Build your relationships and communication skills Skill: Build Strong Relationships

Building relationships is an important skill of a successful BA. Every day you interact with other BAs and your current and potential stakeholders, you can be practicing this skill. It is important for people in the business analysis role to build strong, solid relationships both in and out of the office. There are two key reasons why you should always be working on building relationships to improve both personally and professionally:

1. Knowledge and experience: “No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals”—best-selling author Brian Tracy (www.briantracy.com). You can’t know and experience everything. What you can do is be connected with people who have the knowledge and experience you need at any moment.

2. Access and openness: Your project is the number one priority for you, but it may not be for the subject matter experts (SMEs) and other stakeholders from whom you need time. Having strong relationships with those stakeholders prior to and during a project will help open the necessary doors and encourage them to give you their time. As previously discussed, trust is a big part of a good relationship. SMEs will be more open and honest with you during a project if they trust you. There are many great references on the power of building relationships and how to go about it. Take a look at Never Eat Alone (Ferrazzi and Raz, 2005).

Skill: Ask the Right Questions

An important analysis skill is developing good questions. A business analysis professional should always be thinking of more questions to which an answer is needed. For initial meetings and interviews with stakeholders, use broad questions and elicit answers that describe an overall view. Subsequent elicitation sessions will require more detailed, clarifying questions. When an analyst listens to an answer, he or she first hears the message, then determines if the answer is complete, and asks follow-up questions. When stakeholders tell you how they perform a task like accepting a customer order, follow-up questions include things like:

• What if the customer’s payment is not approved?

• What type of payments do you accept?

• What are the typical dollar amounts of these payments?

A master BA will ask detailed questions around each process, piece of data, and business rule. Some of the questions may be slightly out of scope, but the BA knows that he or she needs to make sure nothing is missed. Strong questions are open ended and encourage the stakeholder to talk at length about the requirement. Often, a stakeholder provides information over and above the answer. This additional information may prove relevant.

New BAs can use the development of questions as a planning and organization technique. When you are having trouble getting started, write down all of the questions that you can think of. Use open-ended questions to evoke a response that is more than just yes or no.

Use the journalist model to think through the who, what, where, when, why, and how (the why question will be further discussed later in this chapter). Each of these question starters will generate many specific questions for a particular project or business area. Formulating a list of questions is something that any BA can do, at any point in a project, working alone or in a group. Creating and reviewing this list exposes the analysis work that needs to be done.

Sample questions include:

• Who performs the process?

• Who manages or approves the process?

• Who provides the input to the process? Who receives the output?

• What data, materials, forms, or software are used?

• What constraints, policies, or procedures guide the process?

• What problems occur with the process?

• Where is the process performed?

• When is the process performed? On a regular basis? After a triggering event?

• Why is the process performed?

• How is the process performed?

Once you have a list of questions, look at each question and think about:

• How could you best elicit this information?

• How will you best record it when you receive it?

• How critical will the answer be?

• What type of requirement component will be found in the answer?

• Who would have the answer?

As you are formulating questions, you should think about who would be able to best answer each question. Most projects involve many stakeholders, each one able to provide unique information or pieces to the puzzle that you are putting together. It is important to think about which questions you will ask each stakeholder before your scheduled interviews. Stakeholders from different departments and at different levels of an organization will be able to provide different information. It is important to ask the right questions to the right people so that stakeholders don’t feel incompetent or ignorant.

Typically, the why questions are best asked to higher level stakeholders. Executives and managers often see the bigger picture and know the reasons for the organization’s decisions. Middle-level managers and supervisors can answer questions about who does what, where activities are performed, and what the goals of each activity are. Business workers will be able to answer specific, detailed questions about how work is accomplished and what specific activities are related to others.

This is communication planning at its most basic level. If you ever feel a bit overwhelmed on a project, take a moment to sit down and make a list of questions. Then note for each question which stakeholders you would ask. You have just developed a simple communication plan. Understanding and documenting what you don’t know gives you a better sense of what you do know.