Business Analyst Communication Series Part 2

1. Introduction to Communication Part 2: Hi, My name is Teresa Bennett, and I'm your instructor for the business Analysis Communication. Part two course. In this course, you will learn why it's important to acknowledge the message. How to become a better listener, articulating responses and feedback. How you can use silence to advance the conversation. The right way to ask questions, facilitation techniques that you can use during requirement solicitation sessions and how to communicate effectively to your audience. I'll go through requirements solicitation exercise to show you specifically how to implement these techniques. I'll also give you some pointers on how to improve your written communications as well. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the course. 2. Lesson 1 Acknowledging the Message: Okay, let's take a look at acknowledgement of the message. So this is acknowledging the words that the other person is saying. Teoh acknowledgment means that the listener gives positive, observable and frequently audible signs to the speaker that they're listening to understanding and appreciating what the speaker says, acknowledging the speaker communicates acceptance of the speaker as a worthwhile person. Your gestures, verbal and non verbal signals all at value to the conversation. Notice that I didn't say that. It indicates acceptance of what the person is saying. You're not agreeing with them, but by acknowledging what they're saying, you're making them feel heard. Let's look at some ways that you can acknowledge the message when somebody else is speaking eye contact. Leaning in pleasant facial expressions, nodding your head, hand gestures, verbal comments Using the first name of speaker and paraphrasing. I would like to say that you should stop multitasking, look at the person, respond verbally and non verbally write. Use your body language as well. The nodding of the head would be part of the body language. I think that many times when we're in meetings, especially in person meetings, people have their laptops open. They're looking at their phones. They're multitasking. We need to stop the multi tasking and pay attention. Truly pay attention to what the other person is saying and let them know that we're paying attention to that. By acknowledging the message I contact we talked about earlier in the course, you want to look at them for a few seconds. Look away. Look back again. You don't want to stare because staring can make somebody uncomfortable. But you do want to have eye contact leaning in again. This is leaning in slightly, not leaning in and getting in their personal space. Pleasant facial expressions, right? We don't want to smart. We don't want to roll our eyes. You can smile. I call it your at rest face right. So when you might not be frowning and you might not be smiling and you're just listening to what the other person says, make sure that you're not making any facial gestures that could be interpreted as making the other person feel devalued, right, like rolling your eyes or smirking or scrunching up your nose or something along those lines that will make the person think that you're not agreeing with what they're saying, so make sure your at rest face is truly an at rest face 3. Lesson 2 Becoming a Better Listener: all right. In this section of the course, we're going to look at becoming a better listener. Part of becoming a better listener is probably pretty obvious. It's listen more and talk less, but there's some other things that you can do to help improve your listening skills. So to help you be a better listener, you should maintain a relaxed but alert posture. Minimize distracting gesture. So if you're a person that uses your hands a lot in conversation or you two on a pencil or you do those types of things, you want to minimize your own gestures so that your paying more attention and staying more focused on what's being said by the other person. Acknowledge the message right, acknowledge the person using head nods, smiles things like that again, make sure that you are not as we talked about in a previous chapter. Make sure you're not smiling when there is approval being asked for something because a smile during that moment can indicate that you're giving approval. Face the person squarely instead of from the side whenever possible. Sometimes when you're in a situation, you're in a conference room and you're sitting around a table that sometimes isn't possible . But try to do that where you can lean slightly towards the person instead of sitting stiffly upright or slouching right. Either one of those is not good. But again, don't lean in too far so that you don't end up in their personal space and make them feel like you're being aggressive. The other thing that I want to point out here is if you really noticed that you have trouble kind of paying attention and staying on topic when other people are speaking, I think I've mentioned this previously in the course. One of the things that you can do to help with that is to take notes while the other person is talking, so you may not. Then, of course, be able to do some of these other things because you're looking down at your paper. But you also want to make sure that you are frequently looking up from your paper, making eye contact with the person, letting them know that you're not just basically sitting there randomly writing things. You are taking notes because you are paying attention to the conversation that is happening at that moment, 4. Lesson 3 Articulating Responses and Feedback: all right in this chapter, we're going to look at response and feedback. Meaning, What is it that you say to respond to what somebody else has said? Response or feedback is referring to the techniques that you're going to use to confirm understanding of the message that somebody else has