After a long summer, I guess it is time to revive this blog from it's hiatus, and once again start to ponder the mysterious ways of business analysis. At least the mysterious ways in which my slightly twisted my reflects on business analysis.
As human beings we all have our guilty pleasures, be it something eatable, drinkable or whatever. Its the small things that we sometimes indulge into, perhaps to celebrate our successes or in grief over out failures.
As a business analyst I, and I can only speak for myself, also have some guilty pleasures, which may not be very productive, but at least they make me feel better.
For one thing there is complaining, about the stupidity, ineffectiveness, lack of insight, stubbornness, (add more words yourself) of the business representative, project manager, senior manager (add your favorite complaining target). By complaining I mean the non constructive uttering of words into the air letting everyone in the vicinity know how you feel about the person in question. At this point I assume that you have checked that this person is not within hearing distance, as we then turn from complaining to stupidity...
A good approach could be to utter sound or general complaints, letting people nearby know that you are not happy with someone/something. If they then ask what the problem is, you have the chance to censure what you tell them...
Complaining in this form usually gets you exactly nowhere, but it does make you feel better, especially if your complaints are backed up by people who heard you.
Now, at this point I should probably offer some sort of more or less valuable insight, so here we go...
If you feel the urge to complain, please do so (after the aforementioned check of the presence of the target or any others who might report to the target), but do yourself the favor of turning the situation upside down. By this I mean, that if you are unhappy with the behavior of someone, ask yourself whether you have done something to induce this behavior, if yes, try to correct the situation, if no ask yourself if you can do anything to make the situation better. Neither may be possible, but at least you have identified that you cannot do anything about it.
Another guilty pleasure of mine, is to celebrate, usually inside myself, if after a discussion with a business representative, project manager, senior manager (add more yourself) I turned out to be right. Again this makes me feel good, but it is not very productive, and the other part may not be so happy.
Instead of just celebrating, a please do that, that you were right and the other one was wrong, try putting it in a lager perspective, hint: you might not be right the next time.
If you the next time you meet the other part express your satisfaction with the compromise you reached last time, I know I know, you were right all along, but by giving him or her a stake in the result they tend to be less unhappy with it, a it might be easier to reach other compromises in the future.
I think a guy, or girl? some call God got it pretty much spot on a few thousand years ago "Do to others as you want them to do to you".
