Hi there, and welcome to Hedgercation.com

It’s a bad portmanteau, I know, but my name is Tim Hedger and I was brought up by two teachers so it seemed to fit at the time!

I’m a passionate advocate for business analysis, with a great deal of experience in carving out opportunities for the function and promoting the value of the role in the organisations I’ve worked for.

I’ve spent over 20 years with the words ‘business’ and ‘analyst’ somewhere my job title – in fact, I’ve had 14 job titles with ‘business’ or ‘analyst’ (or ‘analysis’ to be fair) in them, which indicates how much variance there is in how different organisations interpret the role and where it best fits in the organisation.

In that time have worked in five very different industries – mobile telecommunications, local government, grocery retail, parcel delivery and, most recently, agile consultancy (where I had client engagements with a global online betting company,  a health technology company, and an integrated care provider).

I’ve worked pre-project, on projects, on programmes, across products, domains and the entire enterprise, and across multiple organisations; as well as as an internal and external consultant, in waterfall, iterative, agile and product environments.

I’ve done everything from wholesale organisational design at one end to detailed functional design at the other, via business process reengineering. The more senior I’ve become in each organisation, the more I’ve also got involved in change operating model design – usually an annual event – leading to a short stint consulting in precisely that.

Yet despite all these variances, if I were to distil my core understanding of business analysis into three key points, it would be these:

1. Business analysis is a catch-all terms that encompasses anything required to help an organisation get from ‘state A’ to ‘state B’
2. Most people think in pictures, so if you can help them picture something you can help them to understand it
3. The big picture is everything: without context, change makes people nervous and resistant; with context, you get an alignment that enables traction and drives progress

To give you an example, with no context whatsoever, what’s this?

Not obvious is it? It’s actually household dust magnified 1000 times. Context is really quite important for being able to understand what you’re looking at isn’t it!

However, the trouble with business analysis is that business analysts are often a victim of their own success. Combine the breadth in the scope of the role with the variance in responsibility and then the flexibility to do whatever is needed to get the business from ‘state A’ to ‘state B’ and you have a real challenge defining the role in an organisation. If it’s hard to define, it’s going to be hard to promote – and this is exacerbated by the fact that a business analyst often works alongside a figurehead – an individual associated with the change – whether that’s a programme or project manager, or a business or product owner.

This leads to a perception that business analysis is about the application of methods, tools, and techniques, or the completion of deliverables- which are all really about how business analysis is done, not what business analysis is.

I mean – how do you explain what you do to your elderly or younger relatives? I try – I really do. At best I get blank expressions and platitudes like: “that’s nice dear”. At worst I get outright confusion: “you lost me at ‘project’ son!”.

Yet organisations definitely value good BAs, even if they’re not quite sure why!

There are two analogies that I think encapsulate this. The first is a quote I heard at an IIBA event, where a director in one organisation had said:

“BAs are like roast potatoes. Not necessarily the main event, but you wouldn’t want a Sunday roast without them”

This really resonated with me – good roasties can make a Sunday lunch; bad roasties can ruin one – but they’re not the mean feature are they?

The second is a quote from Italian defender Paolo Maldini, who said:

“If I have to make a tackle, I’ve already made a mistake”

That really resonated with me. Because isn’t it a defender’s job to make tackles? In a world of OPTA stats and fantasy football leagues, aren’t the highest-scoring defenders the ones making the most tackles?

Yet he’s saying if he has to do any of that, he’s already made a mistake. And that starts to make sense when you consider that he once won ‘man of the match’ in a game in which he hardly touched the ball; instead he read the game, influenced the passage of play, and ultimately enabled the right outcome – which was that the other team didn’t score and his team won the match.

And I think that’s a good analogue for what a world-class BA brings to a business – understanding the business, its strategy and its desired outcomes, and being nimble enough to influence the right outcomes without necessary having the authority to effect them.

So we know what a good BA looks like, but we have another problem: the ‘requirements into IT’ space is becoming increasingly crowded.

In the good old days you had the business (who knew nothing about IT), and IT (who knew nothing about the business). The BA was the go-between, acting as interpreter and translator, ensuring that IT understood the business needs, and business stakeholders understood the solution.

Much of the challenge is because of the general fracturing of the role – which in turn is largely because of Agile. In one organisation I worked in, the space traditionally associated with BAs had been fractured into at least 6 additional roles:

It does beg the question – what is the future for the BA profession? And my thoughts on the matter are: the clue could very well be in the term.

Because what is the pinnacle of the BA profession? Maybe it’s different for different people, but for me it’s about hacking an organisation’s thought process, becoming a general-purpose trusted adviser whom the execs want in the room when they’re making big decisions.

It’s when the CEO taps you on the should to say:

“Tim, have you got a few minutes? I’ve got a big idea I’d like to run past you because I really like the way you think”.

So I’ve created this site as a resource for business analysts. My aim is to encourage a deeper understanding of what business analysis is, and through it enable business analysts to thrive in their organisations, particularly in a product environment.

It contains articles and case studies about particular techniques that I’ve found to be powerful, videos of presentations I’ve done, and links to other resources I’ve found useful over the years.

I hope you enjoy exploring it, and I’d be absolutely delighted if you felt compelled to comment on anything you’ve seen.