Shared Values and Core Business Analysis Principles
Key Takeaways
- The Business Analysis Standard identifies shared values, including respect, courage, collaboration, ethics, curiosity, continuous learning, improvement, customer focus, and value maximization, that underpin effective business analysis.
- The Business Analysis Standard presents seven business analysis principles that guide day-to-day practice.
- See the whole means analyzing needs in the big-picture context and identifying why a change is necessary before acting on a narrow request.
- Avoid waste means identifying which activities add value and removing those that do not contribute.
- Shared values describe the character a BA brings to the work, while principles describe how that character translates into concrete action in a given situation.
Why Values and Principles Belong Together
Mindset does not develop in a vacuum. The Business Analysis Standard grounds an effective mindset in two related but distinct sets of guidance: shared values, which describe the character and attitude a BA brings to the work, and business analysis principles, which describe how that character translates into daily practice and decisions. Values answer "what kind of professional am I trying to be," while principles answer "how do I act on that in a specific situation." Both are foundational-level knowledge tested throughout the ECBA exam, especially in situation-based stems that ask what a BA should prioritize.
The Shared Values
The Business Analysis Standard identifies a set of shared values that underpin effective business analysis work across every context and industry:
| Value | What It Looks Like in Practice |
|---|---|
| Respect | Valuing stakeholders' time, perspectives, and expertise, even when they disagree with the BA |
| Courage | Raising uncomfortable findings, challenging assumptions, and asking the question no one else will |
| Collaboration | Working with stakeholders and delivery teams as partners rather than order-takers |
| Ethics | Acting with integrity and honesty, including when it is easier to stay silent |
| Curiosity | Genuinely wanting to understand the underlying need, not just record the stated request |
| Continuous learning | Treating every engagement as a chance to build knowledge and improve practice |
| Improvement | Looking for ways to make processes, solutions, and outcomes better, not just adequate |
| Customer focus | Keeping the end customer's experience and needs central to the analysis |
| Value maximization | Consistently steering decisions toward the option that creates the most value |
These values are not decorative — they are the reason two BAs applying the same technique can produce meaningfully different results. A BA acting from curiosity and courage will surface a hidden root cause; one who is not will accept the first explanation offered.
The Seven Business Analysis Principles
Where values describe character, the business analysis principles describe the practical guardrails for doing the work well. The Business Analysis Standard presents seven principles:
- See the whole — Analyze needs in the big-picture context and identify why a change is necessary in the first place, rather than jumping straight into a narrow requirement.
- Think as a customer — Understand the customer's actual experience and needs so that the solution being built genuinely addresses them.
- Analyze to determine what is valuable — Continuously assess and prioritize work so effort stays focused on maximizing the value being delivered.
- Get real using examples — Use concrete, real examples to build a shared understanding of the need and confirm how a proposed solution will satisfy it.
- Understand what is doable — Continually analyze needs against real constraints so recommendations describe what can actually be delivered.
- Stimulate collaboration and continuous improvement — Help create an environment where every stakeholder contributes to value on an ongoing basis, not just at kickoff.
- Avoid waste — Identify which activities add value and which do not, and work to remove the ones that do not contribute.
Applying Principles in Situation-Based Scenarios
These principles are written to be actionable, not aspirational. A BA who is handed a narrow request to "add a field to a form" and applies see the whole will step back and ask what business problem the field is meant to solve before building anything. A BA facing two competing feature requests who applies analyze to determine what is valuable will prioritize by value contribution rather than by who asked first or loudest. A BA drafting requirements from a stakeholder's abstract description will apply get real using examples by walking through a specific transaction or user scenario until the requirement is unambiguous.
On the exam, look for stems where a stakeholder pushes for speed, scope, or a shortcut that conflicts with one of these principles. The correct answer is typically the option that honors the relevant principle — pausing to understand context (see the whole), grounding the discussion in a concrete example (get real using examples), or naming the non-value-adding step and proposing to remove it (avoid waste) — rather than the option that simply complies with the loudest request.
Why This Distinction Is Tested
Exam writers use the values/principles distinction to build situation-based distractors. A wrong answer option will often describe a value in isolation — for example, "the BA should be respectful of the stakeholder's time" — when the stem is really asking which principle should guide the next concrete action. A candidate who tells the two apart recognizes that respect (a value) explains the BA's general disposition, while a principle such as get real using examples or avoid waste tells the BA what to do next. Naming which of the nine values or seven principles a behavior reflects reliably eliminates at least one distractor on principle-based questions.
Values and Principles Working Together
In practice, values and principles reinforce each other. Courage (a value) is what allows a BA to name waste and propose removing it (avoid waste, a principle). Curiosity (a value) is what drives a BA to seek real examples (get real using examples, a principle) instead of accepting a vague description. Customer focus (a value) is essentially the mindset version of think as a customer (a principle) applied consistently. Understanding both sets, and recognizing how they support the six mindset focus areas from the previous section, prepares a candidate to reason through unfamiliar situational stems rather than memorize a fixed answer key.
A product owner asks a BA to 'just add a new required field to the intake form' without further explanation. Applying the business analysis principle of seeing the whole, what should the BA do first?
While mapping a process, a BA notices a manual approval step that no one downstream ever reviews or acts on. Which business analysis principle most directly supports recommending this step be removed?
A stakeholder describes a new reporting need only in abstract terms, saying management needs 'better visibility.' Which principle should the BA apply to build a shared, unambiguous understanding of the need?