May 12, 2025 • 21 mins
Start with the Big Picture – 10 Reasons Context Comes First
Description:
Before you dive into requirements, backlogs or shiny new solutions, ask yourself: do you actually understand the world this project lives in?
In this episode of The Better Business Analyst, I unpack 10 reasons why Business Analysts must start with context—not just the project scope. We’ll explore how understanding strategic drivers, system boundaries, and stakeholder ecosystems can unlock better requirements, smarter delivery, and far greater impact.
Whether you're shaping a product, leading change, or untangling a mess—this mindset shift is non-negotiable.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Too often as BAS, we're handed aproject brief if we're lucky, or
just some emails and told to getcracking.
But if we don't start by understanding the world that
that brief lives in, it's strategy, systems, constraints
and ambitions, we risk delivering the wrong thing
(00:24):
really effectively. Today I'm sharing 10 reasons why
you must start with the big picture, drawing from real world
experience through leading the career system strategy work at
the Tertiary Education Commission here in New Zealand
(00:45):
about 10 years ago. The Better Business Analysis
Institute presence, the Better Business Analysis podcast with
Kingsman Walsh, right? Thanks for joining me this week
as we countdown the 10 reasons why BAS must begin with context,
(01:07):
start with the big picture. This is probably the number one
tip for junior or medium BAS whohave just got a lot of
experience but never quite get to have that elevated
conversation. This by far is a strength of
mine and it has helped me move along the career path to what I
(01:30):
would say a more technical BA toa business BA and now really a
strategic analyst or a business architect to be like.
We have a countdown this top tenas so important.
That context is key. And this episode has been
triggered through two posts thisweek 1 by Ian.
He'll know who he is who posted the idea of making sure that you
(01:55):
use visuals when communicating. It's a great technique and I
strongly believe that. And that's very useful when we
define the big picture, especially when we trying to
learn something. And also a piece in my
consultancy work this week when I was trying to explain to
someone the big picture, which was kind of missing.
(02:18):
I was a missing piece in the puzzle that was stopping them
moving forward. And I'm going to use an example
here. I won't talk about the people or
any sensitive information, but Iwas involved in a big piece of
work designing the career systemstrategy for New Zealand.
And that was for from ages 7 to 75, every single person in the
country. It was a career system for them.
(02:40):
As I worked originally in careerNew Zealand with my
stakeholders, being able to internal stakeholders or, or
people that fit into it were career counsellors who worked in
schools. And the idea was this would be
used across the country. Now, even though I moved on from
TC after we didn't get funding for the solution side, that
analysis still lives today. And I know that they've
(03:03):
leveraged that in the solutions that they develop now and in the
future. So number one, what is #1 number
one is that the project is not the problem.
Most projects exist because of deeper challenges or ambitions.
Projects are the response, not the route.
(03:24):
And we talk about that with the 4P Plus model.
If you don't know what that is, look on my LinkedIn account,
look on the Better Business Analysis Institute website and
blocks then before it just topped up.
You start with people, then there's process, then there's
the project that you're doing now, the career system, and this
(03:46):
could be in your country, any career system, and this is a
career being jobs. If I'm saying that with a New
Zealand twang, the career systeminitiative wasn't about building
a new tool. It really wasn't.
And yes, we've looked at tools, but it was about a response to
(04:07):
systematic fragmented system problems across career advice,
education pathways, vocational pathways and employment.
It was a big gap. So ask yourself what is the
project you're working on? What is it in response to and
(04:28):
every kick off and ask the question #2 you're not
delivering a product, you're shaping the system.
And this particular example I'm using is quite a shift.
It was quite a shift in thinkingwas a system a big example, but
you might be working on something that's a little bit
smaller as we will have might beworking on a widget as part of a
(04:52):
greater process. But I still want you to have
this mindset. Always think system, not screen
products are just one output of much bigger systems.
So when you're developing the app, like you're creating an app
maybe for e-mail or Outlook, Microsoft just published the new
(05:15):
Outlook desktop client and they've updated the app on the
website. That's all part of the Exchange
Outlook ecosystem. It is not just that one app, OK?
And not only that that's the internal view, but the external
view is that checking your e-mail is only part of the
workflow you might go through. You might need to look at your
(05:37):
calendar events, you might need to respond, you might need to
add attachments. There's all sorts of ecosystem
that goes around there, like integrating e-mail clients, for
example. At TC, we recognize we weren't
just making a student tool, we were influencing students,
parents, industry, E we trainingproviders and employers.
