Business Analyst is like Figaro. Just like in Mozart’s opera, he is everywhere. But let’s get down to earth and have an overview of situations a Business Analyst would usually end up analyzing and finding the optimum solutions to.
Imagine, you want to have dinner at the beach.
You open TripAdvisor, apply your filters, and scroll through the long list of restaurants. You notice Blue Lagoon. It is probably the only beach restaurant that is open in today’s rainy weather and is close to your location.
But you also notice this restaurant rating has just 2.5 stars. You also find negative reactions from former visitors. “What a shitty place…”, – you may think… and jump to the next restaurant.
Imagine, the boss of Blue Lagoon.
Let’s call him Jack. Jack is in his middle 60s. He is in his business for the last 30 years.
Jack’s restaurant is open for just 6-7 months per year while the season is mainly warm and rains free. The restaurant is not always packed with visitors. It is not always good weather outside. There can be rainy days with the visitors close to almost zero.
Nevertheless, Jack pays taxes, twice a year he pays around 20.000 euros for assemble/disassemble service (the restaurant parts are brought to the beach every spring and get assembled and disassembled in the fall), pays for the food and drinks supplies, pays salaries, makes sure he has enough employees who know what to do.
He makes sure the work is done as efficiently as he needs it, teaches the newcomers, observes inefficiencies, cooks together with other cooks, directs waiters, etc.
And, yet, Jack has his wife and two kids and just 6-7 months to return the investments, cover the expenses, and earn money before the season is closed and the restaurant is disassembled. He wakes up at 5am, arrives at the restaurant at 7am, and closes around 1am. This tempo continues for 6-7 months. It is a hell (or an army style?), very exhausting. By the way, Jack is aware of his 2.5 stars. He has no clue what to do or change to get to 4-4.5 stars, at least.
Imagine, you are at the restaurant.
You are at Blue Lagoon. No, you are not sitting and eating your delicious meal. You actually work as a dishwasher…
- You take care of the industrial dishwasher, making sure it works flawlessly. This old mechanical lady from 1982 breaks sometimes. But you know the hacks. You clean its internals from time to time making sure it not only shines with its rarity but also works until the next ‘blackout’.
- You clean up the dirty plates, cups, and other dishes the waiters bring to your office.
- You dry and polish the washed dishes. By the way, you may manually handle around 10.000 items per month.
- You manually bring the dishes to the kitchen, pick the dirty ones and bring them back to your office.
- You wash the floors periodically and take out the garbage.
In a nutshell, these are your responsibilities as a dishwasher at the restaurant.
It is just 11am. You arrive at the restaurant and go straight to your office, noticing only 10 visitors sitting at the restaurant having breakfast. However, entering your office you discover a holy mess: the racks are already filled with mountains of dirty dishes, while the leftovers are spread around the floor.
What would you do about it?
Naturally, if this is your first or second time, you just clean up the mess yourself.
What if every single time you arrive, you find this mess at your office? What would you do?
As you work, you may notice: the closer it is to the evening time, the same scene repeats but with a higher frequency. When you bring the cleaned and polished dishes to the kitchen and arrive back at your office, you find out mountains of dirty dishes, as if nothing happened.
Mess is everywhere. Not just on the trays and plates, but also on the floor, and inside the washing machine. Everywhere. Literally.
I hope I have not yet killed your wish to go to the restaurants. 🙂
What would you do about the mess growing exponentially (remembering, you cannot hire or fire anybody)?
If you never worked at a restaurant, you should know the majority of employees consist of first-year students and scholars (and professional cooks). They do not work for you. They work for Jack. But they work with you. You want to believe you are the team.
Jack might be shouting at the employees just like the captain of the fishing ship. If that is taken personally atmosphere around may get pretty stressful. Occasionally, it may feel like a personal matter. What would you do about that if you know you need money and, therefore, wish to stay on board for a couple of more months, at least?
What would you do to increase the work efficiency and motivation of your teammates?
The modern business.
This restaurant exists for real (the name was changed). It is a 30-year-old business. There are no IT systems involved. No high-tech. Just manual labor. There are 10 full-time and 5 part-time employees.
Now, imagine you own a business suffering from similar ‘sicknesses’ as Blue Lagoon. But your business has a mixture of manual labor with digitized business processes. Processes are not documented. Almost all knowledge resides in the employees’ heads. Your business is packed with various business applications (CRM, ERP, applications for marketing, sales, customer service, finance, SaaS, custom-made apps, etc.). Departments work as firefighters as new tasks add to the pile while the elder ones are still not resolved. Efficiency dropped. Costs and stress level of the employees raised.
How would you clean up this ‘garbage’, making things easier and cheaper?
The modern Business Analyst.
These are all typical situations a Business Analyst can help you with. Business Analyst would analyze the current and to-be situations and processes, prepare gap and impact analyses, analyze documentation, collect and document requirements, processes, knowledge, and issues, discover opportunities, create structure out of chaos, offering the optimum solutions.
Business Analyst generally can act on three levels:
- Strategy: analyzing the market, users/customers, competitors, trends, and business models.
- Architecture: analyzing the systems to be used to improve business operations in line with the goals and strategy, creating concepts, and critiquing project proposals.
- IT: analyzing issues with applications and platforms, and finding optimum solutions via identifying requirements that would be used by the development or implementation teams.
The world has changed and continues to change every day. 15 years ago IT was a dedicated department usually within the software vendors. Nowadays, IT is everywhere. Almost every business has either an IT department or dedicated IT specialists or cross-functional teams. To be effective this requires Business Analysts to change, and adopt knowledge and techniques from other areas.
People do business with people. The core skill of a Business Analyst is to network and build relationships. Technicalities and methods are important and add value but people skills are essential. To be effective in the modern business ‘warfare’ it is important for a Business Analyst to be able to influence, negotiate, mediate, coach, train, collaborate, use knowledge and techniques from psychology, change management, user research, user experience design, product management, sales, marketing, and other areas.
The right tool for the right task
In my opinion, a modern Business Analyst has blurred boundaries. This is for good! When I worked as a Web Developer I used to say “The right tool for the right task”.
P.S. Listen to Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro. Overture. Enjoy!