Three Generations of Business Analysts at KBTG
One of the forces that play a vital role in bridging KBank’s business goals and KBTG’s technological expertise is undoubtedly our amazing business analysts. To spotlight their stories, wisdom, and their KBTG journey, we interviewed 3 generations of business analysts (BA): junior, advanced, and senior. Let’s get to know them.
Pop Thanawat — Business Analyst
Current area of work: Core Banking Integration
My interest for BA began when I was a student. Before graduating with a computer engineering degree in December 2021, as part of my final project, I interned at other companies in a programmer role. During my internship, I discovered gaps in communication between developers and project managers, which ignited my desire to bridge that gap and enable teams to work together more efficiently. That’s what led me to the role of BA. After graduating, I worked as a Business Analyst for almost a year at a software company before applying to join KBTG through the KBTG Intensive Program (KIP).
When I joined KBTG, one of my challenges was my lack of knowledge of the banking industry. The previous company I worked for was an outsourcing business that focuses on developing programs for clients. From there, I gained experience and knowledge of various businesses and customer journeys. However, once I moved to KBTG, I had to learn exclusively about banking, an industry of which I had no prior experience or knowledge.
For example, the current project I am taking care of is called LPM (Loan Portfolio Management) Replacement. My project involves replacing old LPM systems with new ones and combining systems together. But this work doesn’t end with replacement. You have to understand how the system you’re handling impacts others, and even further, how they impact different downstream systems. For someone with no background in banking, I had to make strenuous efforts to thoroughly learn the entire picture from start to finish.
Fortunately, KBTG has many useful online resources about banking alongside a great support system where during the first six months of working as a new joiner, you are assigned a buddy who will be your go-to person for what you need. And if you join the KIP, there’ll be mentors to guide you. So it is through the help of many people, reading a lot and asking many questions that I was able to rapidly develop myself.
For those who are aspiring to become a BA, my biggest advice is always think one or two steps ahead of others. When I worked as a BA for my previous company, I often had to take the lead in running meetings and gathering the users’ requirements. In doing so, I needed to have a long-term vision and have the mindset to find as many tools that can help the user as I can. It is not good enough to think that the tool you select is the one they need. Perhaps other tools that we found can help the user more or are a better suit for them.
If you are still a student and aspire to work as a BA, I highly recommend you to take the lead in as many projects as you can, so you can develop project management and communication skills through working with your team.
Ben Benjasub — Advanced Business Analyst
Current area of work: Data Integration Hub
My career path at the beginning was nothing related to BA. I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. During my journey, I had to collect requirements from customers which sparked my interest in the BA position. In fact, I actually worked at KBTG before as a Junior BA through an outsource company for the Data Integration Hub team. However, back then I couldn’t understand the flow of the work due to my lack of experience in data and business rules. As a result, I left KBTG and decided to work as a BA for an insurance company. There, I started to understand the big picture through talking with users about their pain points and finding vendors to seek softwares that could solve their problems. After 4–5 projects, I felt I understood the work flow of BA better and moved back to KBTG.
Advanced BA work is very different from that of a Junior BA. When you’re a Junior BA, most of the time your work involves finishing project by project, and you don’t really have to think much about it. For example, if you have to deal with data from 5 tables, you would focus on the task assigned, but you don’t know how to further use this data.
With Advanced BA, it is crucial that you understand the relationship between everything. You need to see the whole picture. Your responsibilities widen and you have to understand the depth of the work. How will this data be displayed? Which interface will it appear on? And how will this data be used by the downstream systems? These are the questions you need to start thinking about. Because you deal with data from many areas, you have to be able to connect work from different systems to assess impact and effort, piece together the data used in the project and understand how it affects other systems.
Working in the DIH area certainly allows me to see the bigger picture. Whenever the bank assigns new projects that require data usage, most of the time the DIH team is in attendance of the projects’ workshops such as K-Line, Pay Later, and listen to the BU present ideas and various business requirements. I used to struggle with understanding the rules and design of the work flow, but through joining these projects, I gradually absorbed knowledge and widened my perspective.
My favorite part of working at KBTG so far is my co-workers and supervisors. They are very capable, talented and friendly. Whenever I have questions or don’t understand something, everyone would volunteer to share their advice. With data work being so diverse, there are always areas that each individual may not be familiar with. That’s why we need to help each other. And I am very fortunate to be surrounded by such a supportive team.
Oh Jantira— Senior Business Analyst
Current area of work: Branch and Channel
My work experience with KBank began even before KBTG was established. I first joined the bank during the K-Transformation era, where I’d worked in KBank’s test team for 1–2 years before my seniors saw potential in me and assigned me the position of a BA for KBank. I then moved to KBTG after it’s establishment and continued my work.
Currently, I am working on the S1 system, a portal that provides services for branch employees to gather customer data whether it’s for deposit and credit information, opening a new account or applying for various services.
Throughout my journey of working as a BA since the beginning until now as a Senior BA, I have discovered that the complexity of your work scope increases in correspondence with the level of your position. For example, you might begin with small scopes of work such as enhancement before gradually expanding to overseeing end-to-end processes and end-to-end designs in terms of business, UX/UI, and various integrations.
There are two main parts of working at KBTG that left an impression on me. The first is the business knowledge and process I gained from the bank’s BU. Back when I was a junior BA, I couldn’t grasp the system design, but as I gained more work experience, I started to deepen and broaden my understanding of the big picture. Secondly, I am very impressed by the vision of our leadership team who are always listening to their employees’ feedback and constantly make improvements on the work process. They set clear business goals and incorporated employee experience. More and more obstacles that employees used to struggled with are being removed, continuously making improvements on their situations.
In addition, there is a good culture that is cultivated within the team. This can be felt all the way from top executives down to the working team level. Everyone’s work aligns with each other. Whenever you need help, you’ll always receive good cooperation, even from other teams. This is something that makes me feel touched. And lastly, the organization places great importance on people, with the mindset of personnel development both in terms of hard and soft skills. There are training programs in various fields as well as creating new career paths to support the needs of people in the organization. This is what sets KBTG apart from others.
What a ride that was! We were able to join our BA team on their adventurous career journey from the very beginning. But it doesn’t end there. And that’s the beauty of KBTG. Our career paths, including our BAs, are always growing. For anyone who likes the managerial side, you can take a different route towards becoming Head of Business Analysis, which can rise up to the Managing Director level and even further. Or, if you are interested in following the technical line, you can divert to the Delivery Management side as well. Hopefully this article will shed some light on the potential paths you can take and act as a guideline for people who are growing in this field. If you see the next step of your career here at KBTG, apply to join our team on the KBTG website.
