BA Bites - The Top 10 Ways Business Analysts Influence Strategy (Without the Title)

Today we're going deeper than job titles, frameworks or delivery methodologies. Where I'm packing the real levers of power in an organisation, in Florence. And if you've ever thought, I know what the business should do, but they're not listening. This one's for you. The Better Business Analysis Institute. Welcome back to the Better Business Analysis Podcast. And we're going to dive into Kenway's. You can lead from where you are. Even if no one's handed you the steering wheel, that's right. We're counting down 10 ways that you can move from being an analyst to an informant. And how BA's can shape organisational strategy without the title. Number one is around influence isn't about power. It's about permission. You don't need a title to lead. You need trust. Harvard research shows that soft power when you don't have the title, outperforms formal authority and complex change in this. Yes, there are great studies that say people want to authority, make a statement, and people will then listen to them and do things. There's lots of experience about that. And the complex change in this, the soft power actually up. And as a BA, you have a unique option to access different business silos. Because businesses do work in silos. And our job is to stop that from happening, but it still happens. And the direct opportunity to access people and all these silos, that's actually gold. And a mid-level BA can maybe facilitate customer journey workshop. And that can directly trigger CX uplift, right, a $2 million project. And that's without any senior titles, just earned credibility. And I just want to make a really good point here. When you've got that trust, it doesn't necessarily come across as a badge or as a pet on the back. Okay, but it's quite a lonely place as a BA. You've just got to know that people do trust you, but it may not be explicitly, for example, converted into a great job. But they will trust you. Number two is that strategy starts with the language. And BA's are translators. Speaking both business and tech makes you invaluable, right? It's still an art to bridge the gap between IT and the business they had. I'd say to all the time, communication breakdown is actually the top three reasons why strategy initiatives fail. So, you know, we can use visual storytelling tools like lean canvases to create understanding we visualize and we report out. One BA I know used a simple empathy map to reframe. I'm back log priorities. They're actually just a whole lot of projects. And align them with real user pain points and they just wrap that up. They were already pass that point in terms of user discovery, but they wrapped up how these particular initiatives could actually relate to a customer and, you know, group of customers and why what was the empathy behind that. Number three is that know the business better than the business does. So, influence grows when you understand what actually drives the PNL. And this has taken me a long time to understand that I really understood it because I had to, you know, I've been reporting to executive boards and I've been on executive boards. And when you understand that really the executives talk about PNL and that's their world, by the way. Then that will help you link what you're doing through their language, which is PNL, the product of us. So, just 20% of BA say they fully understand their organization's financial model. You should understand that. That's an advantage. It's something like I said, taking me years, probably later in my career to get there, but it totally makes sense. And so you should learn how your organization makes and loses money and then show up in those conversations. An example here is that a BA may be embedded in finance and they spot duplicated SaaS spending right across multiple systems. And they're actually the same offer like a CRM system. And they might realize that they spend a lot of money on SaaS systems and that they could be saving, you know, turning from the K-year by simply asking the right questions or suggesting that maybe they're consolidated. Yes, that's jumping to solutions and not looking at problems, which we say don't do. But really, I guess the problem is it's not the real problem here at a macro level is that there's just no awareness that these both these departments are using the same tech stack. Okay, and that's where we can add additional value. Number four is to frame your analysis as outcomes and ideally smart objectives and not outputs. And this is different string that would a BA does and sometimes a project manager. They should project manager should do outcomes, but that's not their training is their training is outcomes. Sorry outputs deliverables executives don't care about activity by the way. They really don't have enough time to worry about it. They care about people and staff costs. Right. So that makes the activity. But they they care about results. And outcome driven projects are three times more likely to deliver real that. You need to swap your delivered requirements with enabled. I don't know 15% reduction and support costs or consolidate these two systems which resulted in saving 250k. Yeah, by the end of the financial year. If you reframe a reporting upgrade into a case for reducing call center volume. That's really gold, right. The project might get fast tracked might get fully funded. So that language about what are you trying to achieve from the outcome, which is a reporting upgrade to actually what are we achieving by that. That's really important. And that links to things like an investment logic map and benefits and problems and percentages and what do people care about. And so you're not losing the output. You're saying that that's the journey and that might be the end result that we haven't knew reporting swing. But what is the benefits is quite different from the output. Then number five, it's that you can become a heat seeking missile or decision fatigue. Strategies often fail because the lead is overwhelmed, not under and they actually get too much information and the wrong information. Executives face 70 plus significant decisions a week. That's how many decisions they make. That's why they're in all those meetings. And if you simplify decisions, don't just share data but to steal the path forward. So you say, hey, we've got a problem. It's like, okay, bring, don't be a problem, bring their solution. That's what they would say. You can define, I have to find what the problem really is the root. Here's the data behind it. This is the some solutions. Here's my recommendation. That's so powerful. And you can use like a three point decision matrix and frame trade offs. And the CEO can make that decision in my team. It's really, really simple and you find that actually a lot of decisions in an organization. That's how it ends up anyway. You go the long way through committees, mental management reporting. It eventually gets to someone's desk on the exec in like a sentence. Why? Okay, give me the briefing. They want funding for this is what it's going to do. Seriously, that's how it gets to still and those executives are so busy. So we need to make it easy. Number six is that you need to build your influence and the gaps between media. And what I mean there is that the real moves are made between meetings. 