About Us

Evolving BA is the culmination of the love Georgiana Mannion has for the Business Analysis profession.
She founded evolving BA in 2018 to elevate, educate, and empower BAs everywhere.

Georgiana Mannion is the sole consultant for evolving BA and she collaborates with other consultants to deliver workshops, training, and speaking engagements.

She is also on the lookout for mentees with the right attitude who wish to become Business Analyst consultants to join her as part of her evolving BA team.

She intends on building a BA team unlike other by creating a Playful Practice using the breadth of BA tools and techniques with the ongoing mentoring of the consultants in the team.

Georgiana’s Professional Background

Georgiana has been a BA since she was born. She just didn’t know it came with a job title until her twenties. She’s known as ‘Mary Poppins’ because of her cheerful, yet stern, demeanour and her never ending bag of tricks.

Joining the Job Force

She started her career washing dishes in a pub kitchen when she was 12! It earned her enough to pay for ballet classes and sweets at school.

At 14, she joined an Events Management team organising nightclub events and music concerts. She was responsible for keeping artists happy backstage, well fed, and ready to perform, never daunted by how famous they were. She managed these stakeholders well enough to be the lead support as she kept her cool during meltdowns!
She relocated to Leeds  and took on a Customer Service Advisor role in a call centre for an insurance company. She had a knack for empathising with complaining customers and became the best at retaining business from customers calling to cancel. At the age of 17, she designed and managed a new Customer Retention Team. Here they successfully improved their retention rate from around 32% to 68% in months. They even had up-sales to roadside assistance using the new techniques.

Nursing – a Job we Should All Do Once

At 18, she followed her heart and transitioned to nursing. She had been volunteering with disabled people since she was a child, reading books to the blind, taking wheelchair users on trips. Her nursing was with clients who had profound learning difficulties and behavioural problems. Here she took the lead on stakeholder management with client’s friends, family, paid staff and modelled their world view.

She was also the most proficient in MS Office so she redesigned rosters and pro forma templates for management. She also used this to create training manuals and processes for the staff to follow per client and their needs. She was the key worker of one client and ensured there was a robust handover document when she left.

Due to illness, she had to leave nursing as the physical side of it was dangerous with her arthritis

Human Resources – Where the official projects start

She tried recruitment based sales role and was extremely poor at it! Georgiana can only sell something she truly believes in and KPIs on IFAs and Insurance Brokers don’t do it for her! So, she found a role in an internal recruitment team for a Government Agency. She immediately started making improvements to processes, reducing Capex and Opex cost and eventually lead the team.

 When they initiated an e-Recruitment Project, they assigned Georgiana to the PM role due to her existing system knowledge. In hindsight, it was a role that encompassed  PM, BA, Data, Solution Architecture and System Development! But she didn’t know any of those terms and got on with the implementation. She completed Prince2 and delivered the project on time, on budget, and with requirements met. She was thrilled during the project and all of the project deliverables and didn’t want to return to her substantive so went looking for new pastures.

what’s a BA?’

After getting the bug for project work, Georgiana found an HR Process and Systems Improvement Officer role that seemed to tick all of her boxes at a University. Within 2 weeks of embedded herself into the HR Team, she raised to the HR Director that their current vendor was ‘taking them for a ride’. Poor service, inefficient processes, exceptional payroll errors, ill equipped consultants and poor functionality. The HR Director agreed and decided to initiate a project to replace the current system, enhance functionality, and in source their Payroll for the first time in 8 years. He put her to work on it. She was creating processes to the best of her untrained ability and data models in the only way she knew how. She ran workshops with the HR stakeholders but wanted big print outs to work from so they told her about a ‘Business Analysis Team’ that had a giant printer. She asked them nicely and she printed out her documents. The BAs in the team started to wonder who this person was doing their work! A wonderful chap called Robin Jackson taught her Data Models. And a generous woman named Jo Solecki took Georgiana for a coffee and a chat about her work. She asked her if she’d ever been a BA before. Georgiana replied ‘what’s a BA?’.

Jo requested she interview for a Senior BA role within her Business Improvement Team. Georgiana showed up, convinced she had failed the interview but Jo offered her the job. Georgiana joined the team as a Senior BA having apparently been a BA all her life. She learned everything for the project lifecycle, took training courses, and importantly, stayed on the HR Payroll project. She even became the manager of the BA Team, reporting to the Portfolio Manager. She worked on countless projects in Data Warehousing, Graduation, Student Placements, more system implementations and Continuous Improvement initiatives during her time.

This Portfolio Office operated under the Secretariat and wasn’t linked to IT so it was able to freely support the business on projects with and without an IT component. They worked alongside the IT Teams during implementations but also managed process improvement initiatives.

