What does a Business Analyst do?
An insight into what its like to be a Business Analyst in Kainos.

Kainos, who are they?
Before I start telling you what I do, or at least my interpretation of it, let me tell you about Kainos, who they are and what they do.
Kainos are one of the largest, independent, software companies in Northern Ireland. We design and implement software solutions across a variety of sectors with emphasis on digital Healthcare (Evolve), Enterprise (WorkSmart for Workday) and our newly reformed Digital Services, who continue to pave the way in the transformation of digital services across both public and private sectors.
What does a Business Analyst do?
Now that you know who Kainos are and what they do, I’ll try and explain what I do… a question I get asked daily by my friends and family! I could pitch the whole, “it’s the bridge between the business and IT” and whilst that is broadly true, it doesn’t fully resonate the type of work carried out or the importance it holds in project delivery.
Unlike a traditional business analyst (BA), who would have gone into a business months in advance to build a business case and requirements spec. the modern BA has a much broader skill set. Think of a product manager meets a business analyst and presto, you have the ‘modern’ BA.
A BA is the eyes and ears of the business, think of them as an interpreter. They possess the ability to ingest one language (the business) and decipher it into another (functional requirements), albeit in a much grander scale and with slightly more risk (not to say there is no risk with getting some words confused in another language!).
What does the “eyes and ears” of a business mean? You embed yourself with the client, and begin to develop an understanding of their processes and start to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies. You take these issues and begin to understand what the business and user needs are.
Now that we know what the issues are, what is the solution? At this point we can begin working with the Product Managers/Owners to build out a roadmap of features / epics, prioritising those that deliver the most value early. Once that has been fleshed out, we can start to break down these features / epics into a format that is easily consumable by the team i.e. User Stories. The BA should work closely with the tech architect / lead / wider scrum team to build out these stories collaboratively and ensure there is a shared understanding for what we are building.
Building the right thing.
We know the features and epics we are going to be working on, awesome! BUT, how do we ensure we are building the right ‘thing’ for our client, delivering the most value for the end user and keeping costs to a minimum? The BA is part of a multi-disciplinary team which, in Kainos, typically includes a Product Manager/Owner (often client side), Technical Architect/Lead, User Researcher, UX Designer, Content Designer and several Developers.
The goal for the BA, to create a backlog of functional requirements that can be picked up each sprint by the delivery team. Sounds easy, right? No. How do we get here? The BA works across the team, often using the roadmap for direction. We usually being by drawing up a user journey, usually on a whiteboard to begin with, drawing on inspiration from User Research (UR) and User Experience (UX). The BA should then work with both the PO and Scrum Team to create some initial high-levels stories with a view to iterate over these once we know more about ‘it’.
Great, we have a journey and some high-level stories, what now? Using the Hi/Low fidelity mocks created by the UX team, the UR team take these out for testing to validate both our assumptions and designs with the end users. These activities help us understand what works well for them, what doesn’t and what could be done to improve the product.
These recommendations get collated and fed back to both the Product Manager/Owner and BA at which point they are used to either tinker, or completely re-write the stories that were initially created. The two work in tandem to define what the Minimal Viable Product is (MVP) looks like. Once defined, Iterations are made to the original designs and, in an ideal world, the product goes back out for a further round of testing. Once the stories are ‘ready’, they are prioritised by the the scrum team before being factored into a Sprint. Given time sensitivity, the stories sometimes only get one round of testing before being developed but, that’s not to say further iterations can’t happen later in the product cycle.
How do we stay on track?
The BA meets regularly with the development team to carry out various ‘ceremonies’ such as refinement i.e. looking at stories a few sprints down in the backlog to better understand the requirements and being to identify any constraints or outstanding questions. And sprint planning, looking specifically at the stories coming up in the next sprint. We also frequently use Slack/Skype for off-line conversations, impromptu catch-ups in person and we have our daily stand-up meeting which we use to identify work in progress and outline if there are any blockers etc.
Project life.
I’m going to quote Alison Coote’s earlier blog post, “I’m not going to lie, there is going to be travel required and its is likely to be 3–4 days on site with the client”. You may think working away isn’t for you BUT, you get to work with some amazing people, and gain exposure to some high profile projects, get to visit somewhere new and develop a range of skills you wouldn’t pick up anywhere else.
What are the main characteristics of a Business Analyst?
- Ability to create meaningful user stories
- Communicate both horizontally and vertically (both with the client and in your team)
- Elicitation of requirements (that deliver the most value)
- Working collaboratively with stakeholders and product owners
- Aligning both the needs of the business with the needs of the users to deliver value
- We need to be good listeners and
- Need to be naturally inquisitive as to why things are the way they are.
What can you do?
If you are thinking about changing roles within Kainos, or perhaps you are already doing a similar role and fancy a change of scenery, feel free to contact me for a chat or even better, let’s grab a coffee.
Email: L.johnston@kainos.com
Phone: 07584642770
