It's Not You, It's Me: Why I'm Ditching the Business Analyst Title after 10+ Wonderful Years

I’ve been having an existential crisis. Yes, really. And not even an original one. Just the classic existential questions: who am I? and what am I doing? I’m hopefully approaching it with a tad more maturity than most teenagers, but I wouldn’t want to risk testing that claim.

The TL;DR version is that I’ve realised that it is time to break up with the business analyst title. “Hannah, the business analyst” no longer fits what I am and what I do. Now, I am well aware that it’s absurd to be emotional about a job title but, look, people have relationships and break-ups with life-size dolls. So how weird am I really in the grand scheme of things?

I’m three paragraphs in and I already know that this is going to be a meandering collection of thoughts that don’t appear to have a strong relationship to each other. That’s sort of the nature of a slow-burn existential crisis, so I guess this shouldn’t be entirely unexpected. But in case that’s not the kind of read you’re up for, I’d suggest giving this one a pass. No judgement from me. 💖

That said, if you’re in the midst of your own deep pondering about your title, identity, pathway, or life, then welcome to a front row seat to my existential crisis.

You’re not alone.

To be clear, unlike most of the articles I write, this isn’t even really trying to be helpful. It is just me getting some stuff off my chest. Also, worth noting that ChatGPT is telling me that this is a rambling mess with terrible transitions and that I’m basically “doing writing wrong”. I’ve decided that I don’t care.

Consider yourself warned.

But if none of that has scared you off. Let’s get down and dirty with my existential crisis.

It is genuinely surprising how many times you can be told that you aren’t something without it actually sticking.

I’ve consistently been told that I’m not like other business analysts. That I don’t act like other business analysts. That I don’t think like other business analysts. That I don’t approach things like other business analysts. An anomaly.

I’m spectacularly embarrassed to admit that my (astonishingly arrogant) conclusion based on this information was that “this is how business analysis should be done”. Fast paced, just-in-time, high-volume delivery was obviously where the world was headed. My approach was simply ahead of the curve.

Lordy, the arrogance.

I remember being told by a senior business analyst at a MeetUp that I was doing things wrong because I wasn’t maintaining the huge requirements documentation that accompanied the original build of the system I was working on. At the time, I was a junior business analyst (in both title and experience) and the encounter really knocked my confidence.

Over time, worry became incredulity! I honestly cannot think of a better example of inventory waste than spending time maintaining a two-hundred-odd page document that no one other than me references! The suggestion was pretty wild, no to mention wildly misplaced for the kind of environment I was working in.

In the years since then, the encounter has since taken on a somewhat comedic tone in my head. I hear their comments in the voice of that lady in The Simpsons who always takes the opportunity to scream, “But what about the children!???!”

Except in this case it was, “But what about the traceability?????!?!?”

Which is all to say that I didn’t fit into the usual business analyst crowd. While they were still talking about big waterfall processes and big business cases, I was working in a remarkably agile, fast paced environment. The lessons didn’t fit, the tooling didn’t work, and the advice wasn’t applicable. So I took the theory but had to look elsewhere for practice. I found different heroes including Jeff Patton, Dan North, and Dave Snowden, amongst others.

Arguably, I still don’t fit.

It’s amusing to me that back then I was arguing that lean and just-in-time didn’t have to mean less critical thinking, and now I will happily rant to anyone who will listen about an industry that has simplified the real-world complexity into step-by-step templates and processes.

We have taken the worst parts of the old ways into the new world.

You can’t move at work without tripping over a rule about how things have to be done. We use the user story format but we write them in isolation and we avoid genuine co-creation and design by defining the scope to the nth degree with acceptance criteria, spreadsheets, wireframes, and documents. There are lots of expectations about format, but it is all a tad vague on the quality front.

Quality is like pornography. You know it when you see it.

But quality isn’t a thing we talk about much anymore. The “less bullshit” promised by the new ways of working have somehow become more process and rigmarole. Somewhere along the line we misplaced the most important part, namely: critical thinking.

Which is the part that we business analysts are ostensibly responsible for.

I’ve come full circle and now I’m the senior who wants to scream, “But what about the underlying business case?” at anyone who will listen.

But fear not! The IIBA is publishing memes. We’ll be fine.

