To Be a BA     or     to Buy a BA

The Question the Bard Never Asked

To be the BA, or to buy the BA: that is the question:
Whether 'tis more profitable for the project to suffer
The lack of analysis expertise of the SME,
Or to take arms across seas of troubles,
And by buying the Analyst skill, develop requirements? To hope: to wish;
No more; and by hope alone to say we end
The project and accept thousands lost forever.

That price is expected in IT, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be strived. To go on, to continue;
To continue: perchance to succeed: ay, there's the rub;
For in that depth of effort what functions may come
When we have sloughed off this uncertainty,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long a project;

For who would bear the cries and moans of our customers,
The developers wronged, the testers scorned
The pangs of decreased functionality, the law's delay,
The insolence of the PMO and the spurns
That analyst merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his questions make
With a bare minimum of knowledge? Who would answers find,
To grunt and sweat under a weary project,
But that the dread of something after implementation,
The known unknown from whose deployment
No analyst returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than try for others that we know not of?

Thus fear does make analysts of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is slicked o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!
Thee fair business analyst! Developer, in thy project
Be all my requirements fulfilled.

So What Do You Do Now?

And you thought writing requirements was hard nowadays. So how can you change your ways and learn something new?

On Learning Methods — and More

We at RSG have — totally arbitrarily — determined that the current learning environment lacks a clear vocabulary for designing, and — from the customers’ perspective — choosing the mode best suited to his or her situation for acquiring business analysis (or, for that matter, any) skills. As you all know (or soon will), we currently offer our training courses in the three modes: classic classroom, virtual instructor-led, and self-paced (a.k.a. on–demand). As a result of our long (and painful) contemplations on this matter, we at RSG have had several epiphanies that we would like to share with you.

Classic classroom presentations are structured to transfer a set of skills and techniques in a matter of days. There are economic reasons for this, namely that the instructor (and often many of the students) have to travel to get to the training location. This costs time and money (however you pay for it) so it just makes sense to make the most effective use of the time they are there. This typically leads to developing course content that groups skills and techniques for doing a set of related tasks into packages focused on jobs or responsibilities and that can be taught and absorbed by the audience over 2, 3, 4 (stretching it), or (heaven forbid) 5 days.

This paradigm does not necessarily hold in the virtual universe of web–based delivery. In this virtual world, you can log in, learn how to write effective business requirements (just as a for instance) and log out in a matter of hours instead of days. Courseware can be more focused on skills and techniques for completing a single task or creating a specific deliverable. Virtual instructor-led classes can therefore be chunked quite a bit smaller than conventional classroom material. In this setting, the chunks are a few hours long instead of days and typically present a couple of alternate methods or techniques so the attendee knows more than one way of getting a specific job done.

And then we have the self–paced (on–demand) world. In this environment, given the pervasiveness of the Internet, you should be able to acquire a usable skill or learn a specific technique in a matter of minutes, not hours or (heaven forbid) days wherever you are, whenever you want. This venue is ideal for presenting (or rehearsing) a single skill or technique for getting the task done. Over time, you can acquire alternate methods or techniques for getting it done, but each session should be no longer than 30 - 90 minutes or so and focus on a single technique.

Given all of this contemplation (neglecting contemplating our collective navel), we have decided to name the classic classroom sessions which are measured in days "Workshops", the virtual instructor-led (web-based) classroom sessions measured in hours "Modules", and the self-paced (on-demand), web-based training sessions that can be completed in a matter of minutes "nuggets" (actually, I wanted to call them "Knowledge Knuggets", but got voted down by a body of my beers — I mean peers — sniff).

The bottom line is that we now have more possibilities for transferring skills than ever before. The choice is yours.

So, now you know it. You can learn how to be a BA in a series of workshops, modules or nuggets, or — if you want to go all out — blend them into any configuration that makes sense for you and yours. That is what we call blended learning, but that is a topic for a different day.

Tom Hathaway and Dan Myers
Managing Partners

Future Feature: "How to Get Requirements on a Shoestring Budget"