Thursday, November 06, 2008
I asked my niece recently at her graduation party the typical aunt-like question I have asked her yearly since she was five – what would you like to be when you grow up. Each time she would answer that she wanted to work with animals. But this time she just answered “I don’t know for sure, I will see after I get my basic courses completed”.
A few months later, here I am at a hotel in Hartford pondering the conversation and thinking about how I got to where I am today. How did I get to the place where I am performing in the roles of a Project Manager, Business Analyst, Consultant, Teacher and Coach in the IT industry? What made me successful in my various careers?
Have any of us thought of a Business Analyst as a career when we were a kid? Not for me. I don’t even think that title existed back then. I was never exposed to the insides of a business, technology or consulting growing up. So I pondered….what was the trigger? Well, it didn’t take long for me to figure out that it was my first real full time job out of high school. I was a keypunch operator for a small retail company in Birmingham, Michigan trying to save up some money to go on to college. I loved working there, the excitement of learning the various office processes (I didn’t know what a process was then) in order to get payroll completed or get the commission checks out or to produce the all important reports to the President of the company so he knew how profitable a particular store was.
The computer operator went on vacation one week and trusted me to operate the IBM System 3. That was a mistake – I didn’t follow the process and the commission checks were messed up. Of course, no one found the mistake until all the sales people started calling. That was the start of a wonderful career! You would think that would scare me away, but no, I stuck it out to fix the problem and also made suggestions on how we could improve the process so it wouldn’t happen again (just in case they put me in charge again). But back then there wasn’t a school degree in these things other than being part of business administration. So I moved on to receive my business administration degree and continued to get jobs in the IT industry, from assembler programmer to tester to release coordinator to JAD facilitator and another dozen jobs in between and beyond. All along the way I was playing the role of the Business Analyst, most of the time without knowing it. I translated requirements to solutions and improved business processes along the way.
Maybe I wasn’t born to be a business analyst, but I realized somewhere along the way that I was pretty good at it. It also didn’t hurt that I was the family translator for my Greek immigrant parents, learning to be the bridge in communications since I was about seven. So what made/makes me successful? My drive to improve processes, my ability to listen and question more than talk, my need to figure out new technology, my wanting to know how things work and how to make them work better, the intent to be understood. . Are you born with this or can you learn to do this? Hmm – this may not be a yes or no answer. It depends…….. (A true consultant answer)! I don’t want to influence the feedback that I might get, so let me ask of those functioning as Business Analysts: What makes you successful? Do you have to be born with those capabilities, can they be taught to you or must you experience them through trial and error? Of course there is a lot research around this in the industry, but I would like to know based on my selfishness to stay in touch with my audience. Which key capabilities would you attribute to each and why?
Article written by: Gina Schwalm, PMP, CBAP, Business Analysis Curricula Practice Owner, TEKsystems Partner via Lighthouse Consulting Partners
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