What makes a High Performing Business Analysis Team?
With the Business Analysis (BA) market booming, I’ve been hearing lots of questions around what makes a high performing BA team, how businesses can actually build high performing BA teams, how BAs fit into the Product space, and where the market is heading in the next 5 years.
Businesses want to get ahead of the curve, so I sat down with Justin Kingston, Director at Cube Thinking, to get some answers from the expert on these key topics, which are being released as a weekly podcast and video series. The first question I asked Jason was “What does a high performing BA team look like?” Below are some key points from the podcast, but you can listen in to the full episode or watch the video series on YouTube below.
What does a high performing team BA look like?
A high performing BA team should act like an internal consultancy. They should be a team of individuals with a broad range of skills who can work effectively and efficiently and act as an exemplar to the rest of the business.
High performing BA teams should know the business inside and out and have a great understanding of the business processes and the business goals. They should know that business better than anybody else in that business. These teams have the ability to use their emotional intelligence, IQ, and analysis skills to sit down with people in the wider business to explain the change journey and to make that journey as smooth as possible.
Internally that BA team needs compassionate leadership, as often BAs who have high IQs are more vulnerable to mental health issues and stress. Great leadership will be able to provide exceptional support and pastoral care. This will lead to a happier and healthier BA team, who will naturally be able to work better.
Do BA teams always look the same?
BA teams should be designed to suit the needs of the business. There is no one size fits all. Each team will likely look slightly different. Businesses need somebody to act as the architect of that BA team, to make sure the structure suits the business vision, business mission, and associated metrics.
Leaders can make structuring BA teams easier by utilising a BA Skill Matrix, which will highlight which skills your team has, where the strengths are, and what skills are currently missing.
What does the Skill Matrix look like?
When onboarding new starters or analysing an existing team, as part of the discovery phase, leaders should find out as much as possible about their team members, including their back story, experiences, what they know about themselves, what they don’t know about themselves. The skill matrix is about collating all this information and identifying the skills, experiences, knowledge, and behaviours of each team member. Based on these findings, leaders can decide which scenarios, situations, and positions best suit each person.
If you’d like to see an example of this, please reach out via riana.butler@maxwellbond.co.uk.
What are the challenges of managing high performing BA teams?
Often BAs are perceived as ‘different’ than the wider business because of their high intelligence. At their heart BAs are hard thinkers and often have high IQs, and with this, as mentioned before, comes vulnerability to mental health pressures.
As well as this, BAs are comfortable with change, whilst the rest of the world naturally is not. And one of the challenges can often be enabling effective communication, not only internally in the BA team, but also between the BA team and the wider business.
Want to know more about high performing BA teams?
Listen in to the full podcast episode now on Spotify or watch the video series on YouTube to get a deeper dive into the questions above and more with Jason Kingston. If you have any additional questions around high performing BA teams, please get in touch with me directly at riana.butler@maxwellbond.co.uk.
Additionally, you can reach out to me directly for information on our latest BA roles or browse our current vacancies here.
13/07/21
