We attended an Atlanta PMI luncheon this month with an excellent speaker, Michael Wilkinson from Leadership Strategies, www.leadstrat.com, talking about The Power of Facilitation. The presentation was very interesting and useful but not at all what I expected. Being focused on business analysis and requirements gathering, when I hear the word "facilitation" I see a group of business stakeholders sitting around a large table talking about their business needs with a BA facilitating the session. Michael's talk was about facilitating good decision making and managing vs. leading. My confusion prompted me to think about the fact that the Business Analyst profession is building its own vocabulary for our work – just as other professions have done. Accountants use "debits" and "credits" in a very specific way. IT professionals use acronymns to talk about database access (SQL) and programming lanuages (PHP, HTML). We, as Business Analysts, are translators of these languages, helping business stakeholders understand what the IT team is proposing and helping the IT team understand the business lingo. We need to be careful that as we evolve our profession we don't get stuck in our own language and lose our ability to communicate with others. This is our most important skill and our true value to our customers. So, the lesson for me is to recognize that when I hear the word "facilitation" or "requirement," I don't assume that I know what the speaker means. I ask questions.
-
Recent Comments
-
Blogroll
-
Authors
4 Comments
Love this article! I fight this battle with myself almost every day. We tend to use acronyms all the time, and it is assumed that everybody on a given project knows what they mean, and sometimes it is not so. I tried to "spell" those acronyms out, and a lot of the team members (especially new members to the company) have thanked me because they have learned what they mean. Communication is a huge part of our job.
I couldn’t agree more. I battle this myself. Business teams have trouble understanding IT language and IT groups have a hard time relating to the business. Even though everyone speaks English we miscommunicate more times than not. We definitely need to reduce a use of acronyms and/or keep translating to both teams during discussions to make sure both teams are getting the same message. Communication is a key.
Agree with the primary point in this post that it would be terrible if we lost our ability to communicate due to our eagerness to establish ourselves as a group with a distinctive vocabulary.
I couldn’t agree more. Having worked in IT Consulting for the last 3-4 years as a Business Analyst, I am trying to lose the habit of ‘talking the consultant talk.’ As a Business Analyst my language and vocabulary should be clear and simple, not filled with buzz words and acronyms. This is something that we have to watch conciously as it is human nature to pick the lingo around us in order to fit in with the more technical IT crowd.