The BABOK® Guide breaks the essential analytical thinking and problem solving skills of effective business analysts into five areas: creative thinking, decision making, learning, problem solving and systems thinking. Let’s take a quick look at systems thinking.
Systems thinking is how you put all of the pieces together to understand the properties, behaviors, and characteristics of a system. This information is a moving target for the business analyst and can be quite unpredictable. You need to recognize that systems are not just information technology systems. You are looking at systems in the broader sense, consisting of not just the technology components but the people, the processes, the technology, and almost any other factors that come into play.
Projects and their resulting solutions are like puzzles, possessing many pieces and parts. Changes to one part of the puzzle can impact other parts as well as the whole puzzle. You need to be aware of the complexity of the systems that make up your business operations and keep an eye out for impacts within your new solution as well as to the business itself as work is being performed and decisions are being made.
We will take a quick look at each of the other four areas of your essential analytical thinking and problem solving skills in subsequent posts.
Happy studies!
Susan
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