The Business Analyst who wasn’t (Part 2)

A decade later, I was on track to becoming a real business analyst: I would be a wooden boy no more! I studied Business Computing at university, and was determined to become a real Business Analyst (now that I knew that’s what it was called).

I had a great manager, who sincerely believed in helping her staff to develop themselves. She now actively sought out opportunities for me. Where she’d previously been pimping me out as an all-round troubleshooter, she now started looking for opportunities for me to start the transition to a more IT-centric role.

And, one came up within a year. There was an IT project underway to replace our existing GST processing mainframe systems with a shiny new GST processing system on our in-house financial systems platform. I was put forward as a “User Representative”, to help guide the IT project team with their requirements.

The Business Analyst on the team very quickly identified me as an embryonic BA. Soon, I was not just giving user feedback on the new system, but was brought in to help with design issues and user testing, and acting as a de facto assistant BA – including doing system testing. The BA even described me as Mr “Let’s break things with wacky permutations.” (as a compliment!).

Then... for some reason I’m still not clear on, they dismissed the BA. There was talk of bad performance, but I wasn’t knowledgeable enough or involved enough at the time to determine this for myself. However, they still needed a Business Analyst, and the nearest thing they had to one was... me! So, without anyone ever deliberately deciding anything, I was informally promoted from user representative, to de facto assistant business analyst, to unofficial unacknowledged business analyst. I only worked this out after the fact – at the time, I thought it was natural for user representatives to sit in on design meetings, and to write requirements documents, and to write UAT test scripts, and facilitate UAT sessions for the wider user community. BA? Nearly, but not quite.

About a year later, another IT project came up in my area of subject matter expertise. Again, I was brought in as a “user representative”, but the project manager and my manager both knew that this was code for “business analyst”. I was writing user stories, I was collaborating with the developers, I was intimately involved at every stage of the project, from start to finish (again, I was the UAT leader).

I was getting closer to my goal, but still wasn’t officially there. I’d acted as the BA on one and a half projects now, and I was ready to get the title. I was readying myself for a transfer to the IT division, when...

Stay tuned for Part 3