spoken. The right kind of feedback can significantly improve the process of communication, and the wrong kind can stop a conversation. Cold feedback takes many forms for an analyst, the most powerful are paraphrasing, mirroring open ended questions and empathy statements. So let's take a look at each one of those. Paraphrasing involves restating to the speaker in your own words what you believe is the essence of what has just been said by occasionally checking your interpretation with the speaker, you can accomplish several things. First, paraphrasing demonstrates that you've been actively interested in the speaker and what they're saying. Second, you guard against any serious misunderstandings, and lastly, the quality of communication is increased because you're showing the speaker what information is getting a cost to you and what is not. So let's look at paraphrasing techniques. You can use statements like so what? I heard Waas If I understand you correctly, we need Let's see if I've got this. Look for the speakers. Reaction to your paraphrasing. Keep asking for clarification until the message is clear. Now let's look at mirroring. Mirroring requires you the listener, to repeat verbatim what the speaker just set. So you're not repeating it back to them in your own words, you're repeating it back to them. In their words, That technique is helpful for several reasons. One, if they're getting frustrated, it helps to calm them because you're repeating back to them exactly what they've said. It brings true clarification. It also helps auditory learners. It's good for calculations, definitions and exact instructions. So some techniques that you want to make sure you use is to always keep your voice calm and accepting and always follow mirroring with paraphrasing. So first you're saying back to them verbatim what they said and then say so. If I'm understanding you correctly, what you mean is, or let me make sure that I've understood that correctly. And then paraphrase in your own words, it's OK. Open ended questions. An open ended question is one that it folks a longer response than a yes or no, which is considered a closed question. Broad open ended questions have great power as a questioning technique, and you should always use that in your requirements. Solicitation sessions. It shows interest in the other person's situation. It encourages more dialogue and follow up questions are going to come out of the response that they give you. If you are in a requirement session and you say to somebody, Is there anything else about that? I need to know? They're probably going to say no. Their brain has shut down on that topic. You've just asked them yes or no question. You've basically given the easy out for their minds to take. Not that they're trying to be lazy or they're trying to take the easy way out, but their brain is now focused on either yes or no where, if you say to them, what else do I need to know? It makes their brain start looking for what else you need to know. It's almost like it's a computer based on the question that you ask, it's giving your response, so asking it as an open ended question forces their brain to go through the process of looking for what else they need to tell you. Here's some examples of open ended questions. What is your opinion Off? What are some possible solutions to what additional tasks are required? So instead of saying, are there any other tasks required? Just simply change that toe what additional tasks are required, and if there are none, then they can tell you that there are none. But you want them to go through the thought process of figuring that out rather than just jumping to that examples of close ended questions or things like Does everyone agree? Does anyone have a problem with this? Are these all of the tasks? So some open ended question techniques are things like keeping the questions simple? Don't get too involved. Don't make them too long listening for operative words in the speaker's response so that you can build follow up questions and use the funnel technique to build a more specific, detailed questions as you go. So start out. Think of what a funnel looks like. It's more open at the beginning and comes down to getting more closed. So you want to start out with some broad statements. In the beginning, some broad, high level type of questions. And then, as you continue asking questions, you're getting more focused on a specific area. Empathy statements can help to play back the speakers unspoken feelings that have been expressed with voice tone and body language. So an empathy response acknowledges unspoken emotion as an analyst. Information gathering sessions and project team meetings can sometimes be very full off emotion and emotional speakers do not make good listeners. So when somebody is starting to get emotional, they're no longer listening, and you want to try to reduce emotion. So to reduce the emotion in the conversation, you have to address and acknowledge that emotion. You can't pretend that it's not there. Some statements say you can make are things like I'm sensing you're not comfortable with this option. It seems to me that there may be some concerns with this you want to use I statements, not you. So don't say that the person you are say something that starts with I make it about you instead of about them, respond with empathy. I can appreciate your frustrations that does sound like you're overloaded. How can I help? Things like that will help reduce the emotion from their side, which will help open them up toe listening more 5. Lesson 4 Using Silence to Communicate: all right in this section, we're going to talk about silence, so that may seem odd to say that we're going to use silence during communication. But silence can be a very powerful communication tool. It allows you to organize your thoughts, and it encourages the other person to