CHAPTER 2

Are You Ready to Be a Value-Based BA Practice Lead?

We have discussed the need for value-based business analysis practices as well as the need for a business case to implement new BA practices. In this chapter, we discuss how you as BA practice lead or BA manager and your senior BA team members can ensure that you are ready to lead the effort to implement and sustain the BA practice.

BE A POSITIVE POLITICIAN

Building a new business process such as business analysis is a challenging endeavor. First, you must gain executive sponsorship and organizational alignment. Do you have the power and influence skills to take a comprehensive view that is aligned with your organizational environment and decision-making practices?

Make no mistake: Organizational politics will influence your BA practice in multiple ways. Politics is really the collection of an organization’s internal structures that deal with power, influence, and decision-making. Politics is often thought of in negative terms, but positive politics can lead to positive power and influence. Things happen when politics works. Decisions are made. Projects move forward. Deals are cut. Goals are met. Things get done. Your power is directly related to how well you negotiate the politics of your organization.

Your ability to act as a positive politician will have beneficial results for your team, for your organization, and ultimately for you. People want to follow natural leaders. You as BA practice manager/lead need to be seen as a leader.

As a positive politician, use your influence rather than authority or manipulation to achieve goals. Ensure that you are operating from a positive position—a solid basis from which to influence. This will include:

•  Status. Your role as BA practice manager/lead needs to be positioned high enough in the organization to command respect.

•  Trust. Your colleagues, whether on a peer level or above or below you on the organization chart, must trust you. Trust is earned slowly through positive interactions.

•  Integrity. Never sacrifice your integrity. Never.

•  Consistency. Maintain a “steady as she goes” posture. Carefully craft your communications so that they tell a story and are consistently positive and strategically oriented.

•  Knowledge. Become a quick study. Know what you are talking about, and know when to dive into the details and when to stay at the executive level. Know your audience and what type of communication is appropriate to them.

CREATE YOUR POLITICAL MANAGEMENT PLAN

Devise strategies to negotiate your organization’s politics by building your influence capabilities. Capture the strategies and tasks to achieve them in your personal political management plan (see Figure 2-1 for a sample). Strategies might include the following:

•  Gain executive support, enlist the help of an executive sponsor

•  Build partnerships, alliances, and coalitions

•  Control critical resources

•  Control the decision-making process

•  Control your steering committee process

•  Communicate strategically

•  Manage cultural change

•  Make yourself an expert, enhancing your credibility

•  Promote yourself and business analysis

•  Manage BA benefits

•  Facilitate, negotiate, and build consensus

•  Manage conflict.

FIGURE 2-1. Sample Political Management Plan

BUILD AND MAINTAIN YOUR NETWORK OF SUPPORTERS

To build a positive network of supporters within your organization, identify your customers and the stakeholders who provide budget to your BA practice, provide oversight, provide requirements, provide input, get output, depend on your deliverables, and stand to benefit from your BA practice success. For each key customer/stakeholder, capture the following information:

•  Role

•  Awareness

•  Opinion

•  Importance

•  Current level of support

•  Level of support needed

•  Issues and concerns regarding the BA practice

   What’s in it for them?

   What do they need to view the BA practice positively and actively support it?

What actions can you take to increase the support of your most important stakeholders? What strategies will you devise to negotiate your organization’s politics by building and sustaining a strong supportive stakeholder network? Capture the strategies and tasks to achieve the strategies in your political support network plan (see Figure 2-2 for a sample). Devise your strategies to lessen the impact of those who may negatively influence your BA practice and leverage those who are positive about you and business analysis.

FIGURE 2-2. Sample Political Support Network Plan

ASSESS THE ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS

Last, identify organizational and cultural risks to your success and devise strategies to manage those risks. Update your political management plan accordingly.

Assess the landscape:

•  Environmental/organizational issues that are constantly at play

•  Change the organization is undergoing

•  Political games/maneuvers that are underway

•  Power bases and power struggles

•  Recent and anticipated leadership changes.

Assess how business analysis fits in:

•  Is the business case for your BA practice solid? Does it describe the value and cost of implementing a value-based BA practice?

•  Is implementation politically sensitive?

•  Are there political implications?

•  Will your core mission be impacted?

•  Do you have a strong executive sponsor who is accountable for the business benefits derived from the BA practice?

•  Do you have a strong executive steering committee that is passionate about implementing a value-based BA practice?

•  What are the unspoken expectations?

•  What is the decision-making process?

•  What are the cultural norms?

•  Is the communication and coordination effort challenging?

•  Are you a respected and influential leader in your organization?

