The Business Analyst’s guide to Questions: 1 – Who’s asking?

This is the first in an occasional series about the BA’s  most fundamental tool, the question.  I’ll look at questions from all sorts of points of view,  give tips and examples and throw in some references and extra reading too.

• We’ll look at using questions to steer the conversation – not just open and closed, but all sorts of other ways to make sure you get what you need from an interview
• We’ll consider the balance of power and take a look at what happens when a politician avoids answering repeated quetions
• We’ll see how teachers use questions to check for understanding and compare it with how sales people use questions for selling and how doctors use questions to break bad news
• We’ll consider how best to get qualitiative information (how people feel about something) and quantitive information (how many beans make five)
• We’ll have tables and two-by-two grids for the visually minded
• It will be a whistle-stop tour; we’ll conduct investigations with Aristotle, go Through the Looking Glass with Alice, see whether Kipling’s six serving men are actually enough,  and take some tips from NLP on the way

 It’ll be fun.

And we’ll start with: 

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Who’s asking?

 

 

A man comes into a bar. He looks distraught: his hair is a mess, his pupils are dilated, he is visibly shocked and he’s staggering.

His wife asks: why are you late?

The policeman asks: what’s just happened?

The psychiatrist asks: and how do you feel about that?

The lawyer asks: who else was involved?

The doctor asks: where does it hurt?

The journalist asks: can I have an exclusive?

The photographer asks: can you just look this way?

His best mate asks: what are you drinking?

The barman asks: can I help you sir?

The questions we ask give away a lot. They show what assumptions we are making, and they highlight our own areas of concern or obsession.

More than that though, the question we choose sets us off in one specific direction. Each of those questions is the starting point for a conversation which excludes the other conversations the man could have.

Tip: If you reach a stalemate in an inquiry, work out what questions other people would ask.

Example: Katherine Whitehorn used to sanity-check her plans for activities at children’s parties by asking:

“what would the Coroner say?”  

When she put herself in the coronor’s shoes using this technique, she broke out of her own assumptions (accidents happen to other people) and could judge her own actions by a much more critical standard (is allowing children to play in a pool unsupervised stupid, dangerous or even criminally negligent?).

Tip: The simplest generic question to start with is: ”what is the best question to ask?”

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This is the first of these entries, but you will be able to find more here, as I write them.  
A reminder:  This work by Ben Warsop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

What makes a good Business Analyst?

Philosophy’s tough at the best of times, but this was first thing in the morning and I was attending a job interview and the question ‘What makes a good Business Analyst?’ felt a bit like a curve ball.   I thought for a moment or two and said:

Don’t write this down – but what makes a good Business Analyst is schizophrenia.  

I didn’t mean it literally of course. What I meant is that good BAs have to hold several different views in their mind at one time:

• we must take a business-eye view of things and a technical view
• we  must be able to see the big picture and focus on the detail
• we must be able to work out how things separate out and how they connect together 

The Zen of Business Analysis, if you like.

Sure, there are technical skills and toolsets and methodologies and techniques of course, but they can be learned.  And a BA who cannot communicate is a waste of budget and not a BA at all.  

But the bit that’s born not made is the ability to understand that light is both a wave and a particle, and be ok with it that way.

As others see us

Which of our attitudes will horrify future generations?  What blind-spots will show up large and clear for all who follow us to point at in sneering horror?

I thought about this because of the discordant notes I found as I read the pre-war letters of the Mitfords and a couple of light-weight romances about English middle class life in the 1930s by Angela Thirkell.   The Mitford letters are in a class of their own and Unity’s breathless descriptions of Hitler are almost beyond comment.   But Thirkell shocked on a more banal level, with its casual, almost colloquial anti-semitism (the heroine’s publisher is good at business and has dark hair,  legacies of Jewish ancestry), its incidental acceptance of ritualised brutality (a  schoolboy who has a toy called “foxy” which is the tail of the fox that blooded him, mounted in to a silver handle), and the assumption that driving a car into a ditch is nothing more than carelessness (perfectly normal because you are drunk or showing off).   Oh and the entirely unironic statement that someone was  ”adored by her servants”.  Yeah. Right.  

So which of our assumption and norms will chime as discordantly on our offspring’s ears?

• Our casual consumerism.
  Our economic woes already makes this seem extravagant, it won’t be long before it is in poor taste and finally becomes unfashionable.  The question is whether the economy will recover enough before the oil runs out for the indulgences of the previous decade to occur again.
• Sweatshops.
  I hope future generations judge as as harshly for buying clothes made in sweatshops, wearing them once and throwing them way, as we judge those who opposed Wilberforce’s campaign to abolish slavery. 

• Recreational travel.
  The idea that responsible, intelligent people who can see the climate changing before their own eyes would indulge in recreational travel without compunction will, surely, be as abhorrent as … oh fill in your own exploitative and selfish horrors here.  And so much business travel is unnecessary that it’s no more than an indulgence.
• Personal transport.
  Says me.
• Plastic cutlery and plastic packaging.  
  Our hydrocarbon-starved progeny will  curse us for taking something as rare and unrenewable as oil and turning it into something indesctructable but used only once, and tossing it away into landfill.
• Landfill.  
  The mines of the future.  Hey kids, curse our names, eat our shit.