When I was in high-school (age 13—18 in case you call it something different), my best friend and I came up with a theory that we called “The Game”. Yes it had capitals. Yes we came up with it in the middle of the night. Yes, it was genius.

It mapped out the social network we were part of. Then we rated the popularity and influence of each person in our social circle. Complex systems of “she said” and then “he said” were analysed to understand what happened not just in terms of facts, but in terms of the popularity competition. Karen loses points based on how she behaved at the dance. Ken gains sympathy points. Amy looked amazing at the party and caught the attention of the seniors … and so on.

We refined our map based on actual events, and we reassessed people’s positions and relationships. Using our map of the social network, we would play out scenarios and predict outcomes. And, most importantly, we used our “game” to keep ourselves safe. Being a teenage girl is a whole vibe, and trust me, understanding how the currents of power are flowing at your school is a kind of special protection.

No one else got it.

We quickly realised that actually keeping track of people’s positions was a full time job, so it became a background thing – a practical theory of how the world worked – with the assessments updated on an as-needed basis.

And years passed without me giving it a second thought.

So you can imagine that I was a bit shocked when I realised that a workplace is far more similar to high school than books and movies had led me to believe.

Admittedly, at work, the power assessment rarely depends on how cool your boyfriend/girlfriend is. But, barring that, work and high school are scarily similar. The biggest difference is that the popular kids in high school didn’t have their role embossed on a business card, but CEOs do. A formal hierarchy simplifies some of the analysis.

But a hierarchy is just part of the puzzle. Power happens. Politics happen. All the nonsense still happens. So some of the same social patterns that formed “The Game” in high-school were applicable at work.

Working out what is happening in all the complexity is something that I really enjoy. Never trust what something says it does, be far more interested in what it actually does. Endless enthusiasm for unpacking a problem/process/system/solution and finding stuff out.

A task I took to with zeal.

I recall telling my manager one time that “if the world didn’t want me muscling my way into shit and having opinions then it shouldn’t give me such good results from doing so.” Which was a bit on the nose. Even for me.

But I learnt from the best.

The very first business analyst I worked with was an absolute powerhouse. She was a scrum master, plus business analyst, plus lead, plus proxy product manager, plus, plus, plus. She was neither the most conventional nor a standard role model for how to do the business analyst role. But she set the standard for me.

A standard very few business analysts meet. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure that I do.

I was so disappointed by her replacement; the difference was night and day. Not just in terms of output, but in terms of “care factor”, details, and quality. Her replacement became my standard for what I think of as a “bum-on-seat” business analyst – someone who does the job but doesn’t really care about the system, the business, the team, or making a difference.

I vowed to never be one of them, and quietly ignored that the ratio of awesome business analysts had dropped to 50%. Ignoring uncomfortable realities is easy when you’re invested in an idea.

And I really, really liked the idea of being a great business analyst.

My name is a palindrome.

As a kid I was really taken with it – it made me special. My mum used to tell me that it was a palindrome because “I was her most balanced child”, an idea that was nice when I was a kid, but one I categorically rejected and abhorred as a teenager. Balanced? No way.

So I messed with it and started spelling it “Hana” although I continued to pronounce it “Hannah”. You know you’ve successfully changed how people think of you when your grandmother writes your birthday card and uses your chosen spelling!

Hana was how I spelt my name up until only a few years ago.

One thing that has been really awesome over the last decade is the increased focus and use of te reo māori here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Daily use increases pretty much everywhere, and there’s a huge and renewed focus on pronunciation across the board. It is truly wonderful.

But it had a hilarious side-effect.

As people became more aware of proper pronunciation, there was an increase in anxiety about how to say my name. Many would reach out to clarify its pronunciation, often nervously apologising when they realised I still used the classic English pronunciation.

A situation I observed with rising discomfort.

What started as an expression of teenage angst was now causing confusion for others. Not cool!

So a couple of years ago, I called an end to the embarrassing experiment and quietly reverted to the original spelling.

The crazy thing is how easy it was to change my name in the first place. And it’s equally crazy how easy it was to change it back. People, for the most part, just rolled with it. I got the occasional query, but for the most part, it was crickets. The name didn’t change me. Nor did I change the name.