expand on ideas, reactions or feelings. How does it do that? Because people are quite frankly uncomfortable with silence. If you're quiet, they're going to continue talking. If they stop talking and you don't start talking within a few seconds, they're probably going to say more. So that's why silence actually encourages the other person to expand on what they're saying . Try using silence during these times when you're being asked a question. Take a moment, be silent and think about your response when important points have been made and you need to digest them and analyze them and think about them. One. Emotions are running high, and when you're receiving large amounts of information at once, like when you're in a requirement session, there are times when talk is hurtful and when silence is the beginning of wisdom. I love that quote, and I think that it's something that you should practice the using silence because, like I said before her, people are uncomfortable with silence. That means you're probably uncomfortable with silence to, and if you don't get comfortable with it, then you're not going to be able to use this as a technique because you won't be comfortable using it. So start practicing it, even in your personal life, with your Children, your spouse, your partner, your friends. Try not responding right away. When people say something, try being silent for a few seconds and just see what happens and start practicing that and get yourself comfortable with silence. 6. Lesson 5 The Right Way to Ask Questions: in this section, we're going to look at asking questions and not just questions, but asking the right questions. As part of a listening requirements, you're responsible for opposing clear, concise questions and listening for a response. Once the response is given, you have to digest that information and then determine if follow up questions are necessary before you continue on to the next topic. To completely define the requirements, you have to identify sources of information that are coming out of the conversation and then frame questions properly. Your main job as a business analyst, right? The thing that you're going to do the most of and that, quite frankly, is the most important to your job is a listening and analyzing information. The majority of the information is going to be gathered through various different questioning techniques of different actors, different subject matter experts, different stakeholders, external agents, which could be vendors, customers, people like that. So some potential sources of information our executive sponsors the subject matter experts , which can come from upper management, middle management, business professionals, clerical. If you're working on a project related to a call centre than the people working in the call center technology teams, the outside vendor, suppliers and customers and then personnel that support interfacing software. So other software that's working with the application that you're working on you want to be sure that you identify the people that represent each area of your scope so that you're making sure that you are having conversations with representatives from each of those different areas. So let's look at framing questions on business process when you are probing for additional information related a process. Some of the types of questions you can ask are things like, Why is it done? What does it involve? Who does it, When is it done? Where is it done? How is it currently done? Because there can be more than one way that they're doing a task right now. How might it be done in the future? What constraints are affecting the process? Where's your problems that right now? And if you feel like you are saying why too much, you can try things like for what reason you can switch it up a little bit. You don't always have to use the word why, when you're framing questions around data, right, because you have two different things that you're doing. You're identifying processes, but you're also identifying data. So when you're were trying to figure out what data is needed, some of the types of questions you can ask or things like who uses the data? Where does the data originate? Why do we need that data? What is the data? How is the data to find? What are the constraints on the data? For example, if you had a project, all training, scheduling project and the point of the project was to increase the number of classes that could be scheduled by the existing number of administration personnel, some possible questions you could ask our who schedules the training classes. What activities occur to schedule class? Where's the class scheduling activity performed? One is a class scheduled. Why do you schedule classes? Other possible questions are How are classes currently scheduled? How my classes be scheduled in the future. What constraints are there on scheduling classes? Who uses the class scheduling information? What information is needed to schedule class? What information does scheduling a class generate? Where is the scheduling information generated? Why do we need each piece of information? What is the definition of each piece of data. What are the constraints on the data? So you see how we have a simple statement for project and all of these questions came up. So ah, lot of times, people don't take a moment to think about all the different things that they need to ask, and they look at a statement and say, Well, this is pretty simple and they ask a couple questions and they move on. Take some time to really dig in and figure out all the different types of questions that you need to ask in order to get at all the different types of information that you need to know. Now let's look at appearing clueless in order to foster span a discussion. Then sometimes you should ask silly or frivolous questions, and you're doing this on person. Put yourself