As a business analyst, you are required to interact with other stakeholders on a regular basis. In the process, you form working relationships with each of the stakeholders.

Applying certain behavioral characteristics will help you to develop more effective relationships.

The behavioral characteristics of a business analyst should demonstrate these qualities:

• ethics
   
• personal organization, and
   
• trustworthiness
   

Ethics can be defined as the set of guiding principles used to determine correct, moral behavior – almost like a compass giving you direction.

Behaving ethically requires that you follow specific guiding principles in all circumstances.

As a business analyst, it's important that you behave in an ethical manner at all times. This earns stakeholders' respect and builds their trust in you.

An understanding of ethics can also help you to recognize potential ethical difficulties inherent in proposed ideas or suggestions.

In the context of business analysis, ethics entails working in the best interest of all stakeholders. This involves considering how decisions will impact each stakeholder.

You also need to ensure that you treat all stakeholders with fairness, although this doesn't mean that decisions have to appease everyone – often this isn't possible.

However, it is possible to ensure that all stakeholders are informed of why a particular decision is the best one, given the organization's interests. If an ethical problem crops up at some point in the decision-making process, you will have to be able to resolve it to the best of your ability.

You will know that you are carrying out your work in an ethical manner if you

• take the interests of everyone involved into account when making decisions
   
• explain all decisions taken and ensure that all stakeholders understand these decisions
   
• are open about any possible clashes in opinions or outcomes between stakeholders
   
• are upfront about your work and what you are and aren't able to do, and
   
• admit to any mistakes on your part and take responsibility for any consequences of your mistakes

Say you're a business analyst for a technology company involved in the development, manufacture, and supply of portable data-storage products. The company needs to cut costs.

The company has four divisions – development, manufacturing, sales, and distribution. You must determine which division is best suited for outsourcing.

When you're in the process of eliciting requirements, one stakeholder questions why you haven't involved a union representative from the distribution division. You didn't invite the representative to participate because you knew this person would be biased in their feedback.

However, behaving ethically would involve engaging all relevant stakeholders. You should elicit feedback from the union representative, even if you know this may slow down progress. Having failed to do so, you should admit your error and then rectify the situation.

Your work is made much easier when you practice good personal organization skills. Having good personal organization simply means that you manage your time, tasks, and information well, prioritizing and reprioritizing as you go.

At the most basic level, personal organization requires that you have an efficient, comprehensive filing process or system for organizing all your documents and files. You should be able to find any documents you need easily and quickly, at any time.

You can achieve good time management by

setting clear goals

 

Clearly formulated objectives and goals are easier to achieve when you create task lists and action plans. You need to ensure that each task is written out, explained, and defined thoroughly.

 

prioritizing tasks, and

 

Prioritizing your tasks involves ranking all tasks according to their importance or urgency to create a numbered to-do list or action plan.

 

avoiding procrastination

 

To avoid procrastination, you should complete tasks according to your prioritized list, even if there are other less important but more enjoyable tasks to be done. Putting off a task generally just makes it more difficult to complete the task later.

 

When you are able to access information quickly and easily, finish your tasks on schedule, and monitor the status of your to-do list, you are exercising good personal organization.

In the case of the technology company, you created an organized and detailed filing system for all business analysis documents before beginning your work.

You also created a prioritized and detailed task list, which you update regularly to keep current.

You need to earn stakeholders' trust so that you can discuss all aspects of a project openly and honestly, enabling you to make the best possible decisions.

If you don't have stakeholders' trust, they might keep vital information from you. This can prevent you from identifying the best, most practical course of action.

To gain anyone's trust, including that of stakeholders, you need to earn it.

Many people instinctively distrust change and its possible effects. Your job as a business analyst almost always entails initiating changes within an organization, so it's especially important that stakeholders trust you.

Demonstrating ethical behavior and practicing good personal organization skills are ways to start gaining stakeholders' trust. It also helps to make it clear that you are looking out for stakeholders' needs, which might not necessarily correspond with their expressed desires.

This may sometimes include addressing problems that are uncomfortable or inconvenient for stakeholders to face. However, facing up to such problems honestly and with fairness will increase stakeholders' respect for and trust in your abilities as a business analyst.

You'll be able to tell that stakeholders trust you if they

• include you in their decision-making processes
   
• are open to your suggestions and advice
   
• are willing to talk about any possible issues or problems surrounding a decision, and
   
• are willing to stand up for you and your proposed solution
   

For the technology company that must cut costs, a solution you propose is outsourcing some distribution activities. Although this would benefit the organization as a whole, some stakeholders are uncomfortable, fearing that it will result in a loss of positions within the organization.

You acknowledge this concern when communicating the solution approach with stakeholders. You also request, record, and track feedback from stakeholders about which distribution activities are the best options for outsourcing, so that further requirements can be determined using their input.

In this situation, you act ethically and utilize your organizational skills while creating an environment of trust.