How Best to answer - Have you worked on XYZ domain?

Even if many of us believe that business analysis is a skill which can be applied to any domain, still many organizations prefer business analysts who have worked in a specific domain, such as financial services, retail, or customer support, or any other domain for that matter.

When we look back at our past BA experiences, we would tend to answer this question as I don’t seem to have worked in the particular domain. There are hundreds of domains and it is not possible to work on all possible domains.

To be very specific I got this question from a prospective client who was looking for business analysis work on customer support domain.  This company has 2000+ customer support executives and the customer support process seems to be having a lot of challenges.

I was tempted to say as none of my past projects specifically had a customer support as the primary domain. Then I suddenly remembered that I had worked with a retail client to revamp their online store. This project also had a customer support interface because the system that we were building also had to be used by customer support executives.

We had discussed customer support executives expectations from the revamped system, interfaces between our system to customer support executives system. I explained what I have done with this particular project and the client was happy that at least I had some overlapping experience with customer support domain.

This made me think that why it took me some time to answer the question in the proper way when the project was executed was just one year back?

In our work, we encounter many new things every day. Over time our memory fades away. Even if we would have done a yearlong project, if we are asked to write three paragraphs today about the project, we probably would struggle. That’s how human memory behaves, it trashes information at ultra-high speed.

Is there a way that we can ensure that key learnings that we had from our past projects are available to us for our entire business analysis career?

This is when I decided that probably it’s a good time I create a personal project perspective document. The personal project perspective document should contain:

• What was the project all about (what problem or need was it trying to solve)
• What was your role and what were the key deliverables that you produced
• What kind of challenges came your way during the journey
• How did you solve them,
• Solutions that you found creatively
• Situations where you exhibited your leadership skills.

All these information can help you ace our future battles. This write-up for each project would actually refresh your memory and would allow you to explain the same while facing the interview.

I have developed this template using MS word. If you are keen on getting this template, please like or comment on the post with your email id and then somebody from my team would send you this particular template. You can use for your personal use and share it with your friends and community as well.

Best of luck to all of us for our next BA interviews.

About me

I am a practicing business analyst, trainer, author and blogger.

I have helped more than 400 business analysts to achieve their dream careers by getting them certified in international BA certifications.

I have authored 10+ books on business analysis and 200+ blogs.

I am a certified business analyst from IIBA® Canada and IREB® Germany.

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