I’m sort of experiencing the same thing in my job. And I’m a freakin’ Director making a quarter million a year. I spent half the other night with my 30 year old “manager” and a pair of salespeople wordsmithing my weekly status update to our client and a separate one to our leadership team about my one project. I’m like “you idiots should have spent so much time on the fucking contract”.
It’s actually kind of funny because these guys all act like they were jr managers or sr associates in a Big-4 firm a few years ago (which they were). Which is to say to they are basically kids who are still enamored of titles and work on every PowerPoint document like it’s a business school final exam. At my point in my career I’m used to no one giving a crap about “status reports” and being able to walk into the VP of Whatever client’s office and being like “sup…we need to talk about shit”.
Although it is nice on the one hand because my manager has been with the company for years and is helping me navigate how our company does every “wrong”. OTOH, I’ve been through that many times and I’m really not interested in working for another dysfunctional tech company high on it’s own bullshit.
But…as I mentioned, they are paying me a lot of money.
“Invariably the managers will ask me if I actually did check with the developers.” Given that, I would preemptively preface my responses with a statement that I did indeed. Is there some reason it has to be more complicated than that?
Oh, they also micromanage us. Yes, they do tell us HOW to do each task, not just what they want done. A couple months ago, they asked our lead QA person to verify the accuracy of a revised report, and it was huge so I worked with her on it. We each took sections of the report (I started at the bottom, she started at the top for example) and visually compared old to new. It took a couple days, but when we were done we reported that we were confident that the new report was 100% accurate. But since one of them had asked us to use some macro he built to do the comparison and list any discrepancies, and we did not do it that way (when we reported our findings, they asked if we used his macro), what we did was a fail. She had to start over again and use his macro, which ended up taking about the same amount of time as our original effort. But that time he felt comfortable with our findings (which were the same), only because we used his tool.
I know that’s part of working with a manager, you have to do what they ask. But this is an example of micromanaging. They didn’t just ask us to do something, they told us exactly how to do it and made us do it over again because we didn’t use their method.
Also, just because I didn’t list all the details of my daily work life in the OP doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. From your quoted section, we do that, yes. I submit a daily written status report that lists what I’ve done that day and any issues I encountered. I do once a week one on one meetings with the primary manager (the one who does my performance reviews). We don’t use tools like Asana, Jira or whatever because we have to use what they tell us and not what we suggest (see my first two paragraphs). (And this is completely beside the topic of this post, but one minor annoyance I have with this place is the duplication of tools they make us use. We have three (3!) effin timesheets to fill out every day. We communicate by both Skype (internal) and Teams (external). We have two email systems used on a daily basis, etc. I have mentioned this as a very polite complaint to my manager who said he’d take it under consideration but of course nothing is done.)
I’ll wrap up by just saying that there is no lack of communication here. (But I did already say that I would use the solution suggested by Ludovic. So I’m not fighting you guys, just discussing and answering your questions.)
Not at all. What actually happened was he asked me to verify something with the developers and then draft an answer for the client and send it to him for review. So I checked with the developers and the draft answer I wrote said “We double checked on this and the answer is …” I assumed that they would trust me that when I said “we double checked” it meant that I did as they asked and talked to the developer. But in fact, they seemed to completely disregard that. Or is there something else that “we double checked” could mean that I’m not thinking of?
This is all part of my trying to figure out how to work with these managers. It’s been a struggle. They have questioned if I’ve done micro-tasks before (generally checking with QA or a developer), so I learned quickly to make sure that I do always do that and am now trying to figure out how to reassure them that I did it. I wrote “we double-checked” in the draft reply more to signal to my managers that I did it, not so much because the client would doubt us. But that clearly failed to work as intended.
I was talking to my husband the other night about my clear troubles with all of the BA jobs I’ve had over the last 10 years. It’s becoming clear that it’s not a good fit for me. But what I pointed out to him was something kind of subtle and he said even he hadn’t thought of it. What I’m seeing is that you have to be in a particular job for some number of years (which varies by company but seems to be at least 2-3 years) before you have any credibility. And until you have credibility, the job is very hard.
In software development you gain credibility faster because you show your technical chops and then you learn the business domain by reading and working on the codebase. As an analyst, you gain credibility by building relationships - a much slower process, at least for me.
Because I struggle with that (as you’ve seen in all my posts here, learning how to deal with people is a bit of a struggle) I usually give up after about 2 years and move on to another job. So I’m failing as a BA simply because I’m not being patient enough to stay at one company long enough to build credibility. I’m still holding onto my old developer mentality thinking that my chops should count for more. My mentality is that the manager screened, interviewed and hired me for experience in analysing things, many years of experience working with external clients, doing webinars and formal presentations, writing all kinds of documentation, etc. so why after my date of hire does he act like I’m fresh out of high school knowing nothing? In each BA job I don’t just have to prove that I can do everything I claimed on my resume but I have to spend several years proving it.
