IIBA UK Scotland Branch Event - March 20th 2013.

Influencing when you are not the boss.

Any business analyst would agree that communicating is one of the more important attributes of the role. No requirements would be elicited or documented if business analysts all sat in dark rooms by themselves. With this in mind, the first IIBA event of 2013 organised on behalf of the Scotland branch by Be Positive Analysis Solutions focussed on this important skill with the title “Communication – Influencing when you are not the boss”.

Once again, Hudson Recruitment Services kindly offered to host the event in their Edinburgh office near Haymarket, and once again, did a tremendous job of welcoming delegates with a fine spread of appetisers. Not sure whether it was a strategic decision but the spicy chicken tortilla selection took the chill off a particularly wintery Edinburgh evening.

The evening kicked off with a welcome from Kirsteen Bell of Hudson followed by an introduction from Vicky Di Ciacca of Be Positive. Vicky then introduced the speaker for the evening, Dr David Fraser who is a leading authority on relationship skills. He regularly speaks to audiences about relationship mastery and leadership and is also the author of an award-winning book on the subject.

David started by introducing the concept of understanding value. In particular, he focussed on learning how to ask questions in order to understand what values are important to people. Inevitably, there would be some audience participation involved in a talk about communication and it wasn’t long before delegates took to looking at their feet trying to avoid eye contact with David (at least I did). There followed a series of scenario-based conversations between David and a delegate where David attempted to extract what was really important to them whilst working on a project. It was interesting to see how David persevered, even when the person conceded defeat, and then went on to reveal far more useful values; all the time without appearing forceful.

After a couple of examples, delegates were split into teams of three and were asked to perform a similar exercise on each other. This then developed into coming up with an attractive proposal that other team members could not turn down. The idea being, of course, that once you establish what values are important to people you can then use that understanding to foster better cooperation and influencing.

The time seemed to fly and David followed up by asking people to share their experiences of the exercise. This generated some useful discussion including a question as to whether this sort of exercise could benefit from taking place in a pub!

David closed the event off by mentioning some other techniques and by passing around hand-outs with further information. The Hudson hospitality continued with plenty of opportunity for delegates to chat with each other and partake in any left-over refreshments.

Feedback from the event has been really good. The subject matter was of particular relevance to a group of business analysts and I suspect there will be a few more searching questions asked in workshops this week. David delivered the subject in a manner which was easy to understand and the participative nature of the evening gave everyone a good chance to try out the ideas.

Some video footage of David’s presentation was taken and will be made available to IIBA members online. If you missed the event but would like to attend similar sessions in the future, why not join the LinkedIn UK IIBA Scotland Branch Group at:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=4310089&trk=anet_ug_hm

…or follow @UKIIBA on Twitter.

Alternatively, you can join the mailing list by clicking on “Connect with us” and registering at:

http://uk.theiiba.org/index.php/home


Wynne Raymond
Business Analyst
Be Positive Analysis Solutions