Our organisation has a very diverse group of people responsible for the development and maintenance of our in-house IT systems. There are over 50 developers, working on hundreds of products, over 3 cities. Stakeholders include product owners, managers and users from relatively diverse business units. On the technical side we have BA’s, developers, architects, testers, delivery managers and more. Given all this diversity, one thing has stood out for me: having a good BA can make or break your effort.
This then leads us to the question: What is a good BA? It’s a very difficult thing to quantify, because quite often, we don’t really understand what we expect from our BA.
Our organisation used to expect them to thoroughly and meticulously detail the requirements for any new development. For months they would sit down with customers, and draw up pages and pages of lists of things the software should and shouldn’t do. Really keen BA’s also included diagrams depicting data and process flows. They would do all kinds of modelling to exactly indicate every eventuality. The reams of documents would then be signed off, and sent to the development teams. The BA’s would then move on to analyse another part of the business by creating a new set of requirements for another piece of software.
As far as the software products go, it didn’t work very well. The developers were invariable left with such vast and daunting tasks, that they just seem to ignore all the specs, and wrote a piece of software that they thought would work for the users. Sometimes they sought some input from the users. On rare occasions they even got it, and those were the more likely projects to succeed in providing some semblance of success. One of my colleagues remarked that in the 3 years here, he has never worked on a project that went live.
Our partial solution to the problem is agile development. This seems to be working very well for many software development groups (think Microsoft, Google and others). Without going into a discussion of agile (there’s plenty of them around), following it left an interesting dilemma. What to do with our BA’s? You see, traditionally, we expected them to fit in between the users and developers. Other, more advanced organisations, expected them to stand between anyone of a technical inclination and the users. In university, we were taught that the expectation of the business analyst was to represent the combined knowledge of the business unit in documentation so it may be encapsulate in software systems.
With the agile approach, we chucked a lot of that out the window. We invited the users to the party. We started interacting directly with the first tier owners and manufacturers of business knowledge. We changed our waterfall model which had everyone only partaking in a stage of the development. Under the new agile approach, everyone is a part of the entire lifespan of the project. The success and failure is a shared burden of the entire team, all the time. If the product get to UAT, and isn’t what the users wanted, everyone is to blame.
The good BA’s developed a new position in the process. They moved from being the guardians of the business knowledge to gentle facilitators. Instead of being a link in a game of Chinese Whispers, they set up telephone conferences. They stopped planning systems that would hide the processing difficulties, and started helping users to better understand their processes. They became less involved in the technology, and more involved with the problem. Together, we are changing the old pattern of creating expensive systems that perform inefficient tasks. We are making change where it’s cheapest, and most effective.
So where do we stand with our expectations from Business Analysts? What is the distilled essence of their function? In my opinion, the modern BA has one imperative: Empower the business to collaborate effectively in the creation of fit for purpose software.
When a BA strives to attain this goal, it makes life easier for me, as a developer. When I ask our user representatives whether they would mind if we cut the print function down to only print the component you’re looking at, they can actually debate the merits of either approach! In the old days, there would be no option, leaving you to implement the function as it was specified. You would have to create the page that allowed the user to print all 50 pages of tables and graphs, and would never be used because it took too long to load. Now, the specification is updated (by changing the acceptance criteria on the user story in the product backlog) and we can devote our effort to things that the users really care about, like improving navigation between the different tables and graphs. With empowered users, we can focus our resources to where it matters most for them. With BA’s focusing on the problem rather than the solution, many more possible solutions can be generated. Solutions can now involve changing the way users work, rather than the system they use. Our products are now going live, and the users are satisfied.
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