in the position of being clueless about the process that you're discussing so that others will correct you and explain the options, the true nature of those options and why they chose the direction that they did. This helps teams toe actually re examine their drivers for a decision, and it often helps them look for simpler approaches it sort of shocks their nervous system into reconsideration, right? So takes them out of the norm and makes them think about it. Rather than having an automatic response to things. However, you do need thick skin and self confidence to take that approach, because people may look at you like they're thinking, Hey, you should know the answer to that. Or that's a dumb question. Why are you asking that? And it's OK if they look at you like that, it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, it's your responsibility to get the information that you need to have in order to make sure that you're giving them what they need to have. So if it requires that you use this technique than use it, and don't be concerned about what other people are thinking making debatable statements, this is kind of a variation on the silly question approach. So instead of a silly question, you might be making a statement that will cause a debate toe happen. So let me give you an example in your business. Domain Sox compliance. He might be an important criteria in a requirement planning session. You might state that you've seen little or no information around socks, compliancy and testing, knowing that there really is a reasonable level. You're looking for the team to respond with the fax, and you're also looking for realization across the team of any sass compliancy or testing gaps that might still exist. So even though you know it's there, you're going to make that type of statement so that you cause them to think a little bit more about it. So it's still working the same way as appearing clueless. It's just a little bit of a variation on that. So again thick skin. When you're using that technique active listening when you are actively listening, you are staying focused on the top. So if your mind is wandering and you're thinking about what to cook for dinner or what you need to pick up on the way home from work things like that, then you are not actively listening, so you need to stay focused on the topic. We need to respond in a professional manner to what the person is saying, not what you believe they're saying right, that goes back to that true listening hearing, paraphrasing back to them, repeating back to them for bait. Um, you want to make sure that you're responding to what they're saying. We all hearing process information differently. As the first part of your response. You want to repeat back what you heard them say. So that's where you either use Thean paraphrasing or the verbatim right? Because that's going to ensure that you're actually responding to the correct comment or question. Because if you say, if I heard you right, you said or I think I heard you say or help me make sure I understand you correctly and you're paraphrasing back to them and they say, No, that wasn't actually what I met. Now you're actually getting on the right track right? Where? If you don't say that to them and you just continue down the path of thinking you understood them correctly, you could be responding to the wrong statement completely. So you want to use that paraphrasing or verbatim technique mirroring or prepare of raising to make sure that your understanding what they're saying correctly 7. Lesson 6 Facilitation Techniques : we're going to look at some requirements. Facilitation, questioning techniques. It's not always the easy to get the information that you need from stakeholders. Sometimes they're reluctant to speak. Sometimes they're multitasking, they're not paying attention. And there's some techniques that you can use to get those stakeholders talking. So if you want to analyze something that is being discussed than you can say, would you please break that down for me? So I can further understand If you want to check something to make sure that there's no misunderstanding, then you can use a question that, like, will you share with me your understanding of what we just discussed. If you want to classify something, you can say, it would certainly help me organize my thinking. If you would please classify those points. If you want to do a comparison than you can say, can we compare that statement to the one we reviewed earlier? Please. This is especially helpful if you are in a situation where you think you may have just received a conflict ing requirement. So if you got one requirement earlier, somebody gives you another one, and you think that this one requirement number seven conflicts with requirement number two . So you want to go back and say, Hey, can we compare that statement to what we discussed earlier on requirement number two? And you may need Teoh talk a little bit about number two, right, like bring them back around or what to waas so that you can have that conversation. If you want to define something you can say to help me understand, can you define that term for us? Describing, which means to select I am defined features which characterize a condition, situation or process, you can say, Can you describe a typical situation to which this might apply? If you want to discuss something you can say, let's explore the implications and ramifications of this. If you want to explain or want them to explain, you can say, Can you tell us how you arrived at that conclusion? If you want to illustrate an example right, you want somebody to illustrate something you can say. Can anyone give me an example or two of how this would work? And then, if you want to prompt them, remember earlier we said, Don't ask closed ended questions. So instead of saying is there anything else you could