I am still Hannah, irrelevant of the exact number and ordering of letters.

You know the story about the CTO who comes in and kicks off some kind of transformation in their department. Except their “transformation” is just implementing the precise pattern that worked for them at their last gig. One pattern for success, context be damned.

It usually doesn’t end well. Having one answer for everything is a recipe for failure.

A friend of mine talks about her internal library of patterns. Everything is a system, and everything is a pattern, including events, interactions, ventures, businesses, relationships – a pattern you can work out if you’re paying attention. Either what you’re seeing is a new pattern (exciting!) or an old pattern playing itself out (interesting opportunity to refine your understanding!).

It takes years to build a comprehensive library.

But at some point you have enough patterns that you can really start to use them to make sense of the world around you. Not as an answer per se, but as a shortcut to a working hypothesis. This is when a pattern library starts to become seriously useful. Delivery slowed? There’s several patterns that might cause that. Tension in the team? Seen that before, and I know what to look for.

Humans are invariably complicated, but a tad less complex than we like to think.

You see, the CTO would have been successful if they had treated their “pattern for success” as a hypothesis, rather than a strict recipe. A large pattern library is what makes a good senior in any role. But it is especially true for senior business analysts.

But that’s no longer really true is it?

Nowadays a senior business analyst is just anyone with more than 3 years experience. Most people agree that a business analyst can be an entry level role and many business analysts operate in only one or two quadrants of the tech, people, process, data box that makes up a business capability.

Never fear, LinkedIn has you covered! Here are some tips to help you sound more like a business analyst, which I’m sure will help you get a six figure job as a business analyst with no business analyst experience. Or maybe I can interest you in getting certified as a business analyst by Salesforce?

I love patterns.

Which is why it is somewhat amusing that I didn’t see the pattern in front of me. Even as the overlap in the Venn diagram of what I do and what the term “business analyst” means got smaller and smaller, I have refused to give up on the title.

On my post on this topic, one person commented that there is so much value in the role and they were working to change the market perception to avoid reinventing the wheel. I cynically noted that they didn’t have “business analyst” in their LinkedIn tagline.

Even though I’d really like to, I don’t get to define the role. The market tells us the value of the thing. The market shapes it. Capitalism at play.

Economics.

It’s just business.

The real problem isn’t the title.

It’s me.

How many times do I need to be told something before I really hear it?

Well, according to the evidence, many, many times. More precisely, many times plus just once from Diana who didn’t say it as an observation but as a critique of how I was positioning myself. As a wake up call. She called me out. She directly challenged my identity as a business analyst.

I couldn’t come up with a rational argument for retaining the business analyst title. Other than “I’m scared!”

I actually squirmed like a small child who’s been caught red-handed.

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I experienced this with existential dread. It felt like I had stumbled into a hall that I didn’t know existed to find far too many doors to try to open. Retreating back into the room I had stumbled out of feels like admitting failure. It might be exciting if I wasn’t so fucking terrified.

Those of you who know me in the real know that the enthusiasm for work is not a put-on. It’s not a constructed persona. I really do care about the work. There’s a reason I’ve spent a significant amount of time writing/thinking/talking about work stuff in my free time: I’m a work nerd. I think that’s partly why I care so much for the title – it was through this title that I found meaning in my work.

Prying apart the meaning from the title is something I’ve been wrestling with since then.

I know that the business analyst title is a comfortable blanket. A comfortable identify. But without it, what am I? What do I do?

Even if I dream of working for myself one day, the reality is that my contract will soon end and I’ll be playing in the same toxic job market as everyone else. And the market is labels, rates, skills and yes, titles.

And what the market thinks a business analyst is does not represent what I do.

I don’t know about you, but when all the information aligns and supports a conclusion, then there’s this internal sense of “rightness”, of “truth”. I get this “rightness” feeling when pencils are ordered by colour in the box. Or when the leftovers fit perfectly in the container. Or when there’s a clear winner in the options analysis. It is a feeling of satisfaction.

I’m scared. I don’t know what’s next. But I have that feeling of “rightness” about ditching the “business analyst” title.

At the end of the day, I’m still Hannah.

And I’ll work out how to label what I do later.

💔