“Time flies. It’s up to you to be the navigator.” ~ Robert Orben

This quote is very applicable to our case. We launched our first book, “Business Analysis Kickstart”, back in 2010. But it seems like it was yesterday.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. The BA industry has continued to develop. Agile has become a working approach on many more projects. The IIBA gradually improved the BABOK v2 to reflect these major changes to the BA industry, resulting in the publication of the BABOK v3.

I, too, decided to review what we’ve learned over these five years.

The main driver for our first book was to address the questions of people who are either involved or are getting started in business analysis. Business Analysis Kickstart explained the approach, techniques and many tricks for you to to have up your sleeve. We used a highly visual way of delivering information to save you time and effort required for getting new BA knowledge.

Judging by my own experience across many projects, the profession has a rather tall learning curve, even for experienced people, not to mention those who are just starting out in the job. It requires a lot of practice with approach and techniques. You need to learn many tricks to do the job effectively and build your professional value. This is just as true today as it was in 2010.

As such, I believe that business analysts still need a resource which provides practical, in-depth advice about business analysis skills and techniques.

I ended up doing a thorough review of BA Kickstart and significantly expanding it based on my own experience and the large amount of feedback and questions we received over the years. As a result, I got four times as much material compared to the original book, and the output of this process is the new book, “A Navigator Into Business Analysis”.

The new book builds on the solid foundation of the previous book, BA Kickstart, and provides both a broader and deeper coverage of business analysis. Among many other things, it highlights many aspects of functioning organisations that BAs need to be aware of, and what factors business analysts must consider and base their recommendations on for the final solutions (business and information context, environment, stakeholders, infrastructure, etc.).

I kept the same successful approach to presenting information that our readers enjoyed. This approach:

  • delivers a lot of information through quality visuals
  • enables you learn at your own pace
  • facilitates quick grasping of new complex knowledge
  • saves you time on learning professional tricks
  • delivers new effective skills
  • gives you great insights into BA techniques
  • delivers faster results that can be used in your job straight away.

The book is split into three parts, and the current table of contents for Part 1 looks like this:

Module 1: Business Analysis Overview

Module 2: Business Analyst’s Core Skills

Module 3: Business Analysis Lifecycle

Module 4: Business Analysis Techniques

Module 5: Business Analysis Techniques, Insights

Module 6: Business Analysis Templates

I refined the BA Techniques chapter to reflect the changes made to the BABOK® v3, and added insights into some of the most used techniques.

I’m sure that Part 1 will serve well to those who are considering business analysis as a potential profession, or those making initial steps in a BA career.

The book is going through the final polishing stage, and it will be available to you in a few weeks. Stay tuned to find out what is in Part 2!