Currently, I am a Senior Business Systems Analyst. This means, in components, that I analyse business from a system (IT) point of view. There are business analysts who aren't integrally tied to one or more systems (I'm affiliated with about three right now), and there are analysts of either stripe that are not senior.
At my company, this means I'm at the top of the tree. I don't know where I am in the pay range, but there's nothing directly above Sr BSA. Just things that are considered more prestigious, and pay more.
My first job out in California had a very well-defined job hierarchy. There were paths all the way up from a number of starting points. One track was highly technical, another more business IT oriented, and you could almost all the way up to the top without managing people. Top minus one.
That's a good plan. Too often it seems to be understood that managing people is not the be all and end all of job responsibilities, and that you should be able to get perks without the people.
I was a manager my second job out of university. It had its ups and downs. I worked for a pretty awful (to illegal lengths) boss. My greatest strength as a manager was protecting my guys from the craziness upstream. I worked for an IT company run by at best, people uninterested in technology, and at worst, by technophobes. It was on me to maintain a healthy and well-educated IT department that had the freedom and comfort to suggest technical solutions and innovations without being penalised for shortcomings of the technology, not themselves.
I was hamstrung, to an extent. It was hard to make a "No" sound right. Some things, as requested, *are* impossible. And it's not the programmer's fault. Well, not the programmer you're paying, anyway.
It was a horrible job that paid like crap and stretched my mental health in very unhealthy ways. But I gained valuable experience and insights.
Right now I work at a medium sized company--we're not the 800lb gorilla I've been employed by a couple times, and we're not the 25 people team that will jump through any sized hoop for an appropriately dangled cheque. It's a reasonable middle ground, but I do miss the 800lb gorillaness sometimes. Especially when it comes to education and health insurance.
Anyway.
I'm a Sr. BSA. I don't consider it a strength of mine. I consider it something I do. It's not what I trained to do, it's one of the myriad things I learnt to do in my second job, and can execute on.
If I have to say, it's a good place to put a Comp Sci graduate who spent all her time in martial arts and comedy. I mean, in that I understand software development, have done it myself for both fun and profit. In that I'm more of a people person than your average coder, and am pretty okay with aggression, both displaying and receiving.
What I spend my time doing is (well, apart from the paperwork) is reconciling the needs and wants of the business and their processes with what the systems can accomplish. This means being able to get the trust of business people who have every right being technophobes, and the trust of developers who have some business-independent issues they can't work around. I need to do as much translation as possible, and become a repository of information on both the business and the developers. I need to be able to be the only business representative in an IT meeting, and the only IT representative in a business meeting. Neither of those are popular places to be, let me tell you.
But I'm good at talking to both groups, so that works. I can get their sympathy, because I'm sympathetic to them. I sincerely want the business to have an easiest time of it, supported by a stable system that's easy to maintain, extend, and make reliable. I don't know whose side I'm on from one moment to the next--both groups call me their own, and they call me interloper. I guess...I'm on the company's side.
That's the reflexive skill set I bring to the job. I work at things like not letting things fall through cracks, thinking ahead to explore problems that haven't happened yet (actually, I'm pessimistically reflexive about that too, pretty much), thinking even further ahead to solve the potential problems before I mention them to anyone (this takes more practice, and I have to keep learning more about both business and IT in order to do it best). Problems are nobody's friend, but if you can cushion it with one or more potential solutions, you're much more popular.
I don't know what's up from here. The last Sr. BSA I worked with was promoted to a project manager tied to one set of systems, and she also has a number of people reporting to her. I've been a PM before--it's nothing I mind, but I get further away from the IT side of things, and I much prefer being a BSA and sticking my fingers into all the pots (including project management) as opposed to the other way round. BSA is a great place to do a little of everything.
But you don't get paid bigger bucks for that, and it's not officially recognised.
I've always been a pretty good employee, but these past few months I've been on some strange sort of fire. I've kicked up the number and depth of relationships I have with people in all areas of the company, I've gotten more organised with whatever crutches I can find, and I've started doing more and more of other people's jobs. And I've been more outspoken, both socially in order to bond better, and on behalf of my ideas and any hesitations I feel.
It's worked out pretty well. Stuff's kind of on fire, and someone dumps a crisis of varying proportions on my desk every day or so, but I get a charge out of grabbing it, defining it, and beating it into submission.
People have noticed, I think. Most of the people I work with are comfortable with relying on me, and some enough to report back to my boss, who's gotten back to me with positive feedback, as well as the estimation "You're different now, you know?"
I don't know what caused it--maybe I've been trying to keep myself busy, and I have been straining at my boundaries, but it's been very educational.
Why all this? Self-assessment time. Can I just submit this as it? I've reflected, dammit. Don't make me put a number on things. I did well. I enjoyed it, even as I drive myself into the ground. Do I need to say more? Or less?