USE EXPERTS TO HELP

Some managers resent external consultants, thinking they come in, make obvious recommendations, and leave you to pick up the pieces. If you use internal or external experts, be sure they have been where you are going. Walk them through your political management plan so they understand your environment. Bring in experts to help accomplish the following:

•  Assess organizational readiness and support

•  Review your business case and plans

•  Conduct a risk assessment

•  Coach you through the process

•  Gain approval and consensus on the way forward

•  Form a guidance team/steering committee to involve upper management in the effort.

WHERE DOES THE BA PRACTICE LEAD RESIDE?

Positioning is equated with authority in organizational structures: The higher the placement, the more autonomy, authority, and responsibility are likely to be bestowed on the BA practice lead. Position the BA practice lead at the highest level possible to provide the measure of authority necessary to work across the organization while authenticating the value and importance business analysis has in the eyes of executive management. In the absence of high-level positioning, the BA practice lead’s success and impact will likely be significantly diminished.

WHERE DOES THE BA TEAM RESIDE?

Another dilemma is whether the business analysts are centralized and report to the BA practice lead or are decentralized to be close to their customers. While there are pros and cons to both configurations, it is widely believed that a centralized BA team is needed to maintain a world-class BA practice.

•  Centralized BA team. Having a centralized BA team that reports directly to the BA practice lead facilitates the implementation of new BA practices, makes development of a capable BA team with the skills needed by the organization easier, and makes quality assurance of BA deliverables much less complicated. However, the customers of the BA practice—the business units they serve—often feel less involved. They may feel less ownership in new business solutions because they believe the key decisions were made centrally rather than at their level. If you adopt this configuration, be sure to involve your customers closely in project decisions.

•  Decentralized BA resources. Distributing BAs across the business and in IT allows them to be considered “part of the family.” Decentralized BAs are closer to the customer and therefore often become credible experts about the business. They are likely trusted members of the business team, regarded as advocates for the business needs and priorities. On the other hand, it is much more challenging to implement standard practices, control BA career development, and ensure that business needs are met if BA resources are decentralized. In this structure, bring the BAs together often to foster team development, professional development, and consistency.

Today’s BA roles are typically decentralized, either IT- or business-oriented:

•  IT-oriented analysts improve business results through changes to technology. These BAs are mostly generalists, with specialists emerging that may include experience analysts, business rules analysts, business process analysts, and data analysts.

•  Business-oriented analysts improve operations through changes to policy and procedures. Business-oriented BAs are mostly specialized within a business domain, focused on finance, human resources, marketing, manufacturing, etc. In decentralized organizations, these analysts are dedicated to a major business area, improving the processes and the corresponding technologies that are used to run that operation. In more centralized organizations, these business analysts are organized as a pool of talent whose efforts can be transferred seamlessly to the areas of the enterprise that are most in need of business analysis support.

BA roles are expected to become more strategic, driving BA practice maturity to meet the 21st century needs of our organizations. These roles will likely be centralized, and they will likely include the business architect and the business/technology enterprise business analyst:

•  Business architects strive to make the enterprise visible. They develop the business architecture—rich pictures and documentation that depict the current state of the business in terms of organizational structure, process and data flows, lines of business, locations, etc. They are also responsible for keeping the business and IT architectures in alignment. Business architects then create the future-state architecture to depict how the enterprise will look when the vision is realized and the strategy is executed. Only then can they identify the gap in capabilities that need to be filled to execute strategies.

•  Business/technology enterprise business analysts are cross-domain experts who convert business opportunities into innovative business solutions, and translate strategy into breakthrough process and technology change. They keep their eyes on the competition and forge new strategies.

Whether business analysts are grouped together or are dispersed by time and distance, many companies have created business analysis centers of excellence (BACOE). A center of excellence provides a framework within which all business analysts in an organization conduct their work, usually consisting of processes, procedures, templates, tools, and best practices. In addition to providing guidelines and standards, a BACOE provides a forum for focusing on continuous improvement for the business analysis discipline. We will examine the BACOE in Chapter 3 when we discuss the organization structure supporting your BA practice.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE BUSINESS ANALYST?

If you are trying to implement BA best practices, methodologies, frameworks, and enabling technologies on your project, the influence capabilities described in this chapter apply to you as well as to your BA practice lead. Work with the key leaders on your project to examine your collective power and influence as well as the landscape within which you are operating, and then develop a political management plan. In addition, start preparing yourself right now to meet your organization’s needs.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE BA MANAGER/PRACTICE LEAD?

This chapter presents the case for a BA practice lead to examine political implications, including influence, power, support, and environmental issues. Diagnose your own political strengths and gaps. You need strong influence skills to get people to want to support your effort. Develop a political management plan to enhance your ability to negotiate organizational politics as well as your personal power and influence to achieve your goals. In addition, examine the optimal placement of business analysts in your organization.

We now turn to the next phase of establishing a world-class BA practice: implementation.