I am Joanne.
I started out as a BA at a small software house — 37 people, close-knit, you could ask anyone anything. Then I moved to a company of a thousand. In my first weeks there, I was handed a template and asked to write a business case. I had never written one before. Nobody explained it. There was no worked example, no AI, no colleague to ask — just me, remote, trying to look like I knew what I was doing in a company where nobody knew me yet.
My training up to that point had been theory with very little connection to real work. And my BCS diploma made management assume I was more experienced than I was. The gap between what I had been taught and the job in front of me was where the real learning happened. I proved myself over the following months — quietly, with no roadmap, just effort and determination. I was promoted to Senior BA, and spent the next few years mentoring junior analysts and managing BAs.
Later I moved into coaching BA apprentices, and saw the same pattern from the other side. A new analyst joins. They are capable and motivated. And then there is a lag — six months, sometimes longer, of shadowing and observing before anyone trusts them with real work. Nobody is really to blame for it. They just do not have the toolkit yet.
What both experiences taught me is that the hard part of this job is rarely the methodology. It is having nobody to ask, no model to follow, and no environment built for the work. So I built one.
BA Hub is the platform I needed but never had — a place to learn the craft properly, practise it on realistic projects, and get help from someone (Billie) who knows BA methodology, so you are never figuring it out alone. I also wrote The Business Analyst Blueprint — the method book this platform is built on — and I run in-person BA training and AI application-building workshops.
- First Class Computer Science Degree
- BCS Diploma & Advanced Diploma in Business Analysis
- Chartered IT Professional (CITP)
- Level 3 Teaching Qualification & Assessor Award
- Author — The Business Analyst Blueprint
- In-person BA training & AI application-building workshops