say? What else? If you want to probe for more information on a specific topic, you can say something like, How do you mean? If you're trying to redirect, you can say good point. Can we put that on the issues list? In other words, let's get back to the conversation at hand. Will take that down. You've been heard. You want to make sure the person always feels like they've been heard. But you want to redirect the conversation back to where it should be, so you can use that as a statement to make To do that. Restating is the same, Really? Is paraphrasing, right? So you could say in other words, or what I heard you say is Tell me if I've got this right. Any of those kind of things will work for that review means that you're doing a recap, right? Can we please review the points that we've covered so far is a good way to get that started and verifying. How can we verify that this is indeed the case? So somebody says, I think this is how this is done, or I believe this is how this is done. They're using words that don't sound like their 100% sure that that's how some things done . Then you can say, How can we verify that That is really the case there. And then they may even say, Oh, it is. It may just be that they use the wrong language in their state, or they'll tell you how we can verify that. So those are some questioning techniques, some examples off questions that you can ask when you're looking get something in a certain way. 8. Lesson 7 Communicate Effectively to Your Audience: in this section, we're going to look at a requirement session exercise. So you are the B A that has just been assigned to a new project. You know that your company is going to create a website for someone that sells training materials and coaching products online. That's basically all you know. You weren't given a project overview. You were just kind of thrown into it and said, Hey, we need a B A For this project, you need to get some background first, so make sure you understand their business on what they do today. Before you two start discussing requirements for changes or additions, so your first requirement sessions should always be about Hey, what are you doing now? Right? Its current state is your first requirement session. So let's get a conversation. The Bacon start for the initial requirements discussion Question that the B A would ask. Tell me about your business. I know that you sell training materials and coaching products, but tell me what those products are about. So the SMEs response might be something like, I have three different coaching packages that I sell. One is a one time coaching session. One is a monthly package. So the person is basically paying for poor sessions per month. And when they do this, they get some extra perks, like email support between sessions. I also have a custom training package. Tell me more about the custom training package. How Maney Sessions is that the SMEs response would be. It's a set of six training sessions on areas each customer needs to focus on. So I want to point out here that when this me said, I also have a custom training package that was kind of a ding ding that went off in the B A's head to say, Hey, tell me more about that because that's vague, right? A custom training package means it could be anything. So you now want them to give you a little bit more detail around. What does that mean? Next to be a might ask, How do you know which areas that customer needs to focus off SMEs? Response would be, I haven't assessment. Call with them to discuss their background goals and the areas they need to improve on in their skills. How do you end up having this call with that? I have a link to my website. Do a counter application and people can schedule assessment calls with me. Is your website the only place you have this life? No, it's also in my newsletter on lengthen and on Facebook. Thebe A would then ask what training materials do you sell? And the response would be? I have three training products, essential skills of the I T analyst Ah, core skills of the I T analyst class and a communication skills training manual. Okay, let's talk for a minute about how you sell your training products today. How are you currently selling those training materials? When I talked to someone that's interested in buying my training materials, I either shipped the materials to them or I will email to them. I assume you collect payment prior to shipping or emailing. How are you doing that? I have a PayPal account that people make payments to. So now what? You would continuing asking questions until you understood the current business functions. Your next step would be moving into the conversation around current challenges and what they want to add or change. So that's where you start discussing the new requirements. So typically, depending on how much time you have. That may not happen. Or most likely won't happen until the next session. Right? Usually are going to try to get down the current state in the first session and then have another session on the requirements what their challenges are today, what they're looking for in the future so that you're not trying to lump it all into one session unless you have enough time, right? If you've got a day blocked off with the person than great do that. But if you have a one hour session, you're not gonna get to all that in an hour. And if you try to, you're going to cut corners and you're not gonna ask all the questions that you should, so don't try to cram it all into one session if you have too much for that. 9. Lesson 8 Requirements Elicitation Exercise: Let's look at communicating effectively to your audience. Audience recognition. You're never going to speaker right in a vacuum. When you create a document leader requirement session, give a presentation, communicate with subject matter experts. You need to consider the following questions. Who is your