(06:00):
And we actually had to reach outto those various other
government agencies. Like we have the Ministry of
Social Development, if you like,which is the people that help
get New Zealanders into work andlook at skills development.
And NB, which is the business division of our government
department. They're all different, which
(06:22):
makes it complicated. We're to work with those various
government departments to make sure we're designing a system
that was not just focused on what we were doing at TC.
And So what you could do, a practical tip is to sketch a
quick system map before you write your first requirement.
And so there's two things here. 1 is the system map.
(06:43):
If you're doing system change, when I say system, this is not
IT system, this is higher level,you know government system
services that the government provides.
And a context diagram is always cares.
It's just a non negotiable for me in your project.
So that could be used. You could show how your thing,
(07:04):
your project or your product andit doesn't matter how big that
is, show it in reference to it'senvironment or it's ecosystem #3
is that stakeholders might not understand the context
themselves. And this is really important.
You may need to lead the discovery, not wait for it.
Most of the time I hit projects and people are not thinking
(07:27):
about this. They're definitely not thinking
about it when they're asked to maybe change a policy, then
cause and effect analysis has not done well when they're deep
in a project. Even various ministers of
government will be focusing on debit.
It's actually the BAS job or theBA is the best placed person to
(07:48):
look at that and how that systemmight change.
OK, service designers think about it, but the more I even
think about the service, that bias towards the service they're
designed, whereas ABA would definitely an enterprise.
BA can look across the system orthe response that your
organization is providing in response, you know, to the
(08:09):
system needs and they can look at it.
Indeed, it's not around one department.
It's definitely not even about one organization in most cases.
So not one single stakeholder atTC had the full picture.
No way. We created share artifacts,
context diagrams and strategic mats to align everyone.
And actually what I used was meta modelling techniques and I
(08:33):
used the concept of the key nouns that we would need, like
qualification would be 1 and jobwould be 1.
And we designed it in that way so people could understand it.
It was simple. It was visual as Ian talked
about, but you could talk about complicated things in a wider
environment. You could talk about it with a
principal, which we did. We talked about it in schools,
(08:54):
which we did to students and we could talk about it to the
career plans internally and to management internally to get buy
in. You can use workshops to build
share context as well and not just click requirements for this
particular work, which was system change work, the
requirements are so down the chain.
(09:15):
That's like of 20% of the job. That 80% is actually building
these systems and showing inputsand outputs that are very, very
high level. And I might actually do a whole
podcast on how to do that very well.
And it's actually simple if you know how to do it #4 is that
requirements often emerge from patterns and not people.
(09:36):
So don't expect stakeholders to hand you good requirements,
discover them through analysis, which is requirements or
citation. We don't do requirements
gathering, even though I might use that term.
I'm really meaning elicitation by comparing the needs of
schools and career changes. So that was one of our persona
(09:56):
categories or lots of personas and employers.
We identified common decision points that shaped a reusable
data model. So there are lots of steps in
there. I, I won't go deep today, but we
had different categories. We had people that were in
education, cool. And there were various different
(10:16):
types, 3 categories within that where people that were in work
and we had people that were out of work.
And those, yes, there could be an overlap between those, but
that were our highest level categories within there.
We had people that were happy intheir job, people that their job
was going to change like judo, AI or automation when people
(10:37):
that, you know, were looking to rise up within the ranks of
their organization. And we had people that were
looking to, I guess, change within their organization.
And then we had within schools, it was easier to do that by age,
so we could divide it by very young children.
And we had kind of the primary, secondary and tertiary study and
(11:01):
tertiary could be any age. And then we also had the people
in the category here that were supporting those people.
So we had quite a lot of different persona types, the
influences, and that helped us drill down to the needs and the
jobs that they needed doing and what information they would
(11:22):
need. So it was quite easy for us to
know that even though everyone was following the same journey,
a younger child will just have interests.
And if you overlay the whole lotof, I guess, research across
there, it was very clear that there were requirements around
showing how a child could use their interest to map to job
(11:46):
areas, not specific jobs. They might think about being a
firefighter, they might think about specific elements, but
their interests could actually be mapped.
So they wouldn't explicitly knowthis to maybe job areas that
they could talk about. And interests were very, very,
very important for children at ayoung age.
And there were also research we did on biases.
(12:09):
So there was a whole idea about the, I guess, inspiring the
future work that had been done in the UK.