So I checked with the developers and the draft answer I wrote said “We double checked on this and the answer is …” I assumed that they would trust me that when I said “we double checked” it meant that I did as they asked and talked to the developer. But in fact, they seemed to completely disregard that. Or is there something else that “we double checked” could mean that I’m not thinking of?. It seems you’re assuming the presence of a degree of common sense that isn’t there. Apparently you’ll need to be quite specific and say “I checked with the developers …” After all, for all they know, you could have have double-checked with the janitor, right? Geesh. I’d be very frustrated having to deal with this.
Much like the OP, having at one point been a developer and before than a structural engineer, I’ve since learned that it is not unreasonable to assume most corporate businesspeople are complete fucking idiots who don’t know how anything works. Most of what they do is send emails, Powerpoints and Slack chats back and forth trying to look like they are adding value. And it might look that way to other business people because they are “smart” at making very polished email and Powerpoints. In the case of the OPs manager, it might simply be the manager just constantly checking as CYA in the event something didn’t get done. “But JcWoman assured me it HAD been completed!”
If you don’t like dealing with people, a Business Analyst job may not be for you. Although I am a bit confused by your description. Typically BAs I’ve worked with don’t check up on Developers. That tends to be the role of the Project Manager, Technical Team Lead and/or Scrum Master. Typically BAs gather requirements from various business stakeholders.
I would disagree with you husband about the 2-3 years of credibility. At least for BA jobs. BAs, like Project Managers, need to develop almost instant credibility as they tend to be project-based. And IMHO, they tend to be roles that are undervalued in most projects because they are often viewed as an unnecessary “administrative cost”. Many places I’ve worked, they will try to save money by pushing the BA role onto the Project Manager or Architect. They would also minimize the PM role. With predictable results.
Maybe you don’t like “project” work? I don’t. I just can’t seem to escape it. One of the things I liked about my last job and hate about my current one is was more like a highly structured service, instead of a series of bespoke clusterfucks. Client wants a professional services team to help them, we scope it out using several standard packages as a baseline. They sign an SOW indicating what we will provide, budget, resources, timeline, etc. I go request the resources. Resource Management gives me a start date. Then I manage the project (typically 3-5 of them) to that contract.
My current job, they just sell work and run around scrambling to figure out how to do it while kissing the client’s ass.
But what was nice about my last job was that enough of it was predictable that I could provide regular updates and structure my (and my teams) days, weeks, etc. So I didn’t have some random stakeholder Slack messaging me in a panic because they need to suddenly provide an ad-hoc update to some other asshole and I’m not prepared to give that update because it’s impossible to do real-time status updates.
Actually I do like working with people, and I love project work. I’m very goal oriented, so having a feeling of accomplishment after finishing a project is great.
I also think that I do work pretty well with people. Coworkers tend to like me, clients seem to love me. Often even bosses like me, or at least I get mostly positive feedback from them. Even when directly questioned for my career growth like in performance reviews, asking what can I do better, they’ll often say nothing they can think of. Or they may point out one or two minor things but say I’m doing great over all. So the issue is something more subtle.
And I’m pretty sure it’s 99% on my side, I’m not jivving with something in the analyst role. I do know that what I’ve perceived is that I don’t feel I have credibility.
when I was a software engineer (for 20+ years) I didn’t feel this way. When I started new jobs as a programmer/engineer, as soon as they saw my technical chops I was treated like someone who knew what I was doing. That generally took a few weeks at most. By comparison, in most of the BA jobs, I haven’t been treated like I knew what I was doing for years… and around year 2 on average, I get fed up and leave. When I talk with other BA’s they often say they don’t have the problems I’m describing but they also happen to have worked for their current employer for many years.
I’ll see if I can find some other analysts who haven’t been long in the same job and see if they experience the same thing.
I do not envy any BA his/her job. You are constantly being questioned by your managers and the IT team leads about what the requirements you generate. The business managers are idiots who don’t understand what you tell them anyway. The IT leads and teams just want you to tell them what they need to do without having them spend a lot of time trying to do your job, which is to intimately understand the business process. Some IT folks will. But those are few and far between. As a BA, you are always going to be between a rock and hard place because it’s so trivially easy to point at the BA/SME and blame them for not having elaborated the process well enough or not identified the gaps. Of course the customer loves you. You’re basically doing their job as the SME. It takes a special person to want to do BA work. A masochist, I suspect. Maybe you’re that person, and maybe you’re not. But having someone else confirm what you already know is going to be cold comfort to you.
