Do your company have People or Resources?

First of all, I would like to make the corporative approach I'll be using to talk about people and resources clear to everyone.

People - Individuals who have feelings, believes, values, preferences, ambitions, passions and a need to be constantly motivated.

Resources - Everything needed to get something done in a project that has a cost and a production rate embedded. Eventually, when human effort is needed, people might be used as resources.

Now that we clearly understand the difference, let's talk about how companies misuse both, people and resources on its workdays.

It is very common to see companies (especially the Brazilian ones) in a rush to hire people to be used as resources in a given project. And worse, most of the times they try to get the most qualified people for the lowest wages. The problem is that this practice entails in dealing with a set of known issues. If you wanna have a strong corporative culture that will grow multidisciplinary, mature and self-managed teams that will boost your company, this is the wrong way. 

You've got to remember that those resources are people. Putting them together in a team expecting productivity and interaction among them just isn't gonna work. Your company must have a desired employee profile to be fulfilled before hiring. You can't just put an inattentive person in a team full of details driven people. What you think will happen? The answer is very simple, both team and person will be frustrated at the very first interaction, and that's your fault! As result, you'll get low-quality deliverables, deadline breaking, high turnover and money loss due to constant training for new employees (if you train them).

Try to hire people that are like-minded to your company's objectives and policies so your teams may have more engagement in their daily tasks having the big picture in mind.

In another hand, even having team like-minded with your company's culture you still can't forget that they're people. They need to be respected, they need to feel safe and motivated. Throwing tons of tasks to be delivered in record time on then just because they've shown their value as a team isn't gonna work either. There is a very sharp line between motivation and limitation and even knowing it is not easy to find out, you must try.

Treat people like people. If your employees are happy, motivated and confident, probably your customers will be too. 

If your company have a resource-centric culture, people that work for you will treat your company as a resource too, that is, it can be replaced at any time.

When your company have a people-centric culture you will see the advantages of it which I can explain in a future article.

Business Analyst Career Path. Where Will You End Up?!

Your career path as a business analyst is highly dependent on your preferences and strengths as an individual.

Not everyone who starts out who is currently a business analyst not necessarily stays there very long.

In my mind, there are basically 4 high-level trajectories your career might go depending on whether you go the BA Specialist route, management route, subject matter expert route or choose to make a lateral movement along the way. So let's break down each.

Business Analyst Specialist route

First, when I say BA Specialist, I mean a person who has decided to hold their skills as a business analyst. They are masters of all competencies in the business analyst body of knowledge and they are well-versed on all the knowledge areas.

This person starts out as a junior business analyst or an entry-level business analyst and travels to level 2, which is a senior business analyst and so forth.

If you go this route your skill set will more cycling drive you to be an enterprise architect, which is kind of a super business analyst. The quick version is that you look at the business as a whole and not just to an individual or silo, and determine strategies for how IT as a whole cant help meet objectives.

Management route

This is pretty straightforward and suitable for people who have a passion to help others grow in their career. 

At this point, you are a mentor to other business analysts and are likely to work as a business analyst lead or manager. Is important to remember that being a manager doesn't mean you can't be something else. For example, enterprise architects might have business analysts working with them.

The Subject Matter Expert (SME) route

The SME route has many flavours and usually revolves around a particular industry like business division or technology. 

Some examples are health information systems BA in the health industry or a human resources information systems BA for the HR's division of companies or a sales force BA specializing in the implementation of sells force for sells organizations.

Industry or subdivisions SME often move into a direct partnership with the business sort of things or just cross over into the business altogether because they're so well-versed in the ins and outs.

Technology experts are most likely to become consultants and help companies adapt to technology successfully.

Making lateral moves route

Last but not least, this has many flavours but the short version of it is that a good business analyst has to dive in the skillsets of many professions like user experience designers, project management, process analysts, product ownership and the list goes on. If business analysts find one of these careers interesting than they can refocus their career in that direction fairly easily.

High-performance teams

High-performance teams

Every company wants a high-performance team. According to some literature an HP team can produce 4x, 5x and even 10x more. These are teams that can boost the speed of your business/company.

High-performance teams are always multidisciplinary. Instead of having a team of specialists, when you have an interdisciplinary team, they're engaged in the project from end to end. Instead of having a team of taskers that receives and delivery a task without knowing what's going on from end to end, you get the understanding of the "why's" and also the engagement. In other words, instead of having a team that deliveries tasks you'll get a team that deliveries value.

In a team of specialists, you'll have a high level of dependency. Everyone needs to be allocated to something, and a specific group will start their work only when the previous group finishes their task. As time goes by they become more and more specialists in what they do and never get to know about other teams work.

In a multidisciplinary team, you'll have a collective intelligence. This team is autonomous and demands less coordination. The cooperation replaces the dependency, and everyone helps each other when there is a bottleneck upon delivery. Every time someone helps another person he will learn about this person's work.

One thing to be careful with is the allocation of an HP team. You can't just break the team when allocating certain persons in different projects. That's not the idea. This team is static, they need to be together, and this will make them better each day. The improvement of an HP team over time isn't linear. It can be doubled or even quadratic.

Having this in mind you'll have to stop thinking about who's best for a specific project and start thinking of what project fits best on the team's profile.

But, how to maintain work pattern and individual growth? From time to time you'll have to promote meetings for individuals from different HP teams with the same role so they can talk about how things are done. These meetings will be called "Practice Community" and will ensure de organization and pattern of work.

Create and maintain HP teams in the right way, and you'll start collecting good fruits as fast value delivery, individual professional growth, specialists, etc.