When you tell your business analysis story are you sharing the activities you performed or do you focus on the outcome or achievement? When you focus strictly on activities, you miss an opportunity to realize the value or impact to your clients. The outcomes help your clients understand the role you played in achieving the business goal. Seems simple enough, so why aren’t more business analysis professionals focused on driving value versus driving tasks?
 

The KPMG and IIBA^® Research and Impact study (October, 2016) revealed organizations are actively seeking value-driven business analysis professionals. Value in business analysis has moved beyond finding more and more efficiencies in process or increasing project success rate, although both are still very important. We now see the collaborative, consultative, strategic and insightful business analysis professional leading the way in identifying and prioritizing new opportunities and applying insight and design thinking to improve customer experience.

For instance, one company surveyed in the study, a telecommunications provider, actively sought business analysis skill sets to help with decision-making initiatives to support development of new products and the exploration of new markets. Or, let's look at a professional services firm that actually built a business analysis (BA) Design Thinking Studio to push innovative thinking and holistic perspectives internally and with their clients.

It’s important that as professionals, we take the lead to demonstrate our successful outcomes and how we leverage our capabilities to reap those rewards and help organization's achieve better business outcomes.

 

What does your BA story say about you? Tell us how you see your role in driving value at #IamaBA and upload a 10-30 second video.