BA Mindset Principle #11: Expect Human Behavior from Human Beings

Problems are created and solved by humans

While the business analysis job family is closely associated with information technology, first and foremost we work with people. A lot of information we receive is pre-filtered through human perception and interpretation.

I recall an occasion when our analysis of a set of business scenarios was declared complete by all stakeholders.

We’ve conducted a number of reviews and walkthroughs. We’ve built a decision tree, captured variables and enumerated all possible outcomes, or so we’ve thought.

As a parallel activity, we have requested access to the raw operational data to confirm our assumptions and find real-life illustrations of the scenarios captured. Once the first data set came through, we discovered a couple of unknown outcomes that did not fit with our scenarios.

The problem we were solving was complex volume reporting, and it turned out that the unaccounted scenarios fell into two categories. Both were undisclosed or skipped during the requirement analysis:

• Routinely ignored — these scenarios happened once in a while, and as handling them manually was so time-consuming and tedious, they were ignored and swept under the carpet as not…