Chapter 4 - The business analyst
- The business analyst's tasks
- The making of a business analyst
- The business analyst role
- Essential analyst skills
- Essential analyst knowleadge
The fomer developer
The fomer (or concurrent) project manager
The fomer user
- The analyst roles on Agile project
- Creating a collaborative team
The subject master expert
The rookie
Document requirements
Communicate requirements
Analyze requirements
Lead requirements validation
Elicit requirements
facilitate requirements priortization
Identify project stakeholders and user classes
Manage requirements
Plan the requirements approach
Define business requirements
Facilitation skills
Leadership skills
Learning skills
Oservational skills
System thinking skills
Communication skills
Analytical skills
Organizational skills
Thinking on your feet
Modeling skills
Interviewing and questioning skills
Interpersonal skills
Listening Skills
Creativity
Business analysts always need to be aware of the existing information and to process new information against it.
They need to spot contradictions, uncertainty, vagueness, and assumptions so they can discuss them in the moment if appropriate.
The ability to facilitate requirements discussions and elicitation workshops is a vital analyst capability.
Facilitation is the act of leading a group towards success.
Facilitation is essential when collaboratively defining requirements, prioritizing needs, and resolving conflicts.
A strong analyst can influence a group of stakeholders to move in a certain direction to accomplish a common goal.
Leadership requires understanding a variety of techniques to negotiate agreements among project stakeholders, resolve conflicts, and make decisions
Common Model
Flowchart
UML
Entity-relationship diagram
and similar diagrams
Data flow diagram
When are these model useful?
communicating with developers
help the BA improve the requirements
communicating with users
Why does BA need to Organizational?
BAs must contend with a vast array of jumbled information gathered during elicitation and analysis.
Coping with rapidly changing information and structuring all the bits into a coherent whole demands exceptional organizational skills and the patience and tenacity to make sense from ambiguity and disarray.
As an analyst, you need to be able to set up an information architecturevto support the project information as it grows throughout the project
The BA is not merely a scribe who records whatever customers say.
The best analysts invent potential requirements for customers to consider
They conceive innovative product capabilities, imagine new markets and business opportunities, and think of ways to surprise and delight their customers.
An analyst should feel comfortable talking with individuals in diverse job functions and at all levels of the organization.
A BA should speak the language of the audience she is talking to, not using technical jargon with business stakeholders.
Analysts must be able to get people with competing interests to work together as a team
Roles
Help determine the best approach to document the backlog, including whether story cards or more formal tools are most appropriate.
Apply facilitation and leadership skills to ensure that stakeholders are talking to one another frequently about requirements needs, questions, and concerns.
Ensure that requirements documentation is at the right level: not too little and not too much. (Many BAs tend to document everything in specifications to the nth degree. Some purists suggest agile projects should have little or no requirements documentation. Neither extreme is ideal.)
Help validate that customer needs are accurately represented in the product backlog, and facilitate backlog prioritization.
Define a lightweight, flexible requirements process and adapt it as the project warrants.
Work with customers when they change their minds about requirements and priorities, and help record those changes. Work with the rest of the team to determine the impact of changes on iteration contents and release plans.