There is a significant amount of discussion these days about the fixed vs. growth mindset. Whether it’s optimizing your health and fitness regimens or your financial portfolio or your attitude about your relationships. It’s talked about quite often and we see people striving to level up in all areas of life in order to realize their goals. In every situation, where change and growth is the goal, mindset is the number one thing that matters the most. We talk about modernizing the BA practice just as much. When I started thinking about what the number one thing that a BA needs to change when leveling up their skillset, it’s a mindset! Yes, everyone wants to be a BA Ninja. The number one thing that will get them there is adopting the new mindset of the Ninja. Consider what makes a ninja. A badass right? They are or embody the following:
- Crafty – creative in problem-solving and collaboration.
- Clever – thinking outside the box.
- Responsive – versus reactive.
- Lightning Quick – prioritizing what is valuable.
- Trained – honing their skills to succeed and achieve.
- Problem Solver – experimenting and offering potential solutions.
While as BAs we don’t carry around ninja stars or swords, we do have our tools. Agile or not your BA skills need to modernize! Agile has given us a new lens to perform analysis with and whether your team or organization is formally agile or not, the many aspects of an agile approach to requirements and analysis work are valid in today’s changing business landscape. Below I have gathered some examples:
- User Stories are used by agile and traditional teams, custom development and package software, and any hybrid approaches in-between that can benefit from user stories. This ability to leverage user stories helps BAs keep the customer and user perspective, important regardless of the methodology used.
- Engaging facilitation skills are needed no matter what approach you are using. Agile has shined a big spotlight on collaboration and engaging facilitation skills. These skills are all about modernizing our approach to engaging with stakeholders, engaging them more, and helping be a true partner in using software and process changes to solve real business and customer problems.
- Visual Modeling is another tried and true BA technique and today we need to learn lighter weight modeling skills. Lightweight modeling helps us use visual models to collaborate on analysis with others and get deeper conversations about the requirements gaps happening with the team and stakeholder groups. A picture is worth 1000 words.
- Product visioning skills help us understand what problem we are solving and for whom. This is another skill that BAs have always needed to understand and facilitate a shared understanding. With the rise of agile approaches, it just becomes a bigger spotlight where BAs can elevate their value.
Today and tomorrow’s environment will bring more complexity and more user focus to get it right! This means modernizing our approach to how to approach work, elicit requirements, analyze requirements, document requirements and engage with our teams and stakeholders. An opportunity to specifically learn:
- Engaging the customer and user at the center of our techniques.
- Leveraging small increments to prototype working software/process/workflows, and learn from these small pieces as input to the larger solution.
- Acquiring customer feedback more often and evaluate how the current solution is working, blending this analysis with the requests in queue and data insights.
With all that in mind….
- Are you ready to shed BA practices and mindsets of the past and step into a modern BA Ninja mindset?
- Are you ready to show the true value that BAs can provide teams and organizations?
I created the Modern BA Ninja Program to help experienced and new BAs skill up for the modern age of business analysis. It’s a new world of business and technology and old practices just won’t cut it, not even with a shuriken! Changing mindsets and modernizing our behaviors as modern BAs is not easy. It takes a process of awareness of old mindsets, learning new ones, talking about it and grasping the changes. It takes practice in becoming aware of the old and new ways of thinking and practicing the skills with feedback and support.
The Modern BA Ninja Program will elevate your skills, performance and how others see your value. I know this because I have witnessed several BAs over the last several years’ transition into modern masters of business analysis. Their managers ask me “How do I get all of my BAs to work like him/her”? I designed this program after the best success stories, seeing first hand what skills and mindsets are truly making a difference in high performing BAs today. The integrated program includes a combination of self-paced learning modules; assignments with feedback, 1:1 mentoring sessions, and small group live mentoring sessions from an expert like me. This makes sure you LEARN, PRACTICE, AND EVOLVE as a modern BA professional.
In this BA-Cube.com exclusive Modern BA Ninja Program, you will learn through on-demand self-paced content, you will complete assignments to practice new skills and receive feedback; you will participate in 1:1 mentoring sessions on new skills, and join in small group mentoring as well. This process will truly evolve you into a Modern BA Ninja!
Training alone onsite or on-demand is not enough. True modern masters are getting the mentoring they need to build confidence in new skills and new mindsets. On BA-Cube.com we have been using the blended method with our Premium Members and see the results! BA-Cube has programs for teams as well to modernize a team.
Join us on BA-Cube.com and start the Modern BA Ninja program to ignite yourself or your team into Modern BA Ninja territory!
https://www.ba-cube.com/courses/modern-ba-ninja-dimension-1/