Journey to become a business analyst in health IT

The most important quality to a BA is the desire and ability to acquire new knowledge and skills. I have a list of things I want to improve and have taken initiative to embark on the jounrney. What I did not expect is the language demand in my new job. The health care industry has a much higher standard on the handling of the English language, being able succinctly articulate business cases catered for various levels of stakeholders. I regret not spending more effort to think through how to approach each stakeholder, how I should interact with different personalities, my tone of voice, how to euphemize the difficult messages. Ignorance is costly. I kept on using "English is my second language" as an exuse to use sloppy English. If I had an exuse, then I didn't have the change it. I am writing this blog as a reminder to hold myself responsible to improve. I shall know how much I've improved when I read this blog in the future.

Excerpt from Seven Steps to Mastering Business Analysis: Your biggest challenge is to convince these (business) people that they should spend time with you and tell you everything that you want to know about their business. Successfully convincing them that you are on their side and working to help them is the best secret to being a successful BA. This is probably the most important thing that one should remember as a BA. Some people are natual "people" person, some are more introverted like me and need to work on "people" skills. I find that if you take a genuine interests in everyone you meet, pay attention to what they say, observe how they interact, you can become better at networking with efforts. In fact, in my opinion, introverts tend to be better at observing details and they listen more than they talk. This is actually a good people person skill, which is to focus/prob more about others and less on themselves.

http://www.brcommunity.com/b609.php

Part 1 http://www.brcommunity.com/b600.php Part 2 http://www.brcommunity.com/b605.php

Summary Review of e-Health 2011 I really wanted to attend the annual e-Health conference last year, but the company I was with wouldn't send me. So I signed up as a volunteer only to find out a few days before the conference that it was held in Vancouver. I sent an email to the volunteer coordinator because I was too embarrassed to explaining over the phone that I wouldn’t be able to come since I live in Toronto. As you can imagine, I was really excited that OTN would send me to the conference this year and I really appreciate the opportunity. I want to write a summary review on everything that left an impression on me. I have the tendency of filtering information according to my areas of interests and at the same time cover as much material as I can, so this review will sound a bit scatter-brain-ish. Sessions I have attended, orderly chronologically. Opening by COACH president A good reminder of the purpose of our work: enable healthy outcome in patients. Sometimes I forget why we...

I have been wanting to take a course to improve writing skills for a while now. English is my second language. Although I have been in Canada for 20 years, I am still conscious about how I speak and write at work especially everyone at work talks like politicians and every meeting closely resembles a political debate. Not that I have any difficulties completing my work, more or less, I want to looking for a break through to really take things to the next level. Both of the following courses look like good candicates. I need to take a good look and think about which one to take...I also know this site has further price reductions once a year, perhaps I should wait for that... http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=2133 http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=2368

I attempted the CBAP exam on April 12, 2011 and passed. There are probably many different ways to pass the exam, I want to record what I did for those looking for advise on passing the exam. Took classroom CBAP bootcamp training. This is not absolutely necessary, you can do without it. I took it because I needed the CDU to meet the professional development requirements. Refer to the IIBA website for application instructions http://www.theiiba.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=CBAP_Designation&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=7490 Used the CBAP study guide as supplemental text book to the BABOK. I got this one by Watermarklearning http://www.watermarklearning.com/CBAP-Guide/ Since I haven't seen others I don't know how this compares to them. I find this studyguide helpful because it highlights the important concepts that you should know for the exam. The test at the end of each chapter and the simulation exam at the end of the book are all helpful for testin...

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