In anticipation of his presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Oct 31, – Nov. 4, 2016, we asked Kevin Haines, Sr. Business Systems Analyst, Principal Consultant at Online Business Systems, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled, The Critical role of the Lead BA.

Q: In what ways do you see your group helping your organization pursue business excellence?

A: Pursuing business excellence means understanding your customer and their needs. I am currently working very closely with a large business team that is looking to be able to respond more quickly and productively to changes in the market. It is critical to be nimble when your customers have so many choices and are looking to take advantage of changes in the market, especially for financial services.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing more robust business capabilities for your organization?

A: Integrating with internal and external systems requires a great deal of collaboration and coordination. It can be a real challenge trying to coordinate many moving pieces. Diligent planning and communication can go a long way to ensure you are aligned.

Q: What are your short-term goals for becoming more agile?

A: Being agile means being able to deliver small wins frequently with a very short cycle. We include key business and development resources to identify requirements and deliver solutions quickly. Understanding the key resources to make this happen can be difficult in a large organization.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in the past year?

A: Having dedicated team members is a great advantage. In organizations where key resources are pulled in many directions it is extremely important to be able to be focused to reduce churn and delays.

Q: What do you see as the most important goal or trend for business analysts and other professionals to keep in mind?

A: It is becoming more and more important to deliver business value. It is important to ask ourselves if our customer would be willing to pay for this effort. Expectations for delivering value increase exponentially. As our customers become more tech-savvy they are not willing to pay extra for incomplete or unusable solutions.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your business operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: We have been using software to track issues that allows us to have better visibility and analysis of effort. It provides workflow to move through the SDLC but is lightweight and responsive. We have gone from managing via spreadsheets to this tool which we have found very beneficial.

Q: If you could go back 5 years in time and give some professional insight or advice to yourself, what would it be?

A: It was roughly 5 years ago that I made a fairly significant career change. The change that I made really aligned with my skills and interest. If I had the opportunity to give myself advice 5 years ago it would be to trust in myself and to go for it.

Q: What’s one question you wished you were asked in this interview but were not? And how would you answer?

A: What advice would you give to a young analyst starting out? I would encourage a junior analyst to work on developing their communication skills. Having the ability to listen effectively and to communicate and relate to a diverse type of stakeholder will take you far.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: You may laugh, I hope you don’t cry, and I hope you will see that the Lead BA performs a critical role and employs a number of techniques and skills that are part art and part science. A combination of soft and hard skills rounds out a senior BA.

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Don’t miss Kevin’s presentation, The Critical role of the Lead BA, at Building Business Capability on Wednesday, November 2, 2016 from 10:25 to 11:25 am. Click here to register for attendance.