For a long time, I struggled to describe exactly what was my job as a Business Analyst. Signs were positive though. Year after year, I heard good comments from my colleagues, I was asked to coach juniors, and my annual reviews were great. 🏆
However, not being a deep expert at anything, it was really hard to define me besides being a jack of all trades with my BA, UX, and PO hats. How do I grow professionally? How do I share your knowledge with my colleagues? Which projects should I focus on? It felt like a curse.
At one point, I even stopped writing on this blog. I saw that impostor syndrome coming back really fast – what can I write about that hasn’t been already written by someone else, probably more <put in any adjective here> than me? So this blog slowly became inactive.
But a few months before the pandemic, I had a flash that changed everything about how I see myself as a generalist Business Analyst:
“I make sense of chaos.”
Thinking about it, there were recurring patterns in the chaos of all my past jobs. Finding relevant information in an ocean of data, drawing links between pieces, bringing everyone to a common understanding of a situation, and creating holistic solutions – that’s was what I liked the most, and where I was at my best.
It took a while to figure it out, but I finally had a way to talk about my expertise. This whole idea of making sense of chaos made me think of so many things to write about that I thought, hey, I have this blog that is still out there on the Internet 😁
So get ready to make sense of chaos in the upcoming posts – I’m back!
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Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
As I moved through 2023 and into 2024, I think this post resonates with me. I think it is relevant too with there being more BA work being done offsite, or from a home, as opposed to in a team setting within an office. Thanks for sharing this.