‘The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.’
John D. Rockefeller
What are soft skills? Soft skills are psychophysical features and social skills. They focus on human behavior and attitudes. They characterize how a person interacts in relationships with others and alter our working methods. These abilities can affect how you interact with colleagues, solve problems, and manage your work and are important factors for your success.
Commonly noted soft skills include:
- communication and listening skills
- resistance to stress
- teamwork
- time management
The article explains the importance of soft skills in daily teamwork using a business analyst as an example and the role of effective communication, especially when managing change in a project.
Influence of soft skills
Soft skills must be honed and developed to measure one’s ability to perform personally and professionally. To do it effectively, one has to be aware of 3 main aspects of soft skills to achieve significant progress:
- Cognitive aspect – you know for what purpose and when to apply a given competence.
- Motivational aspect – you want to use it to demonstrate your competence.
- Behavioral aspect – you know their behaviors on a given competence.
As a result of mastering your soft skills, here are just a few examples of the influence of soft competencies and how they can improve the everyday’s tasks of a business analyst:
- Good communication – good quality of data for analysis
- Teamwork – good amount of data to analyze, more accurate development
- Negotiations – good deadlines for obtaining requirements, better requirements priorities
- Empathy – good understanding of the customer’s needs
- Organization of meetings – easier product collection
- Troubleshooting – easier product reception
They can also help to resolve many everyday challenges like:
- Dealing with untimely delivery of data by the customer.
- Lack of commitment on the client’s side.
- Frequent changes in priorities.
- Attempts to change the scope of the project.
- Conflicts (customer–supplier, at the supplier, at the customer).
- Lack of knowledge about software development at the client’s.
- Low involvement of the development team
- Communication skills.
Aspects of effective communication skills
Let’s explore the most famous soft skill, effective communication. This skill involves more than just exchanging information; it focuses on understanding the emotions and intentions behind the information.
Effective communication means clearly delivering a message; you need to also listen in a way that gains the full meaning of what’s being said and makes the other person feel heard and understood. This is why the effectiveness of communication depends on two forms:
- Verbal communication – verbal, oral, and written
- Non-verbal communication – body language, tone of voice, intonation
Good communication skills in business analysis can help you improve areas like:
- Obtaining requirements from the client.
- Explaining requirements to teams.
- Conducting meetings (requirements workshops, acceptances, reviews) with the team or client.
- On-site training.
- “Translation” of requirements from the field language into the general language.
- Being able to express disagreement – finding a way to skillfully disagree with others on a team without creating conflict.
How do we improve communication skills?
Although soft skills are usually not acquired through formal training, they can still be learned. The key to improving soft skills is that an individual must be open to feedback and willing to adjust behaviors. Training can provide guidance and strategies for developing better practices, and through practice, one can strengthen areas where deficiencies exist.
To get the best out of the conversation and master your communication skills, keep in mind these helpful tips:
- Adapt the message to the recipient.
- Speak clearly.
- Don’t Multitask. Be present.
- Control your emotions and body language.
- Listen actively: repeat, paraphrase, ask.
- Make sure your verbal and non-verbal messages are consistent.
- Take care of a good atmosphere.
- Be brief. ‘A good conversation is like a miniskirt, short enough to retain interest, long enough to cover the subject.‘
Soft skills in Change Management
Another key area of business analysis in which soft skills may prove invaluable is handling change, ‘the only constant thing in life,’ as Heraclitus of Ephesus once said. It is well known that the world hardly ever stands still. This is especially true in the arena of system development. It seems that everybody is constantly changing their minds or finding that what was previously agreed upon is no longer applicable.
Changes in the scope of requirements in the process of system development
That being said, having a structured way of handling a changing environment is important. Change management comes with a rescue as a comprehensive process to adapt the organization or project to various changing conditions. It is crucial to implement the scope of the change management process to enable effective management, monitoring, controlling, and documenting project changes.
The easiest way to achieve it is to adjust the generic process of system development to reflect this necessary evil. That process has been described in the first article: Requirements 101 – what you need to know to get you started under the Engineer requirements process section and its adjusted version is shown in the picture below.
Requirements Engineering)
The requirements
The engineer requirements process for the ideal world begins with the need to agree on the input information for the project with the customer. The second activity in the process is to analyze the input information and consider how to achieve the required outputs. This activity, which often goes on in parallel with agreeing on the requirements, almost always involves the creation of one or more sample models of system requirements and analysis reports.
