Skill: Work on the Most Important Work First (Prioritize)

BAs always have more work to do than time to complete it. The more effective you become, the more this will be true. Organizations recognize valuable employees and consultants and assign them the most important and difficult work. As you master business analysis, your time will become more valuable and learning to prioritize your time becomes critical. You have probably worked with people who are always busy and yet don’t meet deadlines because they focus on the wrong tasks. Deciding where to spend your time is prioritization, and it is a critical BA skill.

Prioritizing one’s time and the organization’s resources is one of the most important benefits a BA contributes to the bottom line. How many times have you been in a meeting or working on a task and you suddenly think: “This is such a waste of time!” Those ah ha moments are when you need to stop and rethink your priorities. The BA should raise the awareness of the team to help everyone else prioritize their time correctly. One of the most effective ways of doing this is to ask a series of questions, beginning with the why question:

• Why are we doing this activity?

• What is this activity doing for the project?

• When do we expect a payoff from this activity?

• Is the payoff bigger than the effort that we are expending?

Prioritizing work is a skill that requires practice and diligence. One habit to embrace daily is looking at your to-do list (which is always longer than you will ever accomplish) and identifying the most important tasks. Some of these tasks will be quick and easy to complete, and these are often the most attractive. You might think: “I can get that out of the way this morning and be done with it!” But don’t leave the larger, more difficult tasks until last or they will never get done. Often, those more difficult tasks are related to long-term strategic projects which are very important to the organization.

Case in Point

Imagine you have been assigned to two projects. One is to add a new field to an existing screen so that marketing can track an additional characteristic of each customer. This is important for marketing and sales of future products to specific customers.

The second project is an enterprise-wide initiative to restructure customer service and streamline order processing activities. This project requires that you interview stakeholders from several departments, ask detailed questions, and develop current and future workflows to design new processes.

To which project would you allocate your time during the day? Since the first project is small and fairly straightforward, your tendency will be to get it done. It is easier because you already know how to update a prototype, define a data element, and communicate a change to IT. The second project is less structured. It requires planning and scheduling. You will need large chunks of quiet time to think about the issues. It is easy to put off.

If you spend the majority of your day on the first project, the second, strategic project waits. In addition, the next morning there will probably be another small, easy task on your desk that will get in the way of the bigger project. The natural tendency is to put off more complex tasks.

A useful technique when working on large projects is divide and conquer. A successful BA must understand how to manage a large task by breaking it into small manageable tasks, putting them in a logical order, and doing them one at a time. Take a basic project management class or read a project management book if you have never been introduced to the work breakdown structure. Using this approach will help you break down your work into smaller, easier to manage tasks. These smaller tasks can be scheduled into your day, balancing work on large projects with smaller assignments.

Another skill that most experienced BAs have recognized and refined is their ability to work unconsciously on a project. This is actually a common human ability that is really amazing. Do you ever come up with a great idea while you are in the shower? Does the solution to a problem come to you suddenly as you are driving home from work? Do you wake up in the morning with an approach to deal with a sticky situation? These are all examples of the subconscious at work. The human brain has an amazing ability to be doing one thing consciously (like driving, showering, or watching a movie) and working on a problem in its subconscious. When you realize that you have this ability, it gives you a great advantage over those who do not. You can read an e-mail request without acting on it, and the next day the answer will be at your fingertips. You can interview a subject matter expert, make some notes, and then let your subconscious work on the issue for a day or so. When you come back to it, you will have great insights into the business needs and will have come up with several follow-up questions.