Reflections on Growing a Business Analysis Community of Practice

Since 2014 I've helped grow our organization's Business Analysis Community of Practice. Today this active CoP brings together practitioners and practices from all over our university. The CoP:

• Creates a place for new practitioners to feel welcomed and meet others doing similar work
• Enables practitioners to build each other's knowledge of best practices and business domains throughout the university 
• Helps practitioners converge on shared methods, making it easier for teams to get started and share informations
• Helps practitioners understand business analysis career paths and retain great people in the organization

If you don't already do something like this in your organization, I really encourage you to try it! Here are my reflections and lessons learned.

The early days: peer networking

The CoP was founded around 2012 by Colleen Kelly, a business analyst in central IT at the time. It started as an invitation to meet once a month in the cafeteria for afternoon coffee. Colleen used her network to reach out to peers, word got around, and by the time I joined in 2014 there was a core group of five to ten "regulars." We met to chat, network, and hear about each other's projects.

Just a few simple tools helped the group get started: a mailing list that anyone could join, and an internal web page with basic meeting information. The CoP also benefited from the work of our fantastic Organizational Development team in central IT, which promoted the concept of CoPs and regularly brings together the volunteer CoP leaders to exchange their experiences. (You can find all the CoPs that this great work has resulted in on this site.)

In retrospect I think some key aspects of this phase were:

• Concept of the CoP -- some organizational encouragement for practitioners to get together
• Someone to take the lead -- it only takes one volunteer to get the ball rolling
• Open community -- anyone could come for a friendly chat regardless of their level of experience
• Low threshold of participation -- no expectation for anyone to prepare content

Evolution to topical sessions

As a new business analyst at the university I had a strong interest in hearing about and sharing business analysis best practices. I found other CoP members were interested in this too, though we also found that we all had slightly different roles, approaching business analysis from different directions.

To dig into this we started to alternate a few of the networking sessions with topical meetings. A few members shared projects they were working on, and we had a few sessions on general business analysis concepts. We found that this led to a new level of interest and new participants. Practitioners like to hear about each other's work and learn about different parts of the organization. But it was also very important to keep the informal networking going.

Hiatus, restart, and broader reach & leadership

During these years the CoP also had a hiatus. Colleen and I were co-leading and we both had job changes. There were no CoP meetings for a year or more. I mention this to point out that a  CoP can go through some fits and starts because it may rely on just a few people to keep momentum.

But it can also come back! In late 2017 I had a new role and time to start the CoP again. I joined forces with Taryn Rex, another business analyst, and we reached out to everyone we knew across the university who might be interested, encouraging them to also reach out to others around them.

At this juncture we changed the name of the CoP from "Business Analyst" to "Business Analysis" Community of Practice. We knew that people at the university were doing business analysis in many different roles -- a few with a Business Analyst job title, but many more as project managers, service managers, program analysts, data analysts, financial analysts, and so on.

As new members joined the list we asked them to complete a short survey on their interests and level of experience. This greatly helped us understand the community. We also started to offer online participation (through Zoom) since the university has three campuses. The community grew to over 150 mailing list recipients across the university, with 15-25 members attending each session based on their interests.

The restart focused on introducing business analysis practices in a more structured way. For the initial session I gave a one-hour introduction to business analysis to level-set expectations. Monthly sessions going forward would be focused on a survey of methods, a particular method, or a prepared presentation of project work. (You can view the calendar of topics for 2017-2018.)

When Taryn was unable to continue as co-leader, I decided to form a larger group to co-lead. From the first few sessions there were some clearly very interested participants, and I was delighted to find peers to form a wonderfully engaged steering group (listed on this page in the CoP web site). The steering group meets monthly to guide the direction of the CoP, develop agendas, and identify speakers.

Key reflections here are:

• If you're leading, understand what motivates you -- what's going to sustain you in taking this extra responsibility?
• A community is best led by a community -- find others who are also motivated to keep it going
• Many people in your organization could be doing business analysis, from many different roles
• Use the network of everyone you know -- interested people are everywhere

Transition to shared practices

The interests of new members showed a top recurring theme of learning about the most common business analysis methods in our enterprise. As a steering group we thought the CoP could build on this by sharing our top methods and starting to converge on common practices. We tried the following experiment.

For two two-hour meetings, we ran workshops in which small teams of 3-4 worked on a selected business analysis method. Each team chose from a list of common general methods. Each team drafted a short document summarizing:

• Description: What is this method?
• Step by Step: How to go about it in 5-7 high level steps
• Benefits: What value to expect from the method
• When to Use
• References: Probably the most important part -- links to external resources as well as examples from people's work within our university

We found a volunteer editor for each method and turned the drafts into web pages. The result is the following resource in the CoP's web site:

• Business Analysis Methods

The content is a mix of viewpoints since it was drafted in groups. But I think that is the power of taking this step: it is truly a peer-to-peer resource. Within the community, this work is a source of pride, an excellent basis for future meetings, and a foundation for continuous improvement. And as a practitioner, when I meet with teams I can now say, "these are common practices identified by business analysis practitioners across the university, and we should consider them in this project."

(On a side note, by this point organizing the CoP and developing business analysis in the organization had become  part of my job description as a business architect on the Enterprise Architecture team. While this might not be essential for every CoP, it has been helpful to know that putting 5-10 hours a month into planning and running meetings and doing outreach is supported by my management.)

Some key things I learned from this have been:

• Ask people to contribute -- more than you expect will be glad to
• There is no "right" version of a business analysis method -- the best fit for the organization is probably to start from what people have already found works, and improve on that 

What the future might hold

Where are we headed with our CoP? The steering group has lots of ideas. Some potential areas on our list include:

• Linking up with related CoPs -- for example our organization also has CoPs for project management, testing, and Agile practitioners
• Our new Slack workspace -- how to encourage more ongoing peer-to-peer conversation
• Bringing back more networking time for people to just get to know each other
• Creating ongoing "new to business analysis at the UW" sessions
• A track focused on helping hiring managers define business analysis roles, recruit, interview, and retain
• Sessions more focused on particular professional subdomains within business analysis, such as operational business analysis, process improvement, facilitation, data analysis, financial analysis, etc.

In an enterprise as big and diverse as ours, the potential topics are endless!

What has your experience been with CoPs or similar efforts? Hope to hear from you in the comments.