Take a second to close your eyes and think back to your first compliance project.
Maybe you have been in the industry for a while but have just moved into the compliance realm.
Maybe you found yourself on the other end of the spectrum—like me—and were starting your first job after having finished undergrad a month ago.
From the point of view of the project manager or senior Business Analyst (B.A.), having to train a junior person may not feel like the best use of your precious time. Not only does it require getting them up to speed on the tasks, purpose, and stakeholders of the project, but you will also likely have to help them learn to navigate the OMS (or two, if this is a conversion project). If they’re really junior (I’m talking about entry-level or intern) then you may even need to show them basic things, like helpful Excel functions or how to navigate MS Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, etc.
So why bother considering bringing on a junior B.A. at all? The biggest reason is cost savings. A junior B.A.’s hourly rate is much lower than the rate of a senior person. Now you might be thinking, “Yeah, but I’d get way more out of my money if I spend extra on someone with more expertise,” and I’d agree. However, if your project requires more than one helping hand, that’s when you get into the territory where you may want to start thinking about hiring junior people. It’s simple math. If you can hire one senior person and a couple of junior people rather than an additional senior person, you get more hands for less. It’s basically a buy-one-get-one half off deal, and who doesn’t love a sale.
The other major benefit of hiring a junior person is that you can free up your senior person for the more complicated tasks while the junior person does the “dirty” work—those mundane tasks that in reality take up a lot of time but require minimal skill and training. As a consulting firm that tracks every hour, we at IMP have consistently found that only about 20-25% of the work performed by a senior person is actually taxing their expertise. In other words, up to 80% of a senior B.A.’s work could be delegated to a junior person. By the end of my first compliance project, I was able to both code and test compliance rules. The best part of my ability to code and test was that I could get the easier rules out of the way while the more experienced team members tackled the tougher stuff. Even though the rules I worked on were fairly straightforward, they still consumed about the same amount of time whether it was being done by me or by a senior person once I got past the learning curve.
The key thing to keep in mind when you hire junior B.A.’s is that there needs to be someone who can manage them effectively. The biggest fear of hiring junior people is that there will be a lot of waste and re-work that has to be done, but with the right training and management, the wasted hours are greatly reduced if not eliminated. When I was on my first project right out of school, I admittedly had a lot of learning to do. I was basically a clean slate. My economics classes had not taught me a single thing about what an OMS is or how to navigate one. But my manager was also on the project, and he broke my training up into pieces. For example, one of the first things I learned was how to assign accounts to a compliance rule. I then went through a huge list of rules, repeating the task over and over. Eventually I graduated to copying existing compliance rules and tweaking the new ones in minor ways. After that, I was coding and testing compliance rules. On that note, here are my top 4 tips for managing a junior B.A.:
1. Plan out their training
Before you can even start planning, you’ll first have to find out what they know. Gauge their familiarity with any applications they’ll need to use, like Excel, MS Teams, the OMS, etc. Then, set up their training in baby steps so that they can learn one skill at a time, thus getting comfortable with one thing before moving on to the next. That way, you can fill in their knowledge gaps and work them toward being able to complete more complicated tasks without dumping an overwhelming amount of information on them at once.
2. Think about how you’re going to present information before you start talking
There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to learn something new if there is no structure or logical flow to what you’re learning. If you are demonstrating how to do a task that needs to be done in a particular ordered process, show your trainee those steps in order and give them enough time to take notes. If you are teaching them how to do something on the OMS, first make sure they know how to get to the particular window or module they’re going to be working in.
3. Allow them a little time to figure things out on their own
On my first compliance project, one of my tasks was creating pivot tables that I could use for reporting our progress on the project. I’d never worked with pivot tables, so my manager showed me how to create one, and after that I had some time on my own to play around with the pivot tables and figure out how to build one myself. It required some time at first, but later down the line I was able to create new pivot tables quickly. Another thing I had to do was learn to navigate the OMS, and what really helped me get comfortable with it was just to click around and see what each of the different windows did.
4. Expect questions
It goes without saying that your trainee will be asking lots of simple questions at first, but by answering patiently and precisely, you will help them learn more efficiently. Eventually, they will likely get to the point where they’re capable of figuring out answers to some of their questions on their own.
I can say from experience that IMP does a great job with training new hires. Not only do they have an extensive training program in place, but they also have many people who have offered to sit down with me and expand upon my training. With some time and effort, you too can teach your junior B.A. can perform at least some of the same tasks that a senior B.A. would’ve been stuck with, and the junior B.A. does them for a fraction of the price.