audience? What do they know? What do they not know? And what do you need to say or write for your audience? To understand your point? How do you communicate to a multi level audience? What is each person's position in relation to your job title? Are you speaking to Piers, your manager? The executive team? What's the audience attitude toward the topic? Do you have SMEs that aren't interested in the project? Just SMEs that already understand the vision and there are actually dying to jump in right . They're excited about being on the project. What diversity issues do you need to consider cultural gender? Location. Where you in person? On the phone. Are you in different countries? Are there different time zones involved? Make sure your message does not include jargon or acronyms that some of the audience may not understand. You have to remember that you're speaking to the whole room, not just to a specific person. To communicate successfully, you have to be able to recognize your audiences level of understanding. You also need to consider your audience is unique personality and traits which could impact how successful your communications are. What does your audience know of the subject matter? This is something else that we need to look at, right? So first we've thought about our audience and what their personalities, their level of knowledge we have to take into consideration. What is that They know about the subject, right? So some people could be very knowledgeable, and some may be new to that subject area. So think about what they know in a requirement session. Give SMEs that no different areas of the business instead of once me that knows the entire business process from end to end. Does the audience work closely with the subject at hand? They would be an expert right on the subject, or does the audience have general knowledge of the subject matter? But they really have a different area of expertise. Are they totally uninvolved with the subject matter? You're probably going to have a mix of all three of those tights when you're in a requirement session, but you need to know which person is which, right, so that you're asking the right questions of the right people. SMEs will understand the jargon related to the business subject being discussed probably even better than you understand that the SMEs will be able to explain the details for standard procedures, business processes, etcetera. The part of your audience that is not a Smee are probably somewhat familiar with the subject, but their job responsibilities might just be peripheral to the subject matter. They might work in high tea or another department, or may even work outside of your company. Right? There could be a vendor that's involved in the project because this part of your audience is familiar with the subject matter. They understand some of the jargon, but definitely not all of it. So you still need to avoid acronyms and other jargon as much as possible so that you don't lose them in the conversation. You may also need to provide more background information to this part of your audience so that they have a better understanding of the subject matter. So again, if they're not SMEs that are really involved in the process, Then you may need to give additional information when you're talking so that they have a clear understanding. You may also have audience members that don't have any knowledge of the subject matter. There could be a developer in the meeting that hasn't worked on this application before. You could have a project manager signed the project that's new to the company that could be lost, A different reasons that you end up with somebody on your project that doesn't know anything about it. These audience members will be unfamiliar with the subject matter, and they're gonna be completely lost if you just jump in and get started on requirements. So you've got to remember to give some background right. Doing that is just a Zim Porton, and you need to remember to speak in clear, simple terms. You need to explain the topic clearly through precise word usage, depth of detail and maybe even used some simple graphics for existing applications. A power point presentation with some screenshots of the app and an overview of how it works is a great place to start. If you know you've got people in the room that maybe aren't as familiar with the subject as some of the rest of the people are, consider audience personality trains. By doing that, you can speak using the appropriate tone, visual, aids and writing style for your documentation. By recognizing the audiences personality traits, you can more effectively get the desired response that you're looking for from the audience . Obviously, you can't always know the personality traits of everyone in your audience. Most of the time, you'll be speaking to at least some of the people that you never. They will have been on a previous project with you before you will work with them in some capacity. Unless you're new to the company, you're most likely going have some people that that you've worked with previously, and you're able to consider and know a little bit about their personality to foster effective communication. You want a factor in your knowledge of their personalities, their attitudes and their preferences. Are they slow to act? Are they eager? Are they questioning? Are they organized? Are they disorganized? Are they oppositional? Which is really just kind of a nice way of saying, Are they argumentative? Are they negative or positive? Writer? They the glass is half full or the glass is half empty kind of person. Are they noncommittal? Do they prefer you to be shortened to the point you have somebody in the room that you know prefers you to be shortened to the point? Then when you're directing and question at them, don't give him a bunch of background. Just ask him the question. Let them ask