That creates a base for the origin of requirements and qualification strategy for the system development. Once agreed with the suppliers, they form the basis for a contract for the lower-level development. Whenever the customer or the supplier creates a change request, the requirement in question has to be re-assessed from the beginning until a new agreed requirement emerges.
During the early stages of requirements gathering, changes should be made to that process easily. However, the project must commit to and formally agree on the scope at one point. Starting at that moment, anyone can’t insert any changes on the project. Instead, a more formal arrangement is put in place in which any modifications are officially requested or proposed. After that, the team conducts an impact analysis to understand the consequences of the proposed changes on the overall project.
MVP i POC
In situations where such changes block or delay project progress, the use of an MVP or POC is very helpful:
- MVP, or minimum viable product, is an approach to software development based on creating the most basic version of the application. It’s a faster and cheaper way to deliver a working application and bring your concept to life with minimal effort.
- A proof of concept (POC) usually involves building a prototype or minimum viable product to see if the concept works. POCs can be used to test multiple scenarios. This is an essential step in product development to reduce the risk of failure of new services or products.
Suppose one of these options is established at the beginning of the project and its scope does not change. In that case, we can provide the client with something he can physically experience or test and, based on this, determine the scope of potential changes or modifications.
Reason for change
It is important to distinguish between scope change and scope creep to understand why changes occur in a project.
- A scope change is an official decision regarding a project’s scope. As a result of a scope change, the timeline or budget of a project often changes.
- Scope creep is when a project slowly grows behind the original scope without making an official decision to change a project.
One of the most typical situations in which a change request might appear is the discovery of a limitation in a model or an anomaly in analysis results. This may arise while preparing a derived requirement or the qualification strategy for a derived requirement.
A change request often forces a modification to the model(s) and/or additional analysis work to investigate the problem. On the other hand, while conducting an analysis or creating a model, a problem with input requirements may be discovered. This may lead to a change request for the agreed requirements process.
How to effectively manage the change
Here are a few tips to help you manage change requests regarding the project’s scope.
Understanding the reason for a scope change is one of the most important aspects of scope control.
- Knowing the rationale for change, you can assess its significance. This helps to adjust the project plan accordingly. Moreover, by thoroughly understanding the change, you can more effectively communicate the associated specifics to your team.
- Document each factor and aspect related to the change. This activity may include formal client requests, meeting notes, project incidents, budget changes, and progression data.
- Changes in scope often impact the overall timeline of the project. While accepting the change, the project needs to determine new schedules. It is important to set new schedules and deliverables dates as soon as possible to ensure that the change won’t disturb the team’s work. New deadlines may relate to production timeframes and employees’ working hours.
- While effective communication is important at any point in a project, it’s especially vital when major changes occur to the scope. Make it a priority to effectively present every detail of each change to your team and other stakeholders. This may include: explaining the reason for the change, how the plan needs to be adjusted to handle that change in the project, how any potential challenges caused by the change will be managed.
Prepare for roadblocks so you are ready for several possible outcomes if something won’t go according to the plan.
Summary
I hope this series of articles will inspire you to dive a little deeper into business analysis. As a programmer, I have discovered that analytical skills are extremely helpful in everyday work.
Business analyst skills help me better understand business partners’ processes and requirements. Knowing how to use these tools effectively makes it easier to develop and adapt solutions to the needs of the client or user. I find it easier to manage changing requirements and document and work with them. Writing technical documentation (which is probably everyone’s favorite part of a project :)) is also easier when you better understand how to describe a given solution and its structure.
However, the most valuable aspect to me is the skill of effectively and transparently transferring information between business partners and programmers. The ability to effectively translate a business process or requirements into a more technical language is invaluable and is often the source of project success.
I hope that these aspects of business analysis will give you some insight into where you can improve your daily work.
Sources
- Elizabeth Hull, Ken Jackson and Jeremy Dick, Requirements Engineering, Springer London Berlin Heidelberg, 2005
- Allen David, Getting things done, czyli sztuka bezstresowej efektywności, Helion, 2006
- Business Analysis Book of Knowledge (BABOK v3)
- What Are Soft Skills?
- What Are Soft Skills? (Definition, Examples and Resume Tips)
- A good conversation is like a miniskirt, short enough to retain interest, long enough to cover the subject
- Change Management – na czym tak naprawdę polega zarządzanie zmianą?
- Scope Change in Project Management | Process, Tips & Example
- How to deal with scope change in project management
- Scope Change: What It Is and How To Manage It
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