Whereas it was clear that for a young child, their prospects of
what they think they can be whenthey grow up is shaped by their
environment and the people they interact with.
And as a result of that, there were some barriers that were
needed to be broken down South. An example would be people don't
(12:32):
associate, our young children don't, and probably us adults
don't associate a woman being anastronaut and maybe a woman
being a firefighter, even a doctor or a lawyer.
And so the idea was to expose those children to those choices.
So their their idea about what they could be when they grow up
was not limited. And that's a very, very
(12:53):
important part of the puzzle. And I'm going deep on that, but
it shows issue how much insight didn't come from any stakeholder
at TC, came from research, came from real life examples in the
system. So look across audiences and ask
what's the shared logic here andbuild that logical model.
That's your job as a BA #5 is touse strategic tools, right?
(13:18):
And they belong in your toolkit.BAS aren't just delivery
machines. We're we need strategic tools
and we need to perform strategicanalysis.
So we use the business model canvas, pesto analysis, outcome
mapping. We use things like downstream
flows. We use these meta models of data
(13:39):
flow, just showing how information moves.
We use this idea of entities, business entities, I called them
and we linked, and we needed visualization all the way
through. So there are lots of other
things that you can add to your tool kit, and they're not just
the standard requirements matrixand project.
I guess artefacts that you mightthink about #7 is that empathy
(14:02):
is easier at the macro level. Isn't that weird?
Understanding the wider system unlocks deeper empathy, not just
for users, but for the people funding, regulating and relying
on it. You can see at a high level how
disconnected the learner journeywas.
For example, for people that were in schools that were maybe
(14:24):
disadvantaged. There was one school we we
visited in a in a smaller town in New Zealand and we went to
the high school and there was a class that the teacher actually
defined as the last chance class.
It were kids who are around 16 years old and they, the teacher
here was amazing. They paid for their own career
planning resources in their own money and they're not getting
(14:48):
paid much. We as the government wasn't
providing the tools for them. And this teacher would do
basically anything to keep the kids in school.
And some of those things would not be standard curriculum.
That would be items where they would learn through visual arts
through to performances together.
It was really anything to keep them in school because the
(15:10):
statistically what, and I guess the reality for those kids is
that a lot of them who stayed inthat area, they, their career
prospects were very low. There weren't many employers in
the area. And there were things like
chicken farms. So their options was KFC, you
know, chicken farm, McDonald's. And that's where a large
percentage of kids coming out ofthis high school actually went
(15:31):
because they didn't have career prospects in that area unless
they moved out. And they had ambition and they
had inspiration. But this teacher was doing such
a good job, whereas flipping over, I went to quite an
affluent school in where I live and met with the principal
there. He was great.
They were equally fantastic. And I worked with some of the
kids doing some career planning exercises to learn from them
(15:53):
really. And they were learning about
themselves. And it was so interesting to see
the difference. And they were all correct.
You know, there wasn't anything I could draw away and go, oh,
that's bad. It was all fantastic.
But it showed you how different things are.
And it provided empathy at that high level that you know, that
there are some systematic challenges for people, just
(16:14):
whereas you can, you can see someone down the road who
they're thinking about one individual who's unemployed and
they're like, oh, well, this person's, you know, maybe
they're lazy and they, they start associating bad qualities
to the individual at a micro level.
But if you look at the macro level, there's some macro forces
in place that are just like pushing against some of these
(16:35):
children who had no choice by living in this area.
And, and that's just where they were, they were brought up.
So it's quite fascinating. So if you can build personas and
empathy mats early, even it's rough, it will help you
understand that. It will help your stakeholders
understand that. And I've actually seen a shift
in some government policies lately when we've actually been
able to articulate that back to ministers who had different
(16:57):
views. And that's quite cool #8 is that
the big picture shows you the boundaries.
That's the other important that you're not solving all world's
problems, even though I'd love to.
You need to know what not to solve and that's just as
powerful. So we purposely didn't think
(17:19):
about MB or MSD or the fact that, you know, how are we going
to get kids people into work? That was Ms. GS job, the
Ministry of Social Development job, another government agency,
but our job was to make sure that people had a career
planning advice and understood the qualifications, which was
our domain. And making sure that, you know,
(17:39):
they had opportunities to go andget tertiary education.
And, and, and it was our understanding that, for example,
after six months of being unemployed, the chances of you
getting a job dramatically, exponentially drop.
