A business analyst’s story — ep 1
Let me relate it to a story — how i met my BA self.
I remember my first time being a business analyst (BA), since I started my career as a technical writer. The project lead asked me to do reverse engineering of a web application. Too excited, I started googling as what the hell is that and came up with some templates and approaches. Having the plan laid out — then came the part of talking to the development team. This goes tricky.
One developer starts off speaking Chinese (no offense to the language). Just kidding. He gets too technical and goes over my head. Now a new born BA would get lost, feel drowsy and piss off the speaker. So I would do all that looking away :) Once the session was over I thanked him and asked if he could share the application link on the staging server so I could play around. I had an idea that I could apply reverse engineering here (something I learn during undergrad times). But just the UI and business flow won’t complete the whole task considering it was mere 50% of the thing. So there I begin playing with the application.
The application was a web based subscription service for call centers to manage their ops and provide services to end customers. I played a lot with it like addition to a new video game. I explored every bit and documented it along. Since we know that there is a straight way to do things and then there are work around. So that was one approach. Next is the Newton’s third law of motion. For every action in software, there could be multiple repercussions. This is one of core elements of business analysis. I kept on looking for impacts when I would enter new or edit or save data. The whole exercise of digging up information I could find about the app — how it works, what it does, who uses it — lasted for two months. I understood quite much about how to think broader — a trait of BAs. Understanding multiple dimensions of how a particular business process works is a good start to become a BA. I did realize I have a potential and flair to being a BA:)
Take Away:
Focus. Make sure way to the core of the business process and then the application — in terms of reverse engineering (since it’s already developed).
Think. Who wants this and Why? What good it does to the user? Become the user.
Improve (Innovate). Just doing the routine work is normal. Why not go extra mile and add value. See what can be done to make things better for people attached to the app.
