Wendy Stookesberry created momentum in her business analyst career by volunteering to do a business analysis task. She got noticed as someone who went above and beyond and one BA task led to another and then another. She has also explored internal options and discovered that her management is open to creating a new BA role for her. Soon she’ll be starting that new role, which will lead her back to even more opportunities to expand her business analyst experience as she solidifies her career options. Let’s look at her story.
Wendy Stookesberry was a software developer. She documented a business process for her software development team in June of 2012. She had already taken one of our career planning courses and she knew she wanted to be a business analyst. But in her current software development role she didn’t have a lot of opportunities for customer interaction or to do business analysis work.
At first, she wasn’t sure about moving forward with the business process analysis course because it meant getting buy-in from her manager to document one of their software development processes, and she wasn’t sure how this request would go over.
But her offer to document a business process was well-received and she was assigned to documenting a current state development process in which the team was exploring some automation opportunities. After a few weeks of working through the process documentation, Wendy presented her document to the management team. It (and she) got rave reviews and she was asked to do more work like this and was even called into a customer requirements meeting, something that didn’t typically happen to software developers in her organization.
Since then, Wendy has continued to offer her skills up to the organization and take on business analysis responsibilities – she’s created a virtuous cycle of one BA task leading to another.A little over six months later, Wendy officially moved into her new position as a business analyst in this organization.