So that there was this motivation window where there
was an overlap between both MSD and TC and Korea's New Zealand,
which was part of TC at that time, that we had to work
(18:01):
together on those people becauseit was going to cost the
country, cost the country millions and millions of dollars
to keep those people on the unemployment benefit.
And it also which was Social Security in America.
And it also meant that that person, their happiness, their
mental health was going to go downhill.
So catching people on that six month window of opportunity was
(18:24):
critical for both departments. But it was very clear that MSD
was the responsibility of getting people back into work,
right? So maybe they needed to fund
that six month window for intensive ability, for career
planning. That was not our responsibility,
but we would design the servicesthat they could use.
And that's another point why this project became difficult,
(18:47):
because then once you look at these systematic things, you
make it back, then it's people start to Gray the boundaries and
they start going, oh, you could be a tool for MSD or we're using
this tool in MSD. Maybe you could use it.
And it was like, well, that's not serving our purpose.
It's not reaching the goal of what we're trying to achieve.
Now, that wasn't necessarily. And I hate the fact that there
were real borders between these government departments.
(19:10):
But, and, and, you know, it's not just about who's paying for
what, but it's really important if you just stick to your guns
about your scope, as we always know about #9 is that good
context makes you a better facilitator because you can talk
about it. And I've had a number of times
where I just haven't understand all the context.
And you know, that has burnt me.So when we understand the wider
(19:32):
picture, it leads to stronger conversations and engagement and
silo breaking and agencies. By speaking the language of
policy and system reform and outcomes, not just features, we
actually got traction on board at the board level easily.
And the top tip here is to be the person who connects the
dots. And that's, again, a strength of
(19:53):
a great senior BA. And it builds trust and
influence. And there's no reason why you
can't do that as a junior BA. So start here.
I'm just giving you a Fast forward so you can get your
career ahead of the game. That's a bit of career advice.
And #10 is strategic. BAS get invited to bigger
tables. You start with the context, but
you stop being known as the juror person or the BA or the
(20:15):
documentation. And you start being the one who
gets it. The work involved, where I was
involved in this TC piece of work meant that I got involved
in investment logic, you know, close behind the door meetings,
talking about funding, talking about minister priorities, you
know, elections. And also it positions yourself
(20:37):
not just as a project BA, but asa system thinker.
So if you're serious about impact all, I start by asking,
what is the world this lives in?The better your context, the
sharper your contribution. Be the person who zooms out
before you dive in. I'll see you next week.
Too often as BAS, we're handed aproject brief if we're lucky, or
just some emails and told to getcracking.
But if we don't start by understanding the world that
that brief lives in, it's strategy, systems, constraints
and ambitions, we risk delivering the wrong thing
(00:24):
really effectively. Today I'm sharing 10 reasons why
you must start with the big picture, drawing from real world
experience through leading the career system strategy work at
the Tertiary Education Commission here in New Zealand
(00:45):
about 10 years ago. The Better Business Analysis
Institute presence, the Better Business Analysis podcast with
Kingsman Walsh, right? Thanks for joining me this week
as we countdown the 10 reasons why BAS must begin with context,
(01:07):
start with the big picture. This is probably the number one
tip for junior or medium BAS whohave just got a lot of
experience but never quite get to have that elevated
conversation. This by far is a strength of
mine and it has helped me move along the career path to what I
(01:30):
would say a more technical BA toa business BA and now really a
strategic analyst or a business architect to be like.
We have a countdown this top tenas so important.
That context is key. And this episode has been
triggered through two posts thisweek 1 by Ian.
He'll know who he is who posted the idea of making sure that you
(01:55):
use visuals when communicating. It's a great technique and I
strongly believe that. And that's very useful when we
define the big picture, especially when we trying to
learn something. And also a piece in my
consultancy work this week when I was trying to explain to
someone the big picture, which was kind of missing.
(02:18):
I was a missing piece in the puzzle that was stopping them
moving forward. And I'm going to use an example
here. I won't talk about the people or
any sensitive information, but Iwas involved in a big piece of
work designing the career systemstrategy for New Zealand.
And that was for from ages 7 to 75, every single person in the
country. It was a career system for them.
(02:40):
As I worked originally in careerNew Zealand with my
stakeholders, being able to internal stakeholders or, or
people that fit into it were career counsellors who worked in
schools. And the idea was this would be
used across the country. Now, even though I moved on from
TC after we didn't get funding for the solution side, that
analysis still lives today. And I know that they've
(03:03):
leveraged that in the solutions that they develop now and in the
future. So number one, what is #1 number
one is that the project is not the problem.
