Part Three – Business Knowledge

By Retta Witter, Senior Consultant, J. Geiger Consulting, Inc.

This week’s blog is number three in the series, Underlying Competencies, and will focus on Business Knowledge (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2015, pp. 199 – 203). The plan is for the series to culminate in an evening roundtable for attendees to discuss their thoughts and share ideas related to Underlying Competencies. If there are questions you have for the discussion or would like to participate, please email me or place them in the comments.

The Business Knowledge competency contains five sub-competencies:

• Business Acumen

• Industry Knowledge

• Organizational Knowledge

• Solution Knowledge

• Methodology Knowledge

Business Acumen

There’s know way around it— this simply takes time to develop. That said, there are ways to accelerate development, and one of the best methods for doing so is to join a trade association. For example, if one is in Human Resources, then being a member of Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) is a great idea.

I joined the IIBA, International institute of Business Analysis, to help me sharpen my skills as well as keep them up to date. The speed at which approaches, methodologies, technologies, etc. change is amazing and keeping with the pace takes a commitment to maintaining Business Acumen.

Industry Knowledge

The Fox Valley, Wisconsin where I’ve lived and worked for most of my career is heavy into manufacturing. We also have several great health care organizations. Needless to say, i’s common to have opportunities to consult or work in companies here within these core industries.

To help with Industry Knowledge consider the following:

• Trends (this is always changing and keeping up to date is important)

• Understanding suppliers or markets impacting an industry vertical, especially those in your region

• Seasonality— Is it holiday based or weather based? Hurricane or snow seasons?

Case in point: working for a company that is impacted by snow, say, in the northern part of the country makes understanding seasonal cycles very important. Think companies that make snow blowers, or generators!

Organizational Knowledge

As a consultant, this competency can be the toughest. Learning the nuances of an organization, it’s culture, various policies/protocols and how to adapt takes time, and I find that it takes a communicative mindset. Next week’s blog is on Communication, a skill that I use a lot, especially at the beginning of an engagement. Effective communication helps me get a feel for the players on a project as well as the political atmosphere.

One often overlooked aspect of Organizational Knowledge is that it’s important to understand organizational jargon. AAR can stand for many things, After Action Report, Air America Radio or All-American Road depending on who you are talking to and context. Now imagine if English isn’t your first or second language! We’ll touch more on that next week, but as you can see, understanding the organization is important for a variety of reasons.

Solution Knowledge

Solution Knowledge really ties well with Business Acumen. It’s important to understand the way that a business operates to best understand solution options to a particular problem, and which solution will best fit for long term success.

For me, a key part of Solution Knowledge is understanding the software that I’m helping to implement. For instance, if I can know how it works and try and relate that functionality to the business’ standard operating procedures, I might be able to make a recommendation to tweak a business process vs. custom coding.

Methodology Knowledge

Methodology Knowledge helps in the understanding of context, dependencies, opportunities, and constraints.

Again, as a consultant, I’m constantly learning new methodologies— every company can do things a little differently even while employing commonly known nomenclature.

What terms, tools and techniques are used by your organization to accomplish work? Agile, Scrum, Dev Ops are some hot topics right now.

When I was working on my MBA, I had already been implementing ERP systems as a professional for about 7 years or so. One of the classes from my MBA program that really sticks with me to this day was on ERP systems. ERP implementation bears with it various methodologies, and we often discussed the pros and cons of many of them, especially standardization/out-of-the-box vs. customization…and somewhere in between. In many ways, implementing ERP systems really touches each one of these Business Knowledge competencies. It was a great class!

As a reminder, this series culminates in an evening roundtable event for attendees to discuss their thoughts and share knowledge around Underlying Competencies. If there are questions you have for the discussion or would like to participate, please email me or place them in the comments.

Stop by next week for Part 4: Communication

Bibliography

International Institute of Business Analysis. (2015). BABOK A GUIDE TO THE BUSINESS ANALYSIS BODY OF KNOWLEDGE (Vol. V3). Toronto, Ontario, Canada.: IIBA