• Our dual standards around obesity, dieting, size zero and BMIs.
  Next time you are in a supermarket, count the magazines by the till that are running two cover splashes, one on the dangers of anorexia or dieting, and the other jibing at some poor famous neurotic’s gain in weight.
• Our hypocricy about the sexualisation of childhood.
  Same as above.  Newspapers simultaniously run “string-em-up” rants about paedophilias and drooling comments like those about the then 15-year old Charlotte Church’s breasts.
• Our simultanous delight in technology and indulgence in pseudo-science.
  My mind’s run out of things to say.  Just read any ad for cosmetics or the incomparable Dr Ben Goldacre.

Ach, that’s enough to be going on with.

Incidentally, it isn’t just about when people live it’s also about how they react to their times:  Thirkell is particularly insensitive to the darker side of the 1930s but her conteporary Margery Sharp had a much clearer understanding of the social and political nuances of the times she lived in.

The devil you know

I found the news last night oddly comforting.  I drove home listening to stories of the falling pound, tumbling stock markets, freshly announced job losses, rising unemployment,  spiraling fuel costs, failing industries sucking up public money, and hydrocarbons being choked off at source by ludicrously rich eastern states.  

It had a familiar feel to it.  It was almost cosy.  It could have been 1979 all over again. Or 1992 at a pinch.  

So much less terrifying than climate change deniers and the world’s failing superpower prodding terrorists with nuclear weapons to see if they’ll blink.  

If only the comfort wasn’t an illusion.

Keeping up with the Killer App

I’m finally feeling overwhelmed by everything you can do on the internet.

I was always aware of online innovations early and I was often the first person I knew socially who took them up, even if I didn’t take them up immediately.  This was true for email, the browser, forums, social computing, online-shopping, online maps, user-created content, professional networking, instant messaging – loads of stuff.  

As online apps diversified, I had to dabble rather than embrace.  Either I would decide not to join in (I don’t have an account on Second Life because my first life is pretty demanding, I don’t podcast because my perfectionism would drive me mad), or else I would join in rather late (I’ve only just signed up to Twitter because interesting things – like the Israeli “people’s press conference” – are now being done with the tweets). 

But now, for the first time, I’m not even aware of the new online apps.   Every week, it seems, I find new ones. This is a real head-shift for me.  I feel like someone born just after Sir Francis Bacon died.  Bacon, apparently, was the last person who read all the books.  Not all the books on a particular subject.  All the books.  We are so used to the number of books published (5,500 daily in the UK, though “only” 4,700 in the USA) that it never occurs to us that we could get our head around all of them.  I never did expect to get my head around everything the web says, but now I am struggling to keep up with everything the web DOES.  

It’s kinda exciting.  Like 1995 all over again, but this time it’s real.

Here are some examples:

Zeitgeist sites:

These are basically feeds of user generated content – photos, tweets, questions.  They are oddly soothing to watch for a while.  It’s a bit like watching clouds.

Flickrvision
Twittervision
The 118118 question feed

 

Flikrvision

 

 

Access:

This one’s so interesting it deserves a post of its own, though I may not manage it.  This is

The Isreal Consulate’s “Citizen’s Press Conference” on Twitter

“David Saranga, Consul of Media and Public Affairs in New York, will answer your questions about the situation in Israel and Gaza in a “Citizens’ Press Conference.”  You can submit your question by directing it to our Twitter account. We will do our best to answer through Twitter.  If an answer requires more than the 140 character limit, we will respond on Twitter with a link to an answer posted in this blog.”

Scraping:

Which of course is what the government is proposing to do with out emails and phone calls:

Employee Scrape at IBM:

“Call records and e-mails define the social networks of each consultant. Whom do they copy on their e-mails? Do they send blind copies to certain people? These hidden messages could point to the growth of informal networks within the company…”

Twitter Scrape

“ 2.7M users (and slowing, meaning I’m starting to find the edge), 10M tweets, 58M edges, with pretty-near complete edge data for users with more than a dozen followers.”

Animated data flows:

Presenting dynamic data dynamically,  such as the location and duration of phone calls, location and duration of taxi journeys, (ok these aren’t online apps, but they are still remarkably cool)

Mobile phone calls during the European World Championship in Spain 
Telephone exchange activity in Britain
London cab journeys (very few South of the River, at this time of night? Give us a break!)

more about “BBC – Britain From Above – Stories – …“, posted with vodpod

 

I do owe a massive thank you to Flowing Data for keeping up with the Netgeist so I don’t have to.

Where was my grandmother…

Where was my grandmother… on the night of Sunday 2 April, 1911?  She wasn’t at home with her parents and sisters, which is a surprise because she was only 13.