Most projects exist because of deeper challenges or ambitions.
Projects are the response, not the route.
(03:24):
And we talk about that with the 4P Plus model.
If you don't know what that is, look on my LinkedIn account,
look on the Better Business Analysis Institute website and
blocks then before it just topped up.
You start with people, then there's process, then there's
the project that you're doing now, the career system, and this
(03:46):
could be in your country, any career system, and this is a
career being jobs. If I'm saying that with a New
Zealand twang, the career systeminitiative wasn't about building
a new tool. It really wasn't.
And yes, we've looked at tools, but it was about a response to
(04:07):
systematic fragmented system problems across career advice,
education pathways, vocational pathways and employment.
It was a big gap. So ask yourself what is the
project you're working on? What is it in response to and
(04:28):
every kick off and ask the question #2 you're not
delivering a product, you're shaping the system.
And this particular example I'm using is quite a shift.
It was quite a shift in thinkingwas a system a big example, but
you might be working on something that's a little bit
smaller as we will have might beworking on a widget as part of a
(04:52):
greater process. But I still want you to have
this mindset. Always think system, not screen
products are just one output of much bigger systems.
So when you're developing the app, like you're creating an app
maybe for e-mail or Outlook, Microsoft just published the new
(05:15):
Outlook desktop client and they've updated the app on the
website. That's all part of the Exchange
Outlook ecosystem. It is not just that one app, OK?
And not only that that's the internal view, but the external
view is that checking your e-mail is only part of the
workflow you might go through. You might need to look at your
(05:37):
calendar events, you might need to respond, you might need to
add attachments. There's all sorts of ecosystem
that goes around there, like integrating e-mail clients, for
example. At TC, we recognize we weren't
just making a student tool, we were influencing students,
parents, industry, E we trainingproviders and employers.
(06:00):
And we actually had to reach outto those various other
government agencies. Like we have the Ministry of
Social Development, if you like,which is the people that help
get New Zealanders into work andlook at skills development.
And NB, which is the business division of our government
department. They're all different, which
(06:22):
makes it complicated. We're to work with those various
government departments to make sure we're designing a system
that was not just focused on what we were doing at TC.
And So what you could do, a practical tip is to sketch a
quick system map before you write your first requirement.
And so there's two things here. 1 is the system map.
(06:43):
If you're doing system change, when I say system, this is not
IT system, this is higher level,you know government system
services that the government provides.
And a context diagram is always cares.
It's just a non negotiable for me in your project.
So that could be used. You could show how your thing,
(07:04):
your project or your product andit doesn't matter how big that
is, show it in reference to it'senvironment or it's ecosystem #3
is that stakeholders might not understand the context
themselves. And this is really important.
You may need to lead the discovery, not wait for it.
Most of the time I hit projects and people are not thinking
(07:27):
about this. They're definitely not thinking
about it when they're asked to maybe change a policy, then
cause and effect analysis has not done well when they're deep
in a project. Even various ministers of
government will be focusing on debit.
It's actually the BAS job or theBA is the best placed person to
(07:48):
look at that and how that systemmight change.
OK, service designers think about it, but the more I even
think about the service, that bias towards the service they're
designed, whereas ABA would definitely an enterprise.
BA can look across the system orthe response that your
organization is providing in response, you know, to the
(08:09):
system needs and they can look at it.
Indeed, it's not around one department.
It's definitely not even about one organization in most cases.
So not one single stakeholder atTC had the full picture.
No way. We created share artifacts,
context diagrams and strategic mats to align everyone.
And actually what I used was meta modelling techniques and I
(08:33):
used the concept of the key nouns that we would need, like
qualification would be 1 and jobwould be 1.
And we designed it in that way so people could understand it.
It was simple. It was visual as Ian talked
about, but you could talk about complicated things in a wider
environment. You could talk about it with a
principal, which we did. We talked about it in schools,
(08:54):
which we did to students and we could talk about it to the
career plans internally and to management internally to get buy
in. You can use workshops to build
share context as well and not just click requirements for this
particular work, which was system change work, the
requirements are so down the chain.
(09:15):
That's like of 20% of the job. That 80% is actually building
these systems and showing inputsand outputs that are very, very
high level. And I might actually do a whole
podcast on how to do that very well.
