Help me, help my BA
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And my first thought was Bachelor of Arts.
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Hi Robert, I work for a public university so I understand some of the challenges you're facing as I have faced them as well. A couple resources that might be helpful: 1) ITANA is a higher ed focused Enterprise Architecture collaboration that deals with these types of situations. I highly recommend you check out their material here: Home - Itana - Internet2 Wiki[^] 2) If your institution uses EAB, Gartner or Educause I would setup an analyst call to discuss your specific needs. These calls are usually including as part of your university membership. I find that most IT folks don't know that they have access to these resources. Posting to the Educause forum is a great way to get resources that are higher ed specific. I have 10 years in private sector IT and 10 years in higher ed IT. It is hard for people who have never worked in higher ed to understand that things just work differently until they experience it. I hope this helps.
Eric
Thank you very much, I was unfamiliar with Educause. I will certainly check them out.
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While there is some solid advice here and would encourage you to look into the options provided, I wanted to give you something a little more immediate, based on having dealt with two major ERP replacements and supporting a third, in my career. Essentially, the role of the BA is to be curious, to ask questions, and gain understanding. In my experience customers will try to prescribe a solution based on their own understanding of the technology or because they have always done something in a particular way, but more often than not they are not best situated to provide the solution, due to their lack of understanding regarding all of the factors involved. For this reason, it is so important to start with 'why'. Understand the business problem or requirement that the solution needs to address, without reference to technology, process or user experience (user interface, report layouts, etc.), and really understand the value that achieving that outcome will have to the business. Doing so will both aid in the prioritization and may potentially eliminate some requirements altogether if the value just won't be realized.
Thanks for your input Member. I wholeheartedly agree with your statement. I always find some confusion and push back from junior people in IT when I tell them there are NO IT projects. There are only business problems that can have an IT solution. But the project itself is less important than solving the business problem.
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I am not sure if this is the correct place or not. We are starting to migrate ERP systems. As such our team has hired some new BA's. 2 of them came from the desktop support team. I have noticed they seem to be struggling. I asked them yesterday if they had any training or such. The reply was no. I then asked if they wanted some help to understand their new positions. Both of them said yes. Could some of you please tell me what you think are the most important skills, duties or anything else I can share with them to help them grow into their new positions please. cheers
I would also strongly encourage formal training, or at least reading up on the web what they should do and what outputs they should produce (with samples). You might even review some of that yourself, then tailor the sample outputs to something you would find useful. I don't recall ever working with a Business Analyst per se; however, my expectations would be something like: 1. They should document the main business processes, especially those that need automation or interface with automation (like user stories). This should include copies of sample forms and reports currently in use. 2. This should include key terms, abbreviations, and definitions. 3. It should include any (industry) standards or regulations the business is expected to adhere to (with links to full specs/requirements where available). 4. This should include data flow (and decision/action flow) diagrams that show who creates the data, who acts on it, and where it eventually goes. 5. It should also include data models. They don't have to be formal/relational, but they should list all the business data entities, allowable (and sample) data, volume/size/quantity, and relationships. 6. You might want to also have them help with developing persona, use case, or actor models. Hope this helps.
