From Listening to Understanding – Why listening skill is a must-have for BA?

In the world of business analysis, from requirement gathering to delivering the outcomes to stakeholder, the skill set of a BA is showcased in making documentations, applying elicitation techniques, drawing diagrams to understand the process and so on. However, we often miss out the most important skill set that is the first thing that is needed by BA, which is Listening. Listening is the first and most important must-have skill that a BA should have. This skill is applied from the very beginning stage, which is requirement gathering. Listening carefully to stakeholders to collect requirements is the first point where the foundation of a project builds, any wrong information at this stage could lead to major issues later in the project cycle and could cost more to company. Therefore, though everybody else hears, but a BA always listens. The difference between hearing and listening matters a lot in BA’s world, while hearing is just about receiving information, listening means processing the information, clarifying the doubts and understand the meaning behind the words. There are few reasons which shows why listening is a must-have for a BA, they are: • Collecting requirements: Stakeholder does not often talk in technical terms or in a structured sentence. Mostly the requirements are hidden beneath those simple unstructured non-technical sentences which can only be identified by listening carefully. • Preventing miscommunication: Listening carefully at any stage, will help avoid spreading misinformation. Poor listening could lead to assumptions and a lot of reworks which takes time, money, and efforts. • Building Trust: When stakeholders learn that they are being heard, it builds trust with the BA which results stakeholder open to BA with more clarity and understanding. • Lead to better decision making: Listening to stakeholder not only helps BA to understand what they want but also why they want. It gives more clarity and helps BA to prioritize the requirements according to business needs. Though there are lot of reasons why BA should listen, they also might fall for common pitfalls; therefore, a BA should be aware of those pitfalls so that they can avoid them. Common pitfalls that BA might fall into are: • Jumping into solution too quickly either by listening just half of it or start thing about it even before understanding the problem fully. • Not focused during meeting with stakeholder is also one of the issues where you might be doing something else during a meeting such as checking mails or calendar for future meetings while the stakeholder is speaking to you. • Interrupting stakeholders by asking questions in between or cutting them in the middle of the sentence because you know what they will say. • Only listening to those points that is needed for your boundary of requirement is not a good practice because anything that stakeholder says regarding the project is important and can be informative to you at any stage of the project. For a BA, listening is not just a soft skill, it is one of the core competencies. Tools, methodologies may evolve in the future, but listening will always remain the same and essential. BA does not just listen to the requirements, they listen to understand the story, convert those requirements to business needs, and translate the solution that could make a real impact on the business.