Blog post by Linda Parker. Linda works in our Landlord Registration team and won Business Analyst of the Year in 2019. Gary Cockburn is our Lead Business Analyst. Gary leads the wider RoS BA Community of Practice.

November 1st is Business Analysis day and as many of you already know RoS has a thriving Business Analysis (BA) community. They meet regularly to help support each other and improve their knowledge, which in turn supports RoS business and IT development.

Supporting the wider BA community

But what you probably don’t know is that our support of BAs extends wider than just our internal community, we are great supporters of our fellow BAs within Scotland and the UK. This allows us to give back to a close-nit professional community that has taught many of us so much over the years.

We’ve had a long-standing connection with International Institute of BAs (IIBA), initially with me as a volunteer on the Scottish branch committee, and now my colleague Milena Tupaldo is continuing this role.

We are also corporate members of IIBA and have hosted and presented the February meeting of the Scottish event for the past 5 years. We regularly receive great feedback, particularly when sharing our secrets on how to make a successful Community of Practice.

This involvement also extends to presenting at other IIBA events, and presenting at the European BA Conference has been the pinnacle. My colleague Gary Cockburn and I have presented several times now and last year we also had Sally Rogan from our UX team join us.

We intend to continue this participation in future years by encouraging other BAs from our community to take part in such events.

Our newer BAs are also involved with the group Young Business Analysts which helps support the careers of younger BAs.

BALIFE

One other area we are involved in is the Business Analysis Learning and Innovation Festival Edinburgh (BALIFE). This one-day BA conference was held in Edinburgh in June 2021 and was the culmination of two years of effort from a committed group of volunteers that includes Gary Cockburn and me.

RoS was one of the inaugural sponsors; showing the level of commitment to the Business Analysis role and the wider BA community.

The conference gives BAs from across Scotland, and further afield the chance to meet, learn from specialists, and to network.

All this extra activity is done on a volunteer basis and outside of working hours. It’s about giving back to the community.