Via James Robertson, I got this critique of the BABOK Guide and IIBA. I’m sure that nobody reading this blog will be shocked to learn that I disagree with the arguments made in that post. Let’s look specifically at the assertions and assumptions made by the author, though, and I’ll explain why I disagree. In it, the author writes:
Business Analysis, on the other hand, has appeared on the stage only recently and the efforts being directed towards distilling a body of knowledge, and associated certification standards and educational programs, seem very much pre-mature.
I hear this claim a lot–that business analysis is a “new” profession. I don’t think it’s as new as a lot of people seem to think, though. What’s changed is that a) there’s a growing recognition of the need for the role and b) a lot of people who always did business analysis are starting to identify as BAs and using that title instead of the many different titles that prevailed in the past.
Business analysis has been around long enough for me to spend my entire career doing it. In fact, it was pretty much my first job out of school, and I certainly wasn’t the first BA to work in the companies that hired me. It’s been around long enough that my mother has experience in the role. She’s been retired for years, and finds the BABOK Guide both fully understandable and can see how it relates to what she used to do. If I look back to my first BA job, I believe my colleagues and I would have then understood what the BABOK Guide was driving at and how it related to what we did. Certainly, new techniques and approaches have been introduced over time, and we did our best to ensure that current practice and innovations were properly addressed in version 2.0. But frankly, given that my mother can understand perfectly well what I do and how these techniques work despite having retired from IT a decade ago, I don’t think that business analysis is as unstable as Mr. Gollner thinks it is.
The comparison to project management is an interesting one–largely because Mr. Gollner seems to be talking about PMI and project management as it is today without considering how it got there. One of the major reasons that “project management” is considered to be a well-defined role today is precisely because PMI built and developed a body of knowledge that became the standard for our understanding of the role. PMI didn’t emerge from a well-defined, universally accepted standard understanding of project management–it helped to create it.
The other issue that’s behind a lot of the criticisms in this article rests with the distinction between “generally accepted practices” and “best practices”. Mr. Gollner complains:
As an example, consider the issue of analytical modeling notations, where the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) is forced to catalogue a ramshackle list of options with many of these, such as Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERD) or the “Unified” Modeling Language (UML), being deeply rooted in very specific implementation paradigms for information technology.
His complaint seems to be that the practice of requirements analysis is still quite immature, given that there are still a lot of different modeling practices in use, many of which overlap or are designed specifically for IT, and we don’t definitively understand which techniques are most effective.
All that is true, but I don’t think it’s relevant, unless you believe that if we can’t do it perfectly we shouldn’t do it at all.
The BABOK Guide describes “generally accepted practice”–that is, what business analysts are actually doing. In fact, we’ve done enough research, surveys, solicitation of expert opinion, and collection of feedback from practitioners to be quite confident that the BABOK Guide really does accurately describe that. It gives us a standard of practice for BAs–if I walk into a new job as a BA, knowing how to do what the BABOK describes, I can reasonably expect to be prepared for most of the situations I will encounter on the job. Similarly, an employer who hires a BA has a basis for understanding what they can expect that BA to know how to do. For many BA practitioners, this has been a major improvement over what exists today.
That shared set of expectations is a necessary first step to figuring out what best practices are. Again, to go back to the example of PMI, the PMBOK Guide only talked about “generally accepted practice” for the first 20 years or so–PMI has only very recently reached the stage where they believe they can identify best practices (and I know that there are those who still strongly disagree with them). Until you have a shared set of expectations and outcomes a role or profession is supposed to achieve, how can you say that one approach is better than another? How can you say what those tools and techniques he wants us to be developing are supposed to be used for?
From my perspective, Mr. Gollner has got things almost exactly backwards. He’s complaining that IIBA shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing until the profession is where project management is today, but project management got there because PMI, along with many other individuals and organizations, laid the groundwork by doing what IIBA is doing now.
Would I like to be in a position to tell the world that a certain set of business analysis practices can be proven to reliably and consistently produce significant returns for organizations that practice them? Of course I would! As long as IIBA is being compared to PMI, though, let’s not forget that PMI only produced a study showing that for project management last year–40 years after the organization was founded, 24 years after the PMP certification was launched, and 14 years after the first complete draft of the PMBOK was published (and yes, the PMP does predate the PMBOK).
Now, I don’t want to wait until 2023 to demonstrate the value of business analysis. My hope, in fact, is that we will be in a position to do that within the next few years and even have some of that research incorporated into the next edition of the BABOK Guide. However, that research would be impossible without the shared definition and understanding of the profession we created through building the current edition.
The important question for practitioners is not whether the current BABOK Guide is perfect, but whether it represents an improvement over having no shared understanding or common definition of business analysis. Mr. Gollner can’t have it both ways. If our practice of requirements analysis is immature, and I agree it is, then someone needs to understand what those practitioners are doing and work on how to help them do it better. A large number of business analysts are still struggling with the fundamentals of our profession, and we don’t need a provable, robust model of organizational improvement to understand that they will benefit from understanding process analysis or facilitation skills or improving their communication skills or improving at any of the dozens of other competencies described in the BABOK Guide. If anyone has a case to make that business analysts and the organizations that employ them don’t need people with those abilities, I’d love to hear it.
Kevin Brennan, CBAP
VP, Professional Development
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