Another Helping of Our Own Dog Food – Improving Our BA Organization to Help Yours 

By Brent Hoffman

In the Spring 2010 Seilevel Newsletter, Joy Beatty talked about how Seilevel assesses the work products of its own Business Analysts (See Eating Our Own Dog Food - Assessing Our BA Organization to Help Yours). We have also helped our customers improve the skills of their Business Analysts for many years. In this newsletter, I want to provide our readers with a look at how Seilevel continuously improves the skills of its own Business Analysts.

Why Improve the Skills of Your Business Analysts?

The answers should be obvious, but often companies give more lip service to investing in employee growth than actually doing it and doing it effectively. Business Analysts are knowledge workers as are most professionals working on the analysis, design, development and deployment of software systems. The value of investing in improving the skills of knowledge workers is well documented and has been touched upon for decades in such diverse works as Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month and Bradford Smart’s Topgrading. When one thinks of the importance of complete and accurate requirements to successful software projects, allocating time and effort to improving the skills of your Business Analysts is a great investment. At Seilevel we take this seriously – we eat our own dog food. We want our Business Analysts to produce complete, accurate and consistent requirements documentation using best practices. The goal of this it to reduce missing requirements, decrease unnecessary requirements changes and to provide the right set of prioritized requirements for our customers to build the product that achieves the best business value for them.

What Skills to Invest In?

Seilevel offers training for Business Analysts. We offer multi-day classes covering requirements elicitation, requirements modeling and requirements documentation. We use this same training internally as a foundation to improving our skills.  We have other internal training modules on additional areas such as contracts, customer engagement, project engagement initiation and requirements management. We also hold regular internal forums to discuss a best practice or to review artifacts from one of our current projects.  

How We Do It

    1. Formal Training Classes

All new Business Analysts are required to take all 3 of our multi-day classes on requirements overview, requirements modeling and requirements elicitation. Additionally, all of our Business Analysts will re-take the classes every 2-3 years as a refresher.  A pre-class assessment is given to determine areas to emphasize.

There is the old adage “Those who can't do, teach”. We believe the correct saying should be “Those who can also teach, do better”. Seilevel assigns people that have already taken the classes to share in the teaching. Our classes are module based, with each module focusing on a specific topic (e.g. Data Flow Diagrams, 1-1 elicitation). Each module has theory, examples, interactive activities to apply what was taught and assessment/feedback of the activities.

A post-class assessment is given to evaluate the student’s mastery of the material taught and also to evaluate the effectiveness of the class. A separate evaluation is given to each class attendee to evaluate the class instructors and provide feedback to help them improve their teaching skills. 

    2. Sharing Best Practices

Seilevel holds required “Requirements Forums” on a regular basis, usually bi-weekly. We typically focus on a best practice, an issue with applying a best practice, review requirements artifacts from one of our current projects or discuss a presentation on a new tool or technique given by one of our team members.

We have an extensive internal wiki with a section devoted to best practices including a standardized set of Visio templates for all of our requirements models and examples of their use. All of our Business Analysts are encouraged to contribute to it.

Our Seilevel blog posts also provide us with a mechanism to share issues and solutions, best practices, new tools and techniques, industry trends, etc. 

    3. Focused Feedback

Our company uses a 4-fold process to provide focused individual feedback to our Business Analysts as part of ongoing skill improvement.

Peer Reviews – We hold peer reviews quarterly for all of our Business Analysts. Peer reviews use a set of targeted questions on Business Analyst skills and ask for supporting evidence. Peer review input is provided to the assigned Mentor.

Work Product Assessment – Our Business Analysts review samples of each other’s work products on a quarterly basis. We review by sampling recent requirements documentation and compare it to our checklist. See article in last month’s newsletter from Joy Beatty for details on this process: Eating Our Own Dog Food - Assessing Our BA Organization to Help Yours.

Mentoring – Each Business Analyst is assigned a mentor. Mentor sessions are held monthly or bi-monthly. There is a “career skills matrix” that the Business Analyst can use for self-assessment and forms the basis of the mentoring sessions. The mentor uses the peer reviews and the career skills matrix to work with the Business Analyst to plan out areas to focus on for skills improvement.

Customer Assessment – Each team of 1 or more Business Analysts for a specific project formally asks the customer for feedback on the work performed. This is used at pre-determined points in the project, the number depending on the project’s size and duration. Rather than asking the customer to fill out a long questionnaire, we use a “Customer Referenceability” metric based on a 2003 Harvard Business Review article by Fred Reichheld. The index you can create is a simple 0-10 scale, on which you ask your customers how likely they are to recommend your company and your service to other companies. Customers who assign a “7” or higher are called “referenceable”.  This single metric is very powerful and if there is a situation with a low number, the customer can spend their time providing good feedback for corrective action rather than answering a long questionnaire that misses the customer’s real concerns.

    4. External Resources

We maintain a library of important and useful books related to software requirements that employees can check out to read. Seilevel is involved in local professional groups and has members in leadership roles at some of them. Employees are encouraged to attend meetings as they are able. Seilevel is particularly involved in the local chapter of the IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis).

The Benefit is There for You Too

We find value in continuously improving our Business Analyst’s skills. Seilevel will continue to invest time and effort into this important area.

 Blog Hits

7 Mistakes Business Analysts Should Make 

Over my professional years, I have learned one really important life lesson: Every time I make a mistake, I learn a lot. So I was thinking about that in the context of being a BA. I believe that making mistakes is not such a bad thing and instead should be seen as a wonderful opportunity to learn more about how to be a better BA. These are some of the mistakes I encourage you make….or if not to outright make, at least be ok when they happen and recognize the lessons learned. 

Read on...