85% of decisions are pre aligned before the official meeting. I'm going to say that again, 85% of decisions are pre aligned basically there less likely to change so people have made their mind up before the official meeting. So you need to book coffee catch up. You need to recap one on one. You need parts seeds along the way. And this is really a still a very successful strategy for persuasion and and a good friend of mine who happens to be my boss one of my pieces of work at the moment. He created this is really good at doing the pre meeting. So when it comes to the meeting, it's simply just kind of a yes no at that point. And if you run like 15 minute pre meetings with all stakeholders before a strategy session. By the time they hit the room, their solution has majority support. They've already done it. And this is politeness. This is politeness. This is the non-loving public face from sort of politics. Exactly what they do. Number seven is that visuals, win arguments. I love this one. This is so true. No one reads a 40-page doc, 100-page doc, it's not a hell, but much of it is actually they read the small ones. But they do understand the diagrams and they'll come back to those. They love it. The simpler the better. And sometimes it annoys me how simple the diagram is to be. And you feel like all the values trip to a way. But I understand why there is the case. And visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text by the human brain. Think about that. And this is the picture paints a thousand words. Well, actually a picture paints six hundred thousand. Sorry, 60,000 words. If you look it that way. Because your brain is processing faster. Use journey mats, swim lanes, trade-off charts, cut through the noise. This is your maker's risk matrix is another one. This is where the risks are. These are the options. I have mapped using a journey mats for onboarding, for example, or a cool center flow. And it's always the number one diagram where people go, OK, I can see where they might say is the revenue leakage point, which is a CFO term. But they can see it. They can see that that is a problem in the cool center flow. And that's where you need to get to. And once you start using, setting that as the reset as the language you use, are simple diagrams. They'll want you. They'll trust you. They'll value you and they can see it. And they will not be able to go back to those diagrams. So that saves you all that time because you don't need to just produce all these words. I mean, I've just produced a document, 32,000 words. And I'm just thinking, you know, people are going to read that once if I'm lucky. And they just go to remember one or two diagrams. Number eight is to model scenarios. OK, so don't just analyze the current state. It's probably a real big trap for those who are IBA trained, who go into the world and they do current data analysis. It's it's changing now. It's changing now. But not it hasn't come from the B.A. world. But B.A. is picking up on the fact that it's a waste of time. Influence lives in the what if it doesn't live in the past. So if you do some scenario model, it can increase your buy and buy like 50 percent. Don't just report off a future pathways. Show the options. The future state is focus is another way of saying this. I've presented potential cost reduction models before, cart automate outsource and let the decision makers choose based on your recommendation. And then you know, that is making it really easy for you. What options do we actually have here? I this I understand all that. I trust you. What options do we have? OK, and why do you recommend that? And that will actually spark it will trigger any unreson or unsaid emotions at that point. OK, we don't want to reduce staff or we're actually our preferences not outsource or automation. I've been involved in automation projects before and the been disastrous. And a lot of execs have those projects along their way and they are almost tied to that legacy. So sometimes their their view of the what if is is shaped by the past, but it's not your job to map their past demons. Number nine is to reframe. Reframe the deliverables the actual outputs in terms of value stories. So requirements are just kind of the how I know we say it's the what. But it is kind of the how we get through function. But strategy lives in the white. So value linked user stories, right? They can double stay caught as satisfaction stores scores. So what you do is you add a field to every requirement, every story and you add business value, right? So it's the so that I is is actually the point. But sometimes it's so that I is more of a functional. So you go so that I can allow customer to get from A to B. But unless you say what's the value for the business, what do we get, which is linking down to the response, the capability on the business side. And we'll actually help, especially if it's you need internal sign up here. So at view in the backlog user stories, just add a value outcome column and product owners can actually start reprioritizing based on the benefit, not just guessing what they think. And number 10 is an important one, make peace with rejection, then keep showing up. And this is just a general business top tip. I hear I mean, I hate this. I mean, one of the reasons I've been involved in startups, but one of the reasons why I kind of cringe and get a bit sick of of doing startups is that you just fail a lot of times, right? And that one time the push harder you don't fail again. I'm pretty good. And the world of projects when I work for someone else, man, I just keep going. But when it's myself, I'm really hard at facing rejection. But influence is a long game. And it does take about seven to 10 repetitions for ideas to stick with decision makers. That's why you need to have the least meetings beforehand. You need to be polite, persistent. And influence is notice more than it's acknowledged as I said before. So it's noticed in their brains, but not acknowledged that you have done a good job. And I'll give you an example here is that I mean, I've pushed like through a feedback loop more than three times. I'm currently going through a feedback loop. I'm probably up to the night piece of stakeholder feedback. Yeah, I'm, and I'm serious. I'm kind of over it and it's hard and there's cricket, but if you keep going, you will get to the result you need. Okay. So whether or not you're like a CGMBA or in your first day as a B.A. career, just remember strategy isn't owned by the C suite. It's shaped by the people closest to the problem. And that's actually you. So the question isn't when they give me a set of table, when are they going to, are they going to invite me? It's about what am I doing already that makes them want to pull a cheer out at table. I'll see you next week. [Music]