Hi I'm Yulia Kosarenko, author of the book "Business analyst: a profession and a mindset"
Today we will talk about business analysis technique called immersion.
Immersion is nothing else but learning by experience.
According to the dictionary, immersion is absorbing involvement,
learning based on your extensive exposure to the environment that you need to learn about.
and a great example is immersion in a foreign language.
As business analysts, we immerse ourselves into business process to learn and understand it
and our goal is to understand what people actually do; not what they say they do,
not what their managers think they do,
and not what the documentation says they are supposed to do.
There are two main ways of going about it.
one is job shadowing and the other is apprenticeship.
job shadowing is nothing else but learning by observing
this is where you observe an expert, you watch what they're doing,
you ask why, you ask for explanations,
and you follow them along as they do their job.
Apprenticeship is learning by doing.
This is when you start to help and practice and you're guided by your teacher
to do small tasks, and then large tasks, so that eventually you will be able to do the job yourself.
As business analysts we would usually do job shadowing
and we will shadow the expert in a business process or someone who is working in operations or customer service
we will observe them to see what they normally do as part of their daily job
and goal for us is to really understand their process
how do they do every step what are the problems, what are the exceptions,
what are different the different conditions because you need that knowledge
to understand the process and then to understand how you need to improve it
modify it, tweak it, and optimize it.
Let's talk about some immersion best practices.
How do you approach immersion to really make it successful,
to give you what you really came for which is knowledge and understanding of the business process
Imagine you were a diver and you're immersing yourself into the blue waters ,
you have other divers around you and there are certain rules you have to observe.
The first rule is respect:
you always have to respect the person that's giving you their time.
Never show up unannounced, ask for permission, make arrangements with their manager
and make sure that you are expected and you don't show up at the time where it's most inconvenient.
Humility: that means that you always remember you are a student
you are learning from someone else you are not there as an analyst, you're not there as an auditor,
you are not there to monitor, you are there to watch, observe, and learn and understand .
No judgment: if you see something being done that you perhaps don't think is right
or looks suspicious, or doesn't look very efficient,
don't judge - that's not the part where you judge
this is just the part where you collect information
and when you observe the reality of the business process.
Often, when person is doing something not by the book and not according to the rules,
there is a reason for it - perhaps the process doesn't make sense
or certain steps are in the wrong order
or they don't have the right data - there may be so many reasons why.
First of all your job is to learn and absorb what is being done
and you can start asking why, but you do not judge.
You have to be really focused during the immersion.
Don't check your phone all the time, don't go outside, don't start talking to your friends,
You are there and someone else is giving you their precious time.
you really need to focus on where you are and be always in the moment,
and always absorbing, always monitoring, and always trying to understand.
Now there are a few more things that we want to talk about
because as you come into this different business environment,
you have to really make it efficient and make other people comfortable.
you are there together, you are not there to make other people disturbed,
you're not there to make them uncomfortable.
So ask them: don't showcase to me.
That means that you ask other people not to do anything different than they usually do.
They don't have to showcase to you it's not a parade,
it's not a demonstration you really want them to do what they do normally.
not by the book but how they would do it because one of your goals is
to understand deviations of the process, understand when the current procedures don't work,
where the rules don't make sense anymore.
Perhaps there are some workarounds - you do want to see them,
that's part of the information that you came here for.
You want to explore the exceptions and workarounds
Is there a yellow post-it note on someone's desk?
perhaps in certain times they do something different because they have learned before by experience
that the the procedural way that's documented doesn't work
perhaps they go and ask someone for additional data maybe it's not in the procedure either
ask them about the workarounds and exceptions, ask why and document it
because this is where you may need to make changes to the process
to make it more efficient and easier for people to follow.
Try to be helpful.
When you are doing job shadowing you will inevitably slow someone down
because as you're there you're asking for the explanation, you're trying to understand,
perhaps you're making copies or you're taking screenshots.
it will slow a person down.
perhaps they have certain criteria or performance indicators to match,
so try to be helpful, try to do some little things for them,
try to not make your presence a burden to another person.
And never, never ever go behind anyone's back.
If you see something that you don't think is right
you are not there to report it to their manage, you are not an auditor,
you are there to learn, you are an independent observer.
If you ever go behind someone's back and report on something that you have seen that you don't think is right
you will never gain that trust again - this is not the time for it.
This is job shadowing which is learning by observing.
Now one other important point is you always have to prepare a plan B
Sometimes as you come in for your first day of job shadowing
The people you are with or you will be with that day don't know what to expect
they are not sure what they are supposed to do
perhaps they were told not to even do their regular work
so you have to really prepare them and move them in that direction
where your job shadowing day will be efficient.
Think about it by preparing open questions:
perhaps you will want to start with what do you do questions
for example, you may ask how do you know what to do today
you just came in - what are your tasks for the day
Where you get them from, how do you know what to do and in which order
If you have a queue of tasks - what's the priority
which one do you do first or is someone choosing the priority for you
do you do this step regularly, is this a special case, how is it special?
Perhaps you want to ask whether their schedule varies from day to day
and what are the differences and how their activities differ
And a really good question and the one day probably will want to answer is
answer is what is their most painful time-consuming and least favorite task, and why.
This type of information is priceless to you: you are learning about process and its efficiencies
and inefficiencies, you want to understand the bottlenecks,
you want to understand what doesn't work perfectly
so try to learn and ask those open-ended questions.
you may ask how do you do it questions
show me how would you normally do this
do you always follow these steps
what results do you expect, do you follow a written procedure,
is there anything you do differently than the procedure says? why?
There is usually a reason. Is there anything in the procedure that does not make sense?
Again you're not being judgmental you're just trying to understand.
There are some what-if questions you might ask.
For example, what can go wrong, what are the most frequent problems,
what would slow you down how do you know what to do in case of a problem,
what happens if you can't resolve it
and perhaps what's the most unexpected problem that you've experienced.
All of these and many other questions was experience you will come up with
you may ask what do they what happens when they go on vacation
you may ask whether they do something different at the end of the month or at the end of the year,
and usually as you go through these open questions you might get more and more information
from the person that you're working with.
So hopefully these ideas gave you something to start with
if you've never tried job shadowing before.
I really want you to leave it with this thought today: don't be afraid to try it
remember: a picture's worth a thousand words but an immersion into an activity
is probably worth a thousand pictures
so if you have never tried a job immersion
you might actually find that it's really helpful to you as a business analyst.
This is it for today. for more information visit my website
why-change.com, check out my book "Business analyst: a profession and a mindset"
Thank you for spending this time with me. Until next time. Bye-bye!