Why does BGL need great Business Analysts?

In my mind, the significance of Business Analysts (BAs) in an agile organisation is self-evident. BAs are the glue that holds projects together, often solving problems and preventing them from failing. Some examples being:

• Incomplete requirements: The BA will often break the requirements down into small chunks that make delivery easier
• Changing requirements and specifications: The BA will document and refine scope, providing a helpful hand when there’s any confusion
• Lack of user/customer involvement: Resolved by the Delivery team’s collaborating with the Stakeholders. BAs are the facilitators that bring this together
• Managing unrealistic expectations: This can be a difficult task as teams are often asked to deliver on time and within budget, as well as meeting all objectives of the requirements — the BA helps the team and stakeholders to think in terms of iterative and incremental approach to help derisk the overall delivery

BAs also play a vital role in supporting the Change Delivery Manager (CDM) by helping to move the initiative along when it experiences blockers and impediments.

BAs need to demonstrate soft skills that can really make a difference, such as team building, problem solving, active listening, negotiation skills and adaptability — all of which are done with a customer focus. They’re great at providing support to project teams and sponsors.

How has the role evolved in BGL Tech?

Developing our skills
10 years ago, most of the BAs were working on in-house software/process projects that involved 2–3 systems with a multitude of manual paper procedures, supporting a single business unit or product. The entire project team shared space on one floor, with many of the stakeholders just a few floors away. BAs understood the systems and processes so well, they didn’t necessarily need extensive assistance from Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).

Since then, BGL has expanded and as such, business and project complexity has grown faster than ever before. In many cases, systems interact, integrations and interfaces become more crucial and complex, and users/customers expect more from the systems. It’s the role of the BA to collate information from key stakeholders, and this increased complexity has pushed them to:

• Strengthen their elicitation techniques to cater for the immense amount of information and complexity, and cross-functional connections
• Use these elicitation skills to discover requirements that are unknown when the project starts, adding immense value to the changing landscape
• Strengthen analysis techniques to make the critical connections between functions, processes, rules, data and the end-to-end customer experience
• Increase the use of collaboration techniques. In the past, solutions may have been more obvious. Now, defining solutions for complex systems requires meaningful collaboration across a diverse group of stakeholders
• Strengthen their facilitation techniques to help stakeholders focus, prioritise, and discover requirements as we learn together

Moving from Waterfall to Agile
Previously, most BAs would work in a traditional Waterfall environment, where templates were the norm and the software development life cycle was clearly defined with a regimented organisation-wide or application release schedule.

Today though, BGL has taken on a much more Agile approach to deliver solutions.

The role of the BA in projects using this Agile approach has been a bit ambiguous, but in general the Agile approach complements a movement towards more collaboration and flexibility in solution delivery.

BAs working on projects using the more Agile approach need to:

• Utilise techniques that inspire collaboration and meaningful dialogue to generate effective and innovative solutions
• Understand their role and how it adds value to the solution delivery
• Understand that timing and deliverables may change
• Be an advocate for the value they add to the project and the overall business strategy
• Let go of role definition based on governance processes and focus on the essence, value, and goal of what you do as a BA

Striving to deliver solutions faster
Time and cost have always been a key focus of solution delivery. BGL constantly strives to deliver solutions faster, meaning we need to alter our practices to work more efficiently.

In recent years, this pressure has resulted in tighter timelines for business analysis and requirements. With increased complexity and shorter timelines, BAs have needed to:

• Review their practices and techniques to maximize efficiency
• Consider how they use meeting time, collaborating more, and in smaller groups to get work done
• Re-evaluate how they document requirements, often documenting in smaller pieces rather than big requirements documents (no more BRDs)
• Think about increasing alignment to other projects to integrate value across solutions
• Understand and communicate solution priorities and risks; base the requirements and testing plans accordingly
• Ask for more time where needed with a solid plan in place to provide value to the stakeholders, and identify the business risks

The future of Business Analysis

I believe that BAs will find themselves having an increased focus on business value, strategy, and delivering results.

The demand for BAs with these skills is only going to increase in the years to come. BAs will need to learn to look beyond project scope to understand why the business needs to change, and help to communicate the benefits of doing so. For companies to survive and thrive in an increasingly competitive and globalised world, BAs will need to move beyond facilitation and requirements management and embrace architecture and design.