Comfort zone and undervaluing ourselves

In my opinion, business analysis may be one of the professions where you are most often required to step out of your comfort zone and most often assumed to have an extremely wide yet at the same time in depth range of knowledge and experience. You may also be largely underpaid and should realize how valuable you actually are. Why do I say this?

-The basic assumption is that you have a holistic understanding of the full software lifecycle from the idea level through to requirements definition, solution design, implementation, maintenance and decommissioning.

-You are expected to be able to not only initialize projects but also take them on as if you are a project manager by profession.

-You are expected to be a change expert, able to design large scale transformation initiatives,design training material and deliver them as well

-You are expected to have an in depth understanding of data architecture, management and analytics software like Tableau or Power BI

-People will assume you are an expert tester who can not only create testing strategies and documentation but most of the time also execute and report on testing yourself as if you have many years of QA experience.

-Most of the time, as a supplement to large scale change management, your role will involve continuous improvement on a smaller scale and people want you to be creative, entrepreneurial and certified in Lean.

-You are supposed to be able to have conversations with and present to absolutely anyone, whether it be the CEO or the newly graduated software developer.

-On the topic of presentations, you are expected to have no problems creating and presenting business cases for various scenarios your company is facing,even if you have no prior experience with that particular situation.

-Since you work in IT and are approachable, any IT topic whatsoever is fair game and you should know it all.

-Most job descriptions will assume you not only know all of the above, but will also ask you to be the BA leader in their organization, driving their BA discipline and mentoring their other BAs

-You are expected to have in depth process modeling knowledge and experience, being able to interview people who don't want to be interviewed about why they do and how they work. Afterwards you will need to visualize this in the format preferred by the organization you work for.

-Finally, on top of all of the IT related items above, it is crucial and expected that you have extensive knowledge of the business domain you are involved with.

For the reasons listed above, I will say that business analysis is one of the most rewarding yet challenging professions you may get yourself into. At the same time, due to lack of understanding from outsiders and employers, it may be one of the most undervalued professions. We bring tremendous value to our organizations so let's all push for the recognition and compensation we deserve!