SPEAKER INTERVIEW – Ahead of our Business Analysis Conference Europe, September 18 – 20 2023, in London we find out more about Chris Pyatt, Senior Practice Business Analyst, DWP Digital. Chris will speak on Tuesday the 19th of September about The Institutionalised BA, #BA2023.
Tell me about yourself and how long you have been in a Business Analyst role.
I joined the DWP Digital Business Analysis Practice team about 9 months ago, as a Senior Practice Business Analyst. Prior to that, I managed a team of BAs at the University of Leeds, working there for about 9 years. I live in Leeds and I’m passionate about growing and developing business analysts and the BA profession.
Tell me about your presentation at the Business Analysis Conference 2023
My presentation is about that feeling of institutionalisation that we can develop after we’ve worked within an organisation for a long period of time, and how it affects our thinking when we’re looking to change roles. I’ve had a couple of long stints at previous employers and found that you can easily lose sight of where your value lies and what’s transferable to a new organisation which can make it harder to move on. When I spoke to several other business analysts, they’d experienced exactly the same thing – which made me think, hmmm… I wonder if there’s a conference presentation in this!
What are the highlights/key takeaways from your session?
I think firstly raising awareness of how this feeling of institutionalisation manifests, and sharing some thoughts on why business analysis as a profession has certain traits that might make it more susceptible to this. I also share some advice from people who’ve been through that self-doubt caused by institutionalisation on how they overcame this, and how we as recruiting teams might reduce the uncertainty around the roles we advertise to also help address this.
Do you have any future predictions for the role of Business analyst and perhaps the industry?
I think recently we’ve seen a number of ‘new and trendy’ roles picking up parts of the BA profession and making a specialism out of them. However, I think going forward there will be increasingly a call for the return to more holistic analysis rather than splitting out of analytical specialisms. I also think Business Analysts will need to rapidly upskill themselves with knowledge about AI. There’s a lot of potential and risk associated with AI, but as with all technologies if they’re adapted just as a tech solution without thinking through the broader impacts we’re not going to reap the benefits.
