Multicultured Business Analyst
A Business Analyst (BA) works with different clients, clients from different cultures and in today's world clients from different geographies. It is imperative that a BA is comfortable working with people of various cultures.
I have faced differences in cultures on three levels:
1. Personal belief: Every individual is different and you need to treat them like that. The best way to handle such clients is not to judge them but accept them as they are, just like we do with friends in real life. In a way a BA needs to replicate a lot of things that he does in real life to the work environment.
2. Corporate culture: Evey organization has its own culture. The one that you will notice very early in your assignment is the hierarchy of the company and how employees treat their co-workers. In Capgemini we follow a very informal way of interacting and address everyone by their first name. But when you are working with your client, they may have a completely different way of addressing. One of my recent client had a culture of addressing people with their second names using appropriate salutation. Calling anyone by first name was considered disrespectful. Then there was another client where every senior was addressed as "sir" or "madam". I was lucky that my friend in the sales team informed me about this before I started my conversations with this client. Now I make it a point that I check this before I start working with any client. A small thing but it helps a lot in making the right connections.
3. Different geographies: This is the most natural difference. You can help yourself by reading about that particular geography. Though personally I have hardly found reading about cultures useful, but this does give you a lot of things to talk about at dinner, lunch or coffee. If you are thinking why it doesn't help to read about the cultures, as we discussed in the first point that every individual is different, so it is difficult to categorize people just by geographies. Try reading about your own culture on internet and you will realize you are hardly like what it states. So do not make perceptions about people depending on their geographies but reading will help you in having great and involved conversations :)
As a BA you should be able to adapt as quickly as possible to different people and places. If you are that kind of a person- great! However if you are not, you should work on yourself. This will help you in the long term and make you a better BA.
Tarun Chandel
The Business Analyst
2 comments:
I think the first sentence that made me wonder was "In a way a BA needs to replicate a lot of things that he does in real life to the work environment."
Do you want to imply that people see work environment as unreal life? Not part of real life? - what's worst I can see that a lot of people think that work and life are absolutely different stuff.
But it's a pretty good sum up some of the things you need to work with people. The really fun thing is that most of it is simple common sense, and being polite.
Tarun Chandel
Ronald the idea is to get the work done efficiently and correctly. If we happen to work with a client with different set of beliefs than our own we should not let it be a blocker for our work. We need to understand his business and that's what we should always focus on. Yet time and again it happens that these differences do impede the work and that's the challenge.
Most of the work that I do as a Business Analyst is about applying a lot of common sense and keep digging deeper into my client's business. I am sure it's the same with you :)