Tips to Enable Better Business Outcomes
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One of the challenges practitioners brought up repeatedly during From the Business Analyst to the Boardroom webinar with Guy Shone, Explain The Market, was how difficult it is to get your voice heard in the boardroom. Guy’s response was professionals acknowledge hierarchy too often, while boardrooms are not so concerned with it: your worth comes from formulating your analysis like an opinion with an important story to tell and facts to back it up. Guy’s advice was to lean into your specializations and the traits that make you unique as a professional instead of just an operator. Sound advice we can all use.
Guy also advocated the importance of building your external network to help you get into the boardroom. His recommendation? Develop a representation of yourself that is distinct from your profession: your value comes from being a person who uses the business analysis toolkit. Use your network, professional memberships, reading (whitepapers, research, articles, etc.), and events to make connections and social media to engage with insights that help you build your brand.
Building a structured path for your career will help you champion your successes. First take a critical review of your capabilities. Evaluate your competencies, set goals to develop your skills and gain experience you need to move ahead in your career. Experience can be gained by volunteering to work on projects or job shadowing to gain experience in another area. It is also important to regularly re-assess your progress and continuously refine your plan. Identifying your personal areas of focus for professional development will help you achieve the next step in your career.
Decisions are driven by personalities and individuals. Make sure your personality shines through. Take a chance to get your voice heard. One critical step in doing this and increasing your chance to get into the boardroom is your ability to enable an executive to tell a story using your data and recommendations. This is key to thinking with a boardroom mindset: it is about highlighting how business analysis professionals translate the “what” the C-suite needs done into the “how”.
Your Business Analyst Communication Toolkit | What is Your Point
Data storytelling is about finding the story your data tells and knowing your audience when you are building your narrative. Knowing what data is relevant to your audience will help you share your point and provide the information the executives in the boardroom want to hear about.
Apply your unique thinking as a business analyst in the boardroom and what you can, as a business analysis professional, provide.
In this sold out webinar, Guy Shone shared his insights on how to be instinctively viewed as an equal in the boardroom setting and have your insights taken seriously. Great advice we can all take to heart in our careers. If you missed his webinar watch it here.
Recommended Reading:
How to Get Your Recommendations Heard
About the Author:
Rosalyn eats, lives and breathes social media. With more than 7 years of experience in the field of social media, working in different industries from hospitality to beauty and accounting, she joined IIBA in 2018 as our resident social media guru. She’s happy to do “wefies” with you at conferences – so if you do see her at a conference – say hi and then say cheese!