My apologies for the lack of new posts, this thing they call work, seems to take of a lot of my spare time these days :-]
Usually our finest mission as a Business Analyst / Business Developer is to facilitate a solution that creates value for our business or our customers, hopefully both.
Therefor I find it frustrating to have a task where the deadline is determined by outside factors, usually legislation and what we have develop only gives very little or no value at all anyone. Or rather not what we have to develop, but what the deadline allows us to develop. The Business Areas usually have plenty of good ideas on how e.g. new legislation can be used to give value either to the customers or to the company internally, but these cannot be put into practice within the time allowed.
Where do I as a business analyst find my motivation here? On one hand I have a business which of course has to be compliant with new legislation, but which also has some decent ideas on how to get some value out of something we have to do anyway. On the other hand I have a project with a fixed deadline and a limited amount of resources.
The clash of these two worlds results in me spending most of my time finding minimal solutions and telling the business that we cannot deliver what they would like, at least not within the allowed time frame.
The only point of value I can find in this, is that hopefully the company will be compliant with the legislation, thus avoiding penalties and generally bad publicity.
This is somehow just not enough, as a business analyst or business developer I see myself working with the business to find new potential and new ways of creating value to both the business and the customers. How do I find the motivation to keep doing as good a job on the compliance task as on any other development task?
For once I don't have the answer, but I'll take any suggestions.
The post was originally intended to end here...
But as usual something shows up when you least expect it, a small glimpse of hope in a day that didn't look to good from the beginning of it, so maybe I have at least a part of the answer anyway.
I think one trick is to remember to celebrate the small successes. If you cannot yet see the value of the whole project or task, at least remeber to celebrate your personal successes. This will reinforce you in that you are indeed doing a good job, even if you can fit your results into the greater scheme of things yet.