you if they need more information. What are you expecting from your audience? Are you expecting them to give you business requirements? Do you want them to consider an idea and make suggestions? Do you want them to reject some options? In other words, make a choice between several suggestions that you make. Are you just expecting them toe, listen or read and file the information for future use. Knowing what it is that you're expecting from them is going to help you figure out how you need to communicate with them. Along with, of course, those personality traits. Biased language. Let's look at some issues of diversity your audiences never composed of people that are just like you, and I want to be clear here that diversity includes gender, race, religion, age, sexual orientation, class, physical mental characteristics, language, family issues and department diversity. Your co workers will have many different interests. Levels of knowledge, backgrounds and life experiences. A diverse workforce keeps companies competitive. Talent doesn't come in one color, nationality or belief system. If you have everybody there, that is exactly the same thing. You're gonna get exactly the same every time. Right. You need people that have different opinions and different viewpoints in order to foster communication ideas and creativity. The things to keep in mind when you're working on a project with a multicultural team that spans different countries are things like verbal and nonverbal communication norms for those countries and cultures. Management styles, decision making procedures, sense of time and place, local values, beliefs and attitudes. You need to ensure that you're writing. You're speaking Andrew. Nonverbal communications accommodate language barriers and cultural customs. So don't just assume that everybody's like you. In fact, you should assume that everybody is not like you. I want to give you an example of time when diversity may have Causton issue, because people didn't really think about the difference in language. So this is a classic example of a company's failure to recognize the importance of translation concerns. There was a car named Nova, which in English is defined as a star that spectacularly flares up. But in Spanish, that name translated to Nova, which translated to no go, which is a really poor advertisement for an automobile, Right? You don't want to say you have an automobile that doesn't go, so that's just a comical example of when you don't take into consideration the differences between cultures. 10. Lesson 9 Written Communication: Let's take a look at written communication skills. Excellent writing skills are necessary to be successful in your role. Is a business analysts essential Written communication skills needed are things like excellent grammar. If you struggle in this area, be sure to use the tools available to you. You have spell check in all of the word processing applications, of course dictionaries. You may consider having someone review your communications prior to sending them out until your skills are sufficient in that area. So if you know that you have problems with grammar sentence structure, things like that thin. Have somebody do a check. Have them review it before you send it out. It does not foster confidence. If your written communications are poorly written or grammatically incorrect, meeting minutes when you're taking meeting minutes, there are two things that you should remember toe. Always document, capture action items and follow up items and capture the name of the person speaking. The reason you want to do this is because you want to be able to go back to them to get more information. If you need Teoh. So when I'm taking notes, even in a requirement session, so not necessarily meeting minutes. But my documentation, the requirements that are coming out of a session all right, down in the name of the person that gave me the requirement so that if I have to go back later and ask a clarifying point or ask more information, I can say he Jane, in the meeting, you told me blah, blah, blah, and I need to get, you know, it's more information on this. So that way, you know that Jane gave you that requirement, you know, to go back to. Obviously, if you're only having a one on one session, then you know you don't have to write their name down by every requirement because, you know, they're the only ones that gave it to you. But if you have more than one person in the room, right, the name down e mails, memos and status reports. Once you write the communication, you should review it and take out any unnecessary information. Use bullet points when possible, avoid long paragraphs. People do not like to read, and when they see a lot in one paragraph, they generally tend to skip it or skipped most of it. They might read the first sentence and then skip the rest of it. Stick to the facts. Do not inject opinion unless it's actually called for in the document. Also, make sure that you're keeping emotion out of it on Lee. Stick to the facts right that way you will have less of a tendency to stir up any emotions when they're reviewing your documentation. If it's a type of documentation that can cause that, for example, if you were doing some software testing as part of your be a role, if you're reviewing changes that were made and you're checking to see if they're the same as what you ask for in the requirements and you find a defect when you're reporting that defect, you want to stick to the facts. You don't want to be emotional about it. You don't want to cause the developer that wrote the code to be emotional about it. I always say that code is to a developer what a baby is to their mother. They don't want their babies called ugly, and developers don't want their code called ugly, right, so you want to make sure that you are keeping the emotion out of it and sticking to the facts