BA Careers - Domain knowledge versus analysis skills

Miles Barker — Thu, 27 May 2010 12:44:00 GMT

I've been thinking a lot recently about the value of the BA, and BA recruitment - at all levels.

A common question that comes up is "Do I need to have experience in Industry X/Domain Y to work as a BA in that industry/domain?"

In a nutshell:

Is it like that now? Yes.
Should it be like that? Probably not.
Who can change it? Us - as BAs, managers and recruiters of BAs, and as candidates.

A lot of my thinking crystallised after a Thoughtworks breakfast meeting, about the challenges of modernising an infrastructure for selling train tickets (this is way more complex than you might think!) and seeing parallels with my work. Equally importantly, the CIO of the client co (David Jack of thetrainline.com) had a great track record of applying sound IT management in some very, very different industries.

Often, talking about "Industry X" is a slightly lazy shorthand for a bunch of more abstract things about challenges, approaches, and thinking.

I think some of the key determinants are the nature of a business or domain, e.g.

Is it B2C or B2B?
Is the process tightly constrained by market norms?
Does the "customer" (internal or external) directly interact with the system or business process you are working on, or with a service that is supported by it?
Are the system's users finite enough in number for a representative sample to be dealt with directly during the requirements process?
Are the users or Customers specialists themselves, or generalists/the general public?

and so on.

I know one BA who works (with great success) in the field of Adult Social Care:

B2C
Customer interacts with a service supported by his processes/systems
Customers/users can be sampled directly
Customers/users are specialists in their profession but generalists with regards to systems or process re-engineering.

So what his job is actually about is finding innovative ways (e.g. ethnography) to help professionals and their clients discover true requirements and create new processes to deliver those more effectively.

So I could tell you that "I'm a specialist in Securities Clearing and Settlement and Collateral Management". Or, I could tell you "I specialise in state-driven transactional processing, specifically in consolidating legacy processes and systems into service-oriented models that are sufficiently abstracted to support common processing regardless of product nuances or multiple B2B interface designs, in a time-constrained environment".

Now, which sounds more portable? And which tells you more fully what skills I have?

Of course, there ARE some cases where true domain expertise IS essential, typically those with some combination of highly specialised content AND time pressure AND stakeholders whose time is (genuinely) too valuable to spend "teaching" the BA. I'm reminded of pharma - the 2009 European BA Conference included a particularly memorable talk by Astra-Zeneca's Chris Marshall on the challenges of being BA in the blue-sky research space, where they are almost all ex-scientists themselves.

But most of the rest of the time, it's because things aren't documented or modelled, or aren't standardised, or aren't innovative.

I think we want to be more than just Subject Matter Experts with a BABOK veneer. Personally, I've learned the most and been most innovative when I've deliberately moved out of my comfort zone.

When we're in our comfort zone, we take a lot of what we know for granted
When we move out of our comfort zone, it's often easier to to get clarity without being bogged down in details

And we shouldn't forget, that if we just stick to the same domain and the same group of insiders, innovation will be much harder to come by. Banking sometimes feels like a merry-go-round with people coming in an implementing basically the same idea that they have at their last three employers. Which is fine if your aspirations extend no further than playing catch-up....

So what can we do about it?

1. Improve our in-house BA environment maturity, with properly modelled and documented domains, standard Use Case libraries, etc. so as to make the transition of non-specialist BAs easier.

2. As BA managers, open our eyes on recruitment based on skills and values, rather than knowledge, and phrase our job Specs accordingly

3. Build our BA teams focussed on ideas sharing and creativity

4. As BAs, revise our thinking and our CVs along the lines outlined above.

To be clear - I'm not saying that no-one in a team/project needs specialist knowledge - just that not everyone does - and that there are distinct advantages to mix and match teams and career mobility that we are currently (mostly) missing out on.

What do YOU think?

I will be leading a "BA Career Path and Qualifications" panel discussion on this and many other topics at the Business Analysis Conference Europe in London on 27-29 September 2010 - see http://www.irmuk.co.uk/ba2010/

Miles Barker

Professional Development Director of the UK Chapter of the IIBA

milesicbarker@gmail.com

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BA Careers - Domain knowledge versus analysis skills