It’s Not You, It’s Me: Why I’m Ditching the Business Analyst Title after 10+ Wonderful Years

It’s not me, it’s you

It is genuinely surprising how many times you can be told that you aren’t something without it actually sticking.

I’ve consistently been told that I’m not like other Business Analysts. I don’t act like other Business Analysts. I don’t think like other Business Analysts. I don’t approach things like other Business Analysts. I’m an anomaly.

I’m spectacularly embarrassed to admit that my (astonishingly arrogant) conclusion was that but this is how business analysis should be done. Fast-paced, just-in-time, high-volume delivery was obviously where the world was headed. I was just ahead of the curve.

Lordy, the arrogance.

I remember being told by a senior Business Analyst at a MeetUp that I was doing things wrong because I wasn’t maintaining the huge requirements documentation that accompanied the original build of the system I was working on. At the time, I was a junior BA (in both title and experience) and I’ll admit that the encounter really knocked my confidence.

Over time, worry became incredulity! I honestly cannot think of a better example of inventory waste than spending time maintaining a two-hundred-odd-page document that no one other than me references? The suggestion is pretty wild — and wildly misplaced for the kind of environment that I was working in.

In the years since then, this interaction has since taken on a comedic tone. In my head, I hear their comments in the voice of that lady in The Simpsons who always takes the opportunity to scream: But what about the children???

Except in this case it was But what about the traceability???????

Which is all to say, I didn’t fit into the the usual Business Analyst mould. They were still talking about big waterfall processes and big business cases and I was working in a remarkably agile, fast-paced environment. The lessons didn’t fit, the tooling didn’t work, and the advice wasn’t applicable. So I took the theory, but I had to look elsewhere for practice. I found different heroes, including Jeff Patton, Dan North, and Dave Snowden amongst others.

Arguably, I still don’t fit.

It’s amusing to me that back then I was arguing that lean and just-in-time didn’t have to mean less critical thinking, and now I will happily rant to anyone who will listen about an industry that has simplified the real-world complexity to some step-by-step templates and processes.

We have brought the worst parts of the old ways into the new world.

You can’t move at work without tripping over a rule. We do user story format, but we write them in isolation and we avoid genuine co-creation and design by defining the scope to the nth degree with acceptance criteria, spreadsheets, wireframes, and documents. There is a multitude of expectations about format, but all is still a tad vague on the quality front.

Quality is like pornography: you know it when you see it.

But quality isn’t a thing we talk about much anymore. The less bullshit promised by the new ways of working have somehow become more process and rigmarole and somewhere along the line we misplaced the most important part: critical thinking.

Which is the part for which we Business Analysts are ostensibly responsible.

I’ve come full circle and now I’m the senior who wants to scream But what about the underlying business case? at anyone who will listen.

But don’t worry, the IIBA is publishing memes. We’ll be fine.

Everything is a system

When I was in high-school (ages thirteen to eighteen in case you call it something else), my best friend and I came up with a theory that we called The Game. Yes it had capitals. Yes we came up with it in the middle of the night. Yes, it was genius.

It mapped out the social network of which we were part. We assessed popularity and influence in the system for each person in our social circle. Complex systems of she said and then he said were analysed to measure not what happened in terms of facts, but what happened in terms of the popularity competition.

Karen loses points based on how she behaved at the dance. Ken gains sympathy points. Amy looked amazing at the party and caught the attention of the seniors. And so on.

We refined our map based on actual events, and reassessed the positions and relationships of our schoolmates. Using the map of the people involved, we would play out scenarios and predict outcomes. And most importantly, we used our thinking to keep ourselves safe. Being a teenage girl is a whole vibe, and trust me, knowing how the currents of power are flowing at your school is a kind of special protection.

No one else got it.

We quickly realised that actually maintaining all these scores was a full-time job, so it became a background thing — a practical theory of how the world worked — with the ratings updated on an as-needed basis.

And years passed without me giving it a second thought.

So you can imagine that I was a bit shocked when I realised that a workplace is a lot more like a high-school than books and movies had led me to believe.

Admittedly, at work, the power assessment is usually far less sensitive to how cool your boyfriend/girlfriend is. But barring that, it is scarily similar. The biggest difference is that the popular kids in high-school didn’t have their role embossed on their business cards. CEOs do. A formal hierarchy simplifies some of the analysis.

But a hierarchy is just part of the puzzle. Power happens. Politics happen. All the nonsense still happens. So the same social patterns that formed The Game in high-school were equally applicable at work.

Working out what is happening in the midst all the complexity is something that I really enjoy. Never trust what something says it does; be far more interested in what it actually does. Enjoy endless enthusiasm for unpacking a problem/process/system/solution and finding stuff out. A task I took to with zeal.

I recall telling my manager one time that if the world didn’t want me muscling my way into shit and having opinions then it shouldn’t give me such good results from doing so. Which was a bit on the nose.

Even for me.

But I learnt from the best.

The first Business Analyst I worked with was an absolute freaking powerhouse. She was a Scrum Master, plus Business Analyst, plus Lead, plus proxy Product Manager, plus, plus, plus. She was neither the most conventional nor a standard role model for how to do the Business Analyst role. But she set the standard for me.

A standard very few Business Analysts meet. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure that I do.

I was so disappointed by her successor. The difference was night and day. Not just in terms of output, but also in terms of care factor, details, and quality. Her replacement became my standard for what I think of as a bum-on-seat Business Analyst — someone who does the job, but doesn’t really care about the system, the business, team, or making a difference.

I vowed never to be one of them, and quietly mourned that the percentage of awesome Business Analysts had dropped to 50%. Ignoring uncomfortable realities is easy when you’re invested in an idea.

And I really — really — liked the idea of being a great Business Analyst.

