Business Analyst Mentor helps out with Study group and online training

I’ve been busy recently with marketing and preparing for the IIBA UK conference. I’ve also been invited to be part of a ‘mentor committee’ along with Doug Goldberg, Linda Erzah and Laura Brandau to support an online Study Group.
This initiative is being steered by David Maynard who has invested a lot of time in setting up, monitoring and directing this Study Group (for which he should be thanked).

Initially, David has set up a reading group where the BABOK has been the ‘text’ under study with a lot of interest and praise for Ellen Gottesdiener’s ‘Software Requirements Memory Jogger’ (see my eBook where I recommend this book)
It wasn’t clear, initially, the long term direction this was going to take (i.e. what the members wanted from this) but this has emerged recently with the members clearly voting for a case study experience to really get under the skin of the business analyst role.
The mentor committee has started working on this and the plan is to start this exercise at the start of October. We wll be using The Software Requirements Memory Jogger as our reference and will be acting as both guides and ‘real world’ stakeholders during the course of the exercise.

I’ll be reporting back on this as it progresses.

The real reason I’ve agreed to commit time to this is to help me really understand the professional development needs of the business analyst community, whether that is new/inexperienced business analysts or those looking to enter the profession.

My eBook and informal, ad hoc mentoring have helped take me a long way in understanding the community’s needs but I hope this will provide me with some deeper insight.

In order to support developing that insight, I have introduced a quick survey that helps me get a ’snapshot’ of the type of people who are looking for support in professional development and the problems they are facing. I would appreciate you taking three minutes (only four questions!) to complete the survey here.

This will allow me to develop the products that address problems business analysts (or aspiring BA’s) face today.