I know she wasn’t at home because I’ve just looked her up on the 1911 Census. An alluring and expensive way of spending an evening. I’m a huge fan of the National Archives (their podcasts are exceptional) and they have done a superb job with the census site.  I hate to think how long it took and how much it cost to transcribe those millions of lines of scrawly manuscript.  So I really cannot begrudge them their money.  I’d have happily spent an evening cyber-stalking my ancestors if I could have done it for free, and the seven quid I spent has enabled me to turn turn up some mysteries.  I think I may have just discovered an expensive new hobby.

Three things are odd about the census transcript for my great-grandfather’s household.  

• They weren’t living where I thought they were.   They certainly owned the house on the hill both before and after 1911, so why wasn’t the family there at the time?
• Then their youngest daughter is shown as being 26 years old in 1911.  I’m almost certain she was two or three years younger than grandma, not 13 years older.  
• And finally, as I mentioned,  my grandmother and her brother were away from home that night.   

It turns out she was at school, and the jpeg of the entry for the school showed me a couple of other interesting things. 

• Her 15 and 16 year old classmates had their marital status recorded, which looks decidedly odd in the middle of a list of school-girls.   The choices were “Single, Married, Widower or Widow” which is quaint in itself.  
• One of her classmates had the same name as my godmother – so I find myself wondering if our grandmothers were school-fellows.

It would be expensively easy to click “buy more credits” again and again and five mysteries for a fiver isn’t bad going really.  But I’ll resist and savour the unknowingness.   Though I might get in touch with siblings and cousins to see what they think.

Design-in-a-box

Hotels really are proof that parallel universes exist.

I was working in Germany in 2002 and I spent Midsummer’s Eve that year in Stockholm.  It was a busy and social weekend but on Sunday night I was back in Munich ready for another week’s work.

It’s good to be home…

… I thought to myself as I unpacked my case.  And immediately afterwards:

The Holiday Inn on Leopoldstrasse is not my home!

That was the day that I stopped contracting, though I still earned my living that way for another couple of years because it took me a while to find the permanent job that ticked all the boxes.

I’d forgotten just how much hotels exist in an alternative reality.  It’s not the food, though where else are  danish pastries 3cm wide by 6cm long?  It’s not the light, or the airconditioning, or the bizzare variety of things the TV will do even though only 12 channels are actual television.   It’s not the white towels, or bathroom fittings.  

I think in part it’s the way that they are all so designed.   Actually, that deserves a capital D. They have Decor. Staying in a business hotel is like stepping in to an interior design magazine.   But hotel chains use design without understanding it.  This is probably the only industry that can use the word “modern” to describe design-values without inserting “post-” under its breath.  

The problem is that the design feels sprayed on, a “Designer Look” added on at the end. Design by numbers.  And the numbers are dehumanising: the reason that the Holiday Inn felt like home was that every single one of their 362 rooms is the same – the only difference being that half have the bathroom on the left of the door and half have the bathroom on the right.   The  Sheraton Heathrow sticks in my memory.  It’s built around four grim courtyards, and your window looks bleakly out on a row of identical windows staring bleakly back at you.  You feel like Rene Magritte, stuck in a world designed by M.C. Escher painted by L.S. Lowry.

Even so, I like staying in hotels.  In Tombstone, Kurt Russell asks Dana Delany what she wants out of life and she says:

Room service

Yep.  I recognise that.  

Now if ony I could organise my home life to include room-service but without the add-on design-in-a-box…

Buddy, can you spare some time?

The husband of an on-line friend of mine is doing a PhD, part of which involves the relationship between software and the law.   What goes around comes around, so I’m asking any software-type people to drop by his blog to read all about it and to give the 10 minutes it takes to fill in the survey.

Here is an extract from Tom’s blog about his research:

Legal systems have evolved over centuries to codify rights and obligations in societies. Throughout history law and technology have interacted, modifying each other along the way.  It is often an uneasy relationship…

I want to ask as many software people as possible about what they understand of the law that can impact software, and what their attitudes are towards a couple of legal concepts in a software context.

It is designed to gather information about the knowledge, education and attitude of software developers towards the law related to software, and how law is or isn’t built into software. My goal is not to just have a small survey of a couple of hundred developers, but to really survey lots of them.

To do this, I want to tap as many of my readers  as I can to spread the news of the survey, and for as many of you to take the survey as possible. The more answers I can get from around the world, the richer the results will be. I will also be following up with telephone interviews with a much smaller sample group.

In this survey I have used the term software developer rather broadly. I define this to be anyone working professionally to design, build or maintain software (information technology). So if you are a product manager, solution manager, implementation consultant, systems architect, business analyst, or a systems tester, for instance, then we would be just as interested in your responses. The survey isn’t just aimed at those who code, but those who make a living from its construction and maintenance. Much of this group would fall under that definition. The Germans have a rather nice term,informatiker, but it doesn’t really translate very well.

Those links again:   Blog and survey.  Go on… you know you want to.