And it's actually simple if you know how to do it #4 is that
requirements often emerge from patterns and not people.
(09:36):
So don't expect stakeholders to hand you good requirements,
discover them through analysis, which is requirements or
citation. We don't do requirements
gathering, even though I might use that term.
I'm really meaning elicitation by comparing the needs of
schools and career changes. So that was one of our persona
(09:56):
categories or lots of personas and employers.
We identified common decision points that shaped a reusable
data model. So there are lots of steps in
there. I, I won't go deep today, but we
had different categories. We had people that were in
education, cool. And there were various different
(10:16):
types, 3 categories within that where people that were in work
and we had people that were out of work.
And those, yes, there could be an overlap between those, but
that were our highest level categories within there.
We had people that were happy intheir job, people that their job
was going to change like judo, AI or automation when people
(10:37):
that, you know, were looking to rise up within the ranks of
their organization. And we had people that were
looking to, I guess, change within their organization.
And then we had within schools, it was easier to do that by age,
so we could divide it by very young children.
And we had kind of the primary, secondary and tertiary study and
(11:01):
tertiary could be any age. And then we also had the people
in the category here that were supporting those people.
So we had quite a lot of different persona types, the
influences, and that helped us drill down to the needs and the
jobs that they needed doing and what information they would
(11:22):
need. So it was quite easy for us to
know that even though everyone was following the same journey,
a younger child will just have interests.
And if you overlay the whole lotof, I guess, research across
there, it was very clear that there were requirements around
showing how a child could use their interest to map to job
(11:46):
areas, not specific jobs. They might think about being a
firefighter, they might think about specific elements, but
their interests could actually be mapped.
So they wouldn't explicitly knowthis to maybe job areas that
they could talk about. And interests were very, very,
very important for children at ayoung age.
And there were also research we did on biases.
(12:09):
So there was a whole idea about the, I guess, inspiring the
future work that had been done in the UK.
Whereas it was clear that for a young child, their prospects of
what they think they can be whenthey grow up is shaped by their
environment and the people they interact with.
And as a result of that, there were some barriers that were
needed to be broken down South. An example would be people don't
(12:32):
associate, our young children don't, and probably us adults
don't associate a woman being anastronaut and maybe a woman
being a firefighter, even a doctor or a lawyer.
And so the idea was to expose those children to those choices.
So their their idea about what they could be when they grow up
was not limited. And that's a very, very
(12:53):
important part of the puzzle. And I'm going deep on that, but
it shows issue how much insight didn't come from any stakeholder
at TC, came from research, came from real life examples in the
system. So look across audiences and ask
what's the shared logic here andbuild that logical model.
That's your job as a BA #5 is touse strategic tools, right?
(13:18):
And they belong in your toolkit.BAS aren't just delivery
machines. We're we need strategic tools
and we need to perform strategicanalysis.
So we use the business model canvas, pesto analysis, outcome
mapping. We use things like downstream
flows. We use these meta models of data
(13:39):
flow, just showing how information moves.
We use this idea of entities, business entities, I called them
and we linked, and we needed visualization all the way
through. So there are lots of other
things that you can add to your tool kit, and they're not just
the standard requirements matrixand project.
I guess artefacts that you mightthink about #7 is that empathy
(14:02):
is easier at the macro level. Isn't that weird?
Understanding the wider system unlocks deeper empathy, not just
for users, but for the people funding, regulating and relying
on it. You can see at a high level how
disconnected the learner journeywas.
For example, for people that were in schools that were maybe
(14:24):
disadvantaged. There was one school we we
visited in a in a smaller town in New Zealand and we went to
the high school and there was a class that the teacher actually
defined as the last chance class.
It were kids who are around 16 years old and they, the teacher
here was amazing. They paid for their own career
planning resources in their own money and they're not getting
(14:48):
paid much. We as the government wasn't
providing the tools for them. And this teacher would do
basically anything to keep the kids in school.
And some of those things would not be standard curriculum.
That would be items where they would learn through visual arts
through to performances together.
It was really anything to keep them in school because the
(15:10):
statistically what, and I guess the reality for those kids is
that a lot of them who stayed inthat area, they, their career
prospects were very low. There weren't many employers in
the area. And there were things like
chicken farms. So their options was KFC, you
know, chicken farm, McDonald's. And that's where a large
percentage of kids coming out ofthis high school actually went
(15:31):
because they didn't have career prospects in that area unless
they moved out. And they had ambition and they
had inspiration. But this teacher was doing such
a good job, whereas flipping over, I went to quite an
affluent school in where I live and met with the principal
there. He was great.
