Professional Development | JamieClouting.co.uk

Back in April the IIBA NW&E branch, in partnership with the BBC Academy, ran a successful event for over 100 Business Analysts at the BBC’s new MediaCityUK building in Salford. The presentations on the evening were recorded and made available via BBC Academy’s YouTube Channel.

Niko Vijayaratnam, BBC Future Media – News

The Business Analyst (aka. The Generalist-Specialist)

Most products in BBC Future Media are built by teams implementing Scrum yet Scrum doesn’t define a BA role… so what exactly does a BA in a Scrum team do? Niko Vijayaratnam, Senior Business Analyst in BBC Future Media – News, explores this subject looking at the work that BAs in BBC FM produce and discusses their importance to the success of recent projects.

Niko has been a Senior Business Analyst at the BBC since 2010 working on a range of projects from developing new in-house facing tools for editorial to audience facing products to cover events like the 2012 London Olympics.

John Taylor, ITV

Facing the challenge of working in a virtual office

John started his career 12 years ago working in an IT role, before moving into management accounting and finance. Eventually John found an ideal role to combine both of these areas working as a business analyst, specialising in ERP/corporate systems, which unknowingly his previous roles and experience had provided him the skills for.

Angela Stevenson, BBC Technology Solution Design

Angela is new to Business Analysis, or is she…

Angela began her journey into projects twelve years ago in the IT department of a car manufacturer, where the analysis phase was comprehensive, the objective closely guarded and the requirements rigorously tested.

Being an impressionable apprentice Angela believed all projects must be this way and so set off through a decade with variable success before finding the term ‘Business Analysis’ to neatly describe the way she worked.

Having just studied the academic side of the discipline in recent months Angela presents a light hearted look at how she is reconciling wearing both the BA and PM hats in her current role and how she aims to make the two happy bedfellows for successful projects.

I decided this year that 2011 was the year of some professional development. Well, I decided at the end of last year and opted to renew my lapsed student BCS membership for 2011.

Having studied on a BCS approved degree in Manchester, I knew about the BCS’s work and acknowledged them as a group how act as a common forum for both academia and industry. It is the professional qualifications that I was particularly interested in, many in the areas of Business Analysis and Business Systems Development.

I liked the BCS’s definition of CPD, that focused on maintaining competencies:

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is the organised continuation, improvement and broadening of knowledge, understanding and skills, as well as development of personal qualities necessary for an individual to maintain their competence in order to undertake their duties throughout their working life.

On graduation in 2009 I though I was set, that I had everything that I needed and knew all I needed to know for my career. I’ve since learnt that what I studied was both excellent and dated in equal measure. Some of the tools I studied are no longer in common use and others are no good unless adopted by the whole organisation. In short, it was time to do some more learning.

I hope that there will be some more posts to come on the topic of CPD this year as I look to keep the blog updated with lectures, courses and conferences I attend.

I’m also keen to get along to some of the BCS Manchester events this year. The weekly email I get from the branch is always packed full with some great events and opportunities to get along and meet more like minded professionals. No doubt more posts will follow on this.

Tag: Professional Development

VIDEOS: IIBA NW&E April 2013 Meetup, MediaCityUK