Well, a sanity check, I guess. Because I find it really confusing when I get pretty consistently good performance reviews and people seem to like me but every day is a struggle. I’m an analyst through and through, analysing everything in my life without even thinking about it. If I observe something I want to figure out if I’m right or wrong or why it’s like that, could it be better, can I make it better, etc. I do drive myself batty on occasion!
But maybe you’re right, some is commiseration also.
I just remembered a key detail about the discussion with my husband that I left out of the telling here. I need a lot of autonomy in my job to feel gratified and of course you don’t get that with a micromanager boss. Especially after launching my own business that is successful if small, but also working at the board of directors level at two nonprofits a few years ago. I can rock the world if nobody takes my agency away.
At these BA jobs it’s felt like I don’t get that. Some have given me a lot longer reins than others, to be sure. But in general, it seems that you don’t get autonomy in your work until you build up a lot of credibility. That’s where the idea of it taking a long time to build up credibility came from.
I’m always impressed with people who can get hired into a company and immediately start making changes or crushing big projects. Maybe I just don’t have the charisma to influence people as much as I’d like. But as I analyze it, I find it very confusing because my managers say I’m great but they don’t really act like I’m great.
Sorry, I know you all are tired of me. I just find it helpful to bounce ideas off ya,
What happens if you have a frank private convo with your boss: “Either lay off the micromanaging & distrust or I walk. Your ‘process’ isn’t generating quality results; it’s wasting vast amounts of resources and generating anger & fear in your workers. Including me.”
[quote=“Ranch_Dip, post:11, topic:924224”]
Are they just like this with you? Or everyone? Honestly, it sounds like someone before you dropped the ball in a big way and they are responding to that.
[/quote]The CEO and VPs at my last job were all micro-managers. And what really bothered all of us is it was clear they just didn’t trust us to do even basic tasks correctly.
Well, over beers one night, the boss told us about the early days of the company, when the only personnel they could afford were recent college grads who were so green, they had to have their hands held, and had to be checked up on or they’d cut corners.
That was quite eye-opening. There was a perfectly good reason for their horrible attitudes. They weren’t being evil, just clueless.
We had an intervention the next day where we told the boss we weren’t noobs, and he’d have to trust us.
Damn, DO THAT! Then, when you do leave, maybe they’ll think “Well, she did give us a chance to change and keep her around…”
Yeah. Your intervention or my convo will either work, or fail spectacularly. If it does fail, you’re no worse off that you were going to be 6 months from now anyway; you just learned the truth sooner.
If this week is a real bad week to lose your job, it’s also a real bad week to throw the grenade. But “real bad” ought to be like “Wife’s about to give birth and we’re closing on a house and I just bought a family wagon to replace the sports car” bad. Not the usual “Gosh, I’d kinda like a paycheck every 2 weeks for the next 6” bad.
Bad management absolutely depends on workers being unable to make that distinction. Or being unable to afford 2 weeks without pay. Don’t be that worker who’s ripe to be exploited.
So, did they stop micromanaging you after your intervention? It seems to me that while they may have a very good reason for behaving that way, people tend to get stuck into patterns and have trouble breaking out of them. Like they know they should stop doing it but can’t help themselves. I really suspect micromanaging is like that.
Yeah the fun thing is that I’m not ripe to be exploited and plan to be out of here soon anyway. So I totally could do this. I may do it in December, as I’m shooting for bailing in January. Hubbs and I are reviewing our personal finances to see if I could simply retire and work on my shop or just downgrade to a part time job so that we still have at least a little additional income. (As I told him, I don’t want my happiness to come at the cost of his, if he feels more pressure to support us in the lifestyle that we’re used to.)
Oh, interesting. So this questioning behavior isn’t targeted at just me. Our QA lead is having the managers review a design document today that she drafted and one of the questions was this:
I know that you worked with the developer on the document. Have they read it completely and agree that it covers the entirety of the enhancement?
Our process for document reviews is that you work with the developer to get all the technical details, then have the developer and analyst (me) or QA person (if I draft it) review it thoroughly. Only after it passes that and is client-ready do we pass it over to the managers to review. So, cynical and smart-ass hat on, I would translate this to “I know you worked with the developer, but did you … REALLY?”
See, I read it as, ‘If this fails UAT, can we blame the developer, since we have it writing that they reviewed the test cases and concurred that the release covers all the user stories?’
It’s targeted at whomever they can blame. You, QA, IT, COVID… anybody but them. And they need you to make sure there is a documented trail to that effect. Whoever does not provided them with that cover, has not done their job.
I think in this particular case, you might be being overly sensitive. Another way to translate this is “I know you worked with the developer, but has the developer actually reviewed it thoroughly and signed off on it? Because we frequently receive QA plans where the developer pushes back on some issue because ‘that’s not what I meant’.”
I just find it helpful to bounce ideas off ya,