Names matter, somewhat

My name is a palindrome.

As a kid I was really taken with it — it made me special. My mum used to tell me that she chose a palindrome because I was her most balanced child, an idea that was nice when I was a kid, but one I categorically rejected and abhorred as a teenager.

Balanced? No way. Special? Gross.

So I messed with it and started spelling it Hana, although I continued to pronounce it Hannah. You know you’ve successfully changed how people think of you when your grandmother writes a birthday card to you using your preferred spelling!

So Hana was how I spelt my name up until only a few years ago.

One thing that has been truly awesome over the last decade is the increased focus and use of Te Reo Māori here in Aotearoa New Zealand. It has been amazing to see daily use increasing pretty much everywhere. There’s a huge and renewed focus on pronunciation across the board. Which is truly wonderful.

But it had a un-funny side effect.

As people became more aware of proper pronunciation, there has been an increase in anxiety about how to pronounce my name. Many would reach out to clarify its pronunciation, often nervously apologising when they realised I still used the classic English pronunciation.

I felt increasing discomfort at this development! What started as an expression of teenage angst was now causing confusion for others! Not cool!

So a couple of years ago, I called an end to the embarrassing experiment and quietly reverted to the original spelling — a feat made much easier by the fact that I never actually bothered to change my name formally.

The crazy thing is how easy it was to change my name in the first place. And it’s equally crazy how easy it was to change it back. People, for the most part, just rolled with it — I got the occasional query, but for the most part, it was crickets.

The name didn’t change me. Nor did I change the name.

I am still Hannah, irrelevant of the exact number and ordering of letters.

There is a pattern for everything

You know the story about the CTO who comes in and kicks of some kind of transformation in his department? But their transformation is just implementing the exact same pattern that worked for them at their previous gig. One pattern for success, context be damned. It usually doesn’t end well.

Having one answer for everything is a recipe for failure.

A friend of mine talks about her internal library of patterns. Everything is a system and everything is a pattern: a pattern that you can work out if you’re paying attention. Events, interactions, ventures, businesses, relationships, they all follow patterns. Either what you’re seeing is a new pattern (exciting!) or an old pattern playing itself out (interesting opportunity to refine your understanding!).

It takes years to build a comprehensive library.

But at some point you have enough patterns that you can start to put them to use to make sense of the world around you. Not as an answer per se, but rather a shortcut to a working hypothesis. This is when they start to become seriously useful. Delivery slowed? There are several patterns that might cause that. Tension in the team? Seen that before, know what to look for.

Humans are invariably complicated, but a tad less complex than we like to think.

You see, the CTO would have been successful if they had treated their pattern for success as a hypothesis, rather than a recipe. A large pattern library is what makes a good senior in any role. But is especially true for senior Business Analysts.

But is that still true?

A senior Business Analyst is now just anyone with more than three years experience. Most people agree that the Business Analyst role can be an entry level role. And let’s be honest about the roles out there — many Business Analysts operate in a single quadrant of the tech-people-process-data box that makes up a business capability.

But don’t worry. You can find tips now to help you to sound more like a Business Analyst. Or to help you to get a six figure job as a Business Analyst with zero business analysis experience. And don’t get me started on the irony of Salesforce offering business analysis certifications.

I love patterns.

Which is why it is somewhat amusing that I didn’t see the pattern in front of me. Even as the overlap in the Venn diagram of what I do and what the term Business Analyst means got smaller and smaller I have refused to give up on the title.

On my post on this topic, someone commented that there is so much value in the role and that they were working to change the market perception to avoid reinventing the wheel. I cynically noted that they didn’t have Business Analyst in their LinkedIn tagline.

Even though I’d really like to, I don’t get to define the role. The market tells us the value of the thing. The market shapes it. Capitalism at play.

Economics.

It’s just business.

The real problem isn’t the title.

It’s me.

It’s not you, it’s me

How many times do I need to be told something before I really hear it?

Well, according to evidence at hand, many, many times. OK, more precisely: many times, plus just once from Diana who didn’t say it as an observation, but as a critique of how I was positioning myself. As a wake up call. In short: she called me out. She directly challenged my identity as a Business Analyst.

I actually squirmed like a small child who’s been caught red-handed.

And I couldn’t come up with a solid argument for retaining the Business Analyst title.

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I experienced this realisation with existential dread. It felt like I had stumbled into a room that I didn’t even know existed only to find far too many more doors to open. Retreating back into the room I stumbled out of feels like admitting failure. It might be exciting if I wasn’t so fucking terrified.

Those of you who know me in the real know that my enthusiasm for work is not a put-on. It’s not a constructed persona. I really do care about the work. There’s a reason I’ve spent a significant amount of time writing/thinking/talking about work stuff in my free time: I’m a work nerd. I think that’s partly why I care so much for the title — it was this title that defined — revealed — the meaning of my work.

Prying apart the meaning from the title is something I’ve been wrestling with since then.

I know that the Business Analyst title is a snug security blanket: a comfortable identity.

But without it, what am I? What do I do?

Even if I dream of working for myself one day, the reality is that my contract will end soon and I’ll be playing in the same toxic job market as before. And the market is labels, rates, skills and yes,titles.

And what the market thinks a Business Analyst is does not represent what I do.

I don’t know about you, but when all the information aligns and supports a conclusion, then there’s this internal sense of rightness — of truth. I get the same feeling when pencils are ordered by colour in the box. When the leftovers fit perfectly in the container. When there’s a clear winner in the options analysis. It is a feeling of satisfaction.

I’m scared. I don’t know what’s next. But I have that feeling of rightness about giving up the Business Analyst title.

I guess I’m Hannah. I do stuff.

I’ll work out how to label it later.