Explore your project and business environment

- Take my advice here. Since you, as a business analyst, are in front of your end users and customers to talk requirements, it falls greatly on your shoulders to know and be able to articulate just why this change is needed. That is, you need to know your project and know your business environment. Even if you're junior on the project and given very specific tasks, you need to get the larger perspective. Working either as a BA or doing BA kind of work, such as project managers, systems analysts, product owners, and SMEs, you are, in part, strategist, and that means you need the perspective necessary for strategy. You're driving the discussions and the definition of the why, and this could be the larger why for the organizational path. But you're also tactical, in the sense that you also drive requirement definition, solution shape, and implementation, for this particular project. If you can speak convincingly to the alignment of the project to the broader business objectives, you are several steps closer to getting people on board. So, get to know these strategic objectives and goals for the business, the function, or the team you're working with. You've heard this a lot, but I cannot stress the importance enough. Lead your discovery, as well as your initial stakeholder discussions, with, "Why transform?" This could be either as a question to your senior executives, or as a statement, once the strategic reason behind the project is crystal clear. Don't stop at the first answers you're given. Get to the specifics. And by specifics, I don't mean the mission statement. I mean the description of the change itself. You see, you're not looking for some high level blurb, such as, "We're enabling our customer's ambitions." This is way too high level. It's not specific enough to gather you momentum or explain the reasons for, "Why transform?" Instead, look for something such as, "We are changing our system to attract a new customer group." Or, "We're moving away from the manual processes because of the industry shifts and customer turnaround expectations." These are of course, just a couple of examples, but you get my drift. Get to specifics because that's your value proposition, and when I say your, I mean you. Yes, you as a BA, you have a value proposition because you are the face of change. You are in the discussions. You talk to customers about their needs. You communicate with them on what the effective solution looks like. This further helps you elicit requirements. These are robust and well thought through. They are the type of requirements that will return business benefits. So with a strong sense and reason for the why, and a robust and aligned business needs, your own value proposition just got stronger.