They were equally fantastic. And I worked with some of the
kids doing some career planning exercises to learn from them
(15:53):
really. And they were learning about
themselves. And it was so interesting to see
the difference. And they were all correct.
You know, there wasn't anything I could draw away and go, oh,
that's bad. It was all fantastic.
But it showed you how different things are.
And it provided empathy at that high level that you know, that
there are some systematic challenges for people, just
(16:14):
whereas you can, you can see someone down the road who
they're thinking about one individual who's unemployed and
they're like, oh, well, this person's, you know, maybe
they're lazy and they, they start associating bad qualities
to the individual at a micro level.
But if you look at the macro level, there's some macro forces
in place that are just like pushing against some of these
(16:35):
children who had no choice by living in this area.
And, and that's just where they were, they were brought up.
So it's quite fascinating. So if you can build personas and
empathy mats early, even it's rough, it will help you
understand that. It will help your stakeholders
understand that. And I've actually seen a shift
in some government policies lately when we've actually been
able to articulate that back to ministers who had different
(16:57):
views. And that's quite cool #8 is that
the big picture shows you the boundaries.
That's the other important that you're not solving all world's
problems, even though I'd love to.
You need to know what not to solve and that's just as
powerful. So we purposely didn't think
(17:19):
about MB or MSD or the fact that, you know, how are we going
to get kids people into work? That was Ms. GS job, the
Ministry of Social Development job, another government agency,
but our job was to make sure that people had a career
planning advice and understood the qualifications, which was
our domain. And making sure that, you know,
(17:39):
they had opportunities to go andget tertiary education.
And, and, and it was our understanding that, for example,
after six months of being unemployed, the chances of you
getting a job dramatically, exponentially drop.
So that there was this motivation window where there
was an overlap between both MSD and TC and Korea's New Zealand,
which was part of TC at that time, that we had to work
(18:01):
together on those people becauseit was going to cost the
country, cost the country millions and millions of dollars
to keep those people on the unemployment benefit.
And it also which was Social Security in America.
And it also meant that that person, their happiness, their
mental health was going to go downhill.
So catching people on that six month window of opportunity was
(18:24):
critical for both departments. But it was very clear that MSD
was the responsibility of getting people back into work,
right? So maybe they needed to fund
that six month window for intensive ability, for career
planning. That was not our responsibility,
but we would design the servicesthat they could use.
And that's another point why this project became difficult,
(18:47):
because then once you look at these systematic things, you
make it back, then it's people start to Gray the boundaries and
they start going, oh, you could be a tool for MSD or we're using
this tool in MSD. Maybe you could use it.
And it was like, well, that's not serving our purpose.
It's not reaching the goal of what we're trying to achieve.
Now, that wasn't necessarily. And I hate the fact that there
were real borders between these government departments.
(19:10):
But, and, and, you know, it's not just about who's paying for
what, but it's really important if you just stick to your guns
about your scope, as we always know about #9 is that good
context makes you a better facilitator because you can talk
about it. And I've had a number of times
where I just haven't understand all the context.
And you know, that has burnt me.So when we understand the wider
(19:32):
picture, it leads to stronger conversations and engagement and
silo breaking and agencies. By speaking the language of
policy and system reform and outcomes, not just features, we
actually got traction on board at the board level easily.
And the top tip here is to be the person who connects the
dots. And that's, again, a strength of
(19:53):
a great senior BA. And it builds trust and
influence. And there's no reason why you
can't do that as a junior BA. So start here.
I'm just giving you a Fast forward so you can get your
career ahead of the game. That's a bit of career advice.
And #10 is strategic. BAS get invited to bigger
tables. You start with the context, but
you stop being known as the juror person or the BA or the
(20:15):
documentation. And you start being the one who
gets it. The work involved, where I was
involved in this TC piece of work meant that I got involved
in investment logic, you know, close behind the door meetings,
talking about funding, talking about minister priorities, you
know, elections. And also it positions yourself
(20:37):
not just as a project BA, but asa system thinker.
So if you're serious about impact all, I start by asking,
what is the world this lives in?The better your context, the
sharper your contribution. Be the person who zooms out
before you dive in. I'll see you next week.
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