There’s a pattern I’ve seen on more than a few platform rollouts. The business analyst writes the requirements. The designer picks them up afterwards, then makes them look good. Development builds it, testing signs it off, the thing goes live. Six weeks later the support tickets start. Not because the
Every technical writer hits the same wall eventually. The document is 90% done. It just needs 1 subject matter expert to confirm a few details, then sign off. That expert is a senior engineer with 40 meetings a week, a system outage to manage, plus 3 other projects asking for
You can learn the technical side of business analysis in about 6 months. Requirements templates, process notation, user stories, traceability matrices, gap analysis. It’s all learnable, all documented, all fairly consistent from one organisation to the next. What takes years is the other part. Getting a room full of people
I’ve worked on programs with excellent methodology that went badly. I’ve worked on messy ones that landed well. The difference was never the framework. It was who was in the room, how they got on, whether anyone was willing to say the difficult thing out loud. That’s not a soft
Most IT projects don’t stall because of the technology. They stall because nobody agrees on how the work actually gets done. The software gets delivered. The training happens. Then, a few months later, people quietly go back to the old way. Usually it comes down to processes, and more specifically,
Every workplace has that one person who knows how everything actually works. Call her Jane. Jane knows why the invoice template has that weird extra field. She knows which supplier to ring when the usual one goes quiet. She knows the three steps nobody ever wrote down that keep the
Looking back at 2023, one experience still stands out. Attending a live session with Chris Do in London. It was part of a work conference setting, but it felt more focused and practical than most conferences I have attended. Chris Do from The Futur is known for helping creatives and
Most people walk into interviews thinking they are being judged. Their skills. Their experience. Their answers. What often gets missed is that interviews also judge the organisation. They reveal culture before day one. They show how people speak when power is in the room. They expose how disagreement, curiosity, and
As a technical writer or business process analyst, your work depends on other people’s knowledge. Subject matter experts hold the detail behind the diagrams, SOPs and work instructions. They know what really happens beyond the documented process. They know where things break. They know which steps exist only because of
