The Path to Great Relationships Part #5. Business Analyst and Project Manager
Hi all! I’m happy to share my 2nd article concerning the productive cooperation of a BA and PM on the project. Hope this will be useful for all of you😊 I’d also like to thank my colleague, Diana Bondar, Junior Business analyst, for her support in preparing this material.
Business Analyst role and responsibilities
The role of the Business Analyst (BA) is especially important for every project and brings a lot of value to the company. Those who have not worked closely with BAs think their responsibilities are connected mostly with work on the documentation, but that is not just the point.
The key duties of every business analyst are:
- Gather all needed requirements from stakeholders.
- Document those requirements.
- Ensure the team understands everything.
Let’s check the key duties closer: the most essential is communication with product owners and/or end-users (stakeholders) to understand their needs and wishes to deliver qualitative services in the future. After gathering the requirements, BA documents them and ensures the quality (SMART/INVEST) by presenting them to the team and negotiating the milestones. The next step is supervising requirements traceability and updating it if necessary.
Based on that, briefly — BA is a contact point between customers and the team.
The integral part of BA responsibilities is:
- Create and design requirement specifications.
- Support some project documents.
- Set up the Requirement gathering pipeline and the Requirements communication pipeline/ Requirements workflow processes.
- Conduct elicitation, refinement, and planning meetings to capture the project's functional and non-functional requirements.
- Supporting the team during the Requirements implementation part.
Business Analysts can also gather some metrics to monitor changes to baseline requirements and the project scope.
10 key qualities of a Business Analyst
From my perspective as a Project Manager with 5+ years of experience (including one year of BA experience at the beginning of my career path) and working in different domains (Healthcare, Finances, Retail, Manufacturing, Automotive, and Entertainment), the skillful BA should have the following qualities:
- Effective communication and presentation skills.
- Conflict resolution and problem-solving skills.
- Politeness is essential as well as BA should be restrained.
- Experience in BA area and tools needed (such as Azure DevOps, Jira, Confluence, Trello, Visio, etc.).
- Sufficient English level (at least Upper Intermediate — to express thoughts easily and understand clients’ points of view).
- Understanding the business context and being able to suggest the solution.
- Analytical and out-of-the-box thinking skills.
- Attentiveness to details.
- Proactivity (be able to bring fresh ideas).
- Not to be afraid of difficulties and challenges.
- Understand stakeholder types and ensure each type of stakeholder (tech/non-tech/ completely non-tech) understands your point.
PM & BA cooperation experience and challenges
Since some time ago, I have worked as a BA, I can also share my experience with you. As it was the start of my career path, it was quite difficult to familiarize myself with all the processes in the company, learn project specifics and functionality, and document everything clearly for developers.
I also cooperated with the Project Manager to ensure we were moving in the right direction and our clients were satisfied with our services. I spent a lot of time documenting all the requirements and writing specifications where all the functionality was described. I had experience working with a graphical tool such as Balsamiq (https://balsamiq.com/) to create a simple graphical representation of the functionality and flows. As an example, you can create such wireframes, so it will be visible and understandable what is planned to deliver even before starting design implementation:
Currently, on the project, we mostly use the Miro board tool for the requirements ideating and formulation. This tool is great, as it allows capturing inputs quickly and makes collaboration easy and enjoyable in an understandable way for everyone.
Example: Using Miro for prototyping and agreement on the suggested changes:
Example: Using Miro for possible solution presentation and prioritization:
Example: Using Miro for ideating the WBS for the complex feature and monitoring its status:
Other tools:
- Azure Board for capturing final requirements and monitoring its status.
- Notion for preparing meeting agenda and monitoring personal tasks.
- Confluence to keep and update the formal project documentation.
There are specific requirements for BAs in different companies or projects in some cases, but candidates generally have the same main duties. The most important thing is to understand if this role is interesting for you or not.
In SoftServe, I worked with three Business Analysts on my project as we had three separate teams. We used to have weekly syncs to share some updates and review project documentation, so everyone was aligned. It was not difficult to share the load as every BA was working with a specific team and clients. However, we needed weekly syncs to align on the project updates and share the experience and plans.
Now, due to team restructuring, I am working just with one BA, but the approach is the same — we have regular meetings to discuss:
- Client's feedback and preferences.
- Project updates.
- Discuss the approach and how to work further.
- Prepare sprint reports.
- Review documentation, etc.
For me, it is important that BA working with me would be proactive, able to bring some ideas, multitask as we have a dynamic environment, and not be afraid of some difficulties and challenges. I respect my colleagues who always strive to develop themself and learn something new; it is essential nowadays. It can be professional book reading, training/course, certifications — everything that can help to improve their level and become a strong professional.
What about the development of a Business Analyst?
To be promoted to the next level, it is particularly important to know project and clients’ business value, be good at planning, data gathering and data analysis, scope definition and prioritization (together with product owners), lead meetings (elicitations, refinements, plannings, estimations) and presentations, gather requirements, plan stakeholders’ engagement and collaboration.
In addition to the points mentioned above, a Business Analyst should create and support documentation (Requirements management plan, Traceability matrix, Scope management plan, Communication plan, etc.). BA needs to try/discover a lot of techniques for requirement analysis, meeting handling, stakeholder analysis, suggest the improvements of the current state, and use different techniques to dive into the business value.
PM and BA cooperation is crucial for every project as both these roles are responsible for project success and many project areas depend on them.
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