Into the World of Contracting

Georgiana branched out into the world of contracting and took her first contracting role in an international team developing in pure Agile. Here she worked in paired programming, front end web development, SQL databases, testing, and discovered she loved Kanban boards (and still uses them for personal things!).

She’s worked for Banks, Government, Health, Utilities, Education and Client delivery of IT Services. Working as a vendor instead of a client, she helped avoid a $5m fine with forensic analysis of data sets. She branched out into Organisational Change Management and loved the engagement. She delivered rollouts of multiple projects including an ERP and BPM Tool.

Evolving BA

Georgiana started evolving BA to work with multiple clients for strategic planning, training, coaching, mentoring and supporting the delivery of a Centre of Excellence. She launched evolving BA to elevate, educate, and empower BAs within their organisations and across industries.

She works for multiple clients across her service offerings and is always looking to support more.

In 2013, Georgiana gave her first formal BA conference talk in London and has since spoken in 15 cities on 3 continents on a variety of subjects and is known for her engaging passion on the subjects and delivering powerful keynotes.

Georgiana’s Personal Background

As you might have guessed, Georgiana is a colourful character within the professional services and outside of them.

Now, let’s finally agree to call me George. The formal stuff is over. Me as a person is not far off what you get as a consultant. I am cheery, enthusiastic, and have a varied set of interests.

I was born in Brighton, England and lived in London, Glasgow and Leeds until I moved to Brisbane, Australia in 2014.

Music and Musicals

Firstly, is my love of music. I was brought up by musicians. My father was a guitarist, my mother a violinist plus they played piano and percussion. My house was full to the brim of instruments, vinyl records, cassettes and CDs. Walls and walls of music. I learned guitar, violin and piano but I play them badly.

I still play the guitar and bass and have played in indie, punk, blues, and folk bands since I was 13. I was even signed to a record label un the UK. You can hear me on Spotify and even buy my vinyl record! Though I’m not going to tell you the band name. I co-host a podcast about music called Flawless – A Music Podcast, where someone nominates an album, we deep dive it, and decide if it’s Flawless. I’m winning by the way, with 7 albums as Flawless in 100+ episodes.

I’m an actress, which would not be a surprise to those that know me. I started when I was 3 as a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz and I’ve performed in countless plays and musicals. I am still an active member of community theatre in Brisbane. This definitely helped me to become an accomplished speaker as I’m very comfortable in front of crowds.

LGBTQIA+

Another community I’m proud to be a member of is LGBTQIA+. I knew at a young age I was queer and although mostly people were supportive, I have been in some troubling situations. I now mentor LGBTQIA+ teens and am grateful to report that we have come a long was as a society since I was a teen. Young people are always grateful to see a successful

I like to do pro bono work, in particular with girls and young women. I mentor them and run workshops on resilience, change, diversity and career guidance.

disability

Mental disability.
I experienced severe trauma and as such I live with mental health problems. I have PTSD, Anxiety Disorder, Treatment-Resistant-Depression, OCD and previously, Anorexia. I also have two genetic disorders, Bipolar and ADHD. It took a long time for me to be diagnosed as I am a cheerful and outgoing person. The great news is that I am well managed with therapy, medication, and lifestyle. If you were to meet me, you wouldn’t suspect.

Physical disability.
I was born with a rare form of Arthritis which means I get joint pain and swelling. It’s managed with medications, massage, and pacing myself. I also have a chronic pain condition called Fibromyalgia which is unexplained pain in random parts of the body. This extends to Allodynia which is skin pain.

One positive is my red hair and green/blue eyes. I have a gene called MC1R. This means I have a high pain threshold, I require 20% more anaesthesia, I don’t get addictions and I also don’t get withdrawals.

Managing diversity in life and in the workplace means I’m confident, I can read a room, I empathise, I hyper-focus, and I deliver high quality work whilst listening to my body and mind. All of these things have, in some way, become a super power for me so I’m grateful I can manage a balanced lifestyle with my career, health, hobbies and family.

Life Now

Moving to Australia in 2014 was a dream as I have always had a love of marsupials! I have a yearly membership to a Koala Sanctuary where I can hold koalas and feed kangaroos and wallabies all year round.

Outside of work and hobbies, I have a wonderful family. I have a partner who has been my champion and challenger throughout my career and a support with my disabilities. He is an entrepreneur himself with companies in aerospace, music and tradesman.

He has given me 2 gorgeous stepdaughters, both artists in their 20s and a feisty little granddaughter. I definitely didn’t have ‘becoming a grandmother in my thirties’ on my life plan but it’s a joy.

My career is important to me and it will grow and my life is full. When you hire me, you get the whole of me. The established consultant, the theatrical, the funny one, and the empathetic. All of which make evolving BA a well-rounded company that will bring so much more than dry templates or dull training.

Book 15 minutes with Georgiana