BA Mindset Principle #10: Be Part of the Solution

In the spirit of product ownership

Analysts are often asked to stay away from “solutioning”.

Sadly, that is often understood as staying away from the solution.

An instructive story happened to me earlier in my business analysis career. We had just completed a very intense requirements analysis phase that took several months.

Between fifteen and twenty stakeholders were involved in a marathon of many all-day analysis workshops, with a hundred-page requirements document for user interface alone, several hundred requirements captured in a spreadsheet, many diagrams and decision tables and more…

In other words, a new complex system was being built.

Once the final signature dried off on the requirements document, the dedicated design and development team took over.

They were all seasoned and expensive consultants contracted for the sole purpose of delivering this system.

Much to my surprise, I, the business analyst who had worked on requirements, was instructed not to communicate with the development team in any way. As the company was paying consultants a lot of money to get the job done, they were to receive their instructions from and report to a single person…