerous updates and revisions to deliver the best possible results for individuals or corporates.