From the course: Agile Business Analysis

The business analyst role in agile

From the course: Agile Business Analysis

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The business analyst role in agile

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- Just like we can't imagine an organization without customers, I can't imagine an agile team without analysis. Analysis skills are critical to agile teams. Doing agile business analysis is about facilitating dialogue about customer and user value and scenarios with the team, making the team and product owners' decisions more efficient and analyzing for gaps and impacts. Agile as an approach for projects is all about ensuring that what is built is valuable. We accomplish this with feedback. Feedback from users and data and feedback aligned to the product vision and metrics of success. It doesn't matter how fast we work if we're not using feedback loops along the way, and that's where analysis comes in. A BA on an agile team generates dialogue to facilitate value-driven decision-making and priority setting. A BA analyzes product owner priorities and works to decompose them into smaller pieces. Each piece delivers value to the customer and is small enough for the team to accurately estimate and get feedback on. BAs need to have solid analysis skills, ensure shared understanding and facilitate decisions among a diverse group. But wait, what about my requirements and spec documents? Are you thinking that? Well, this is a normal question for BAs who've been practicing business analysis for a while and are accustomed to the BA role being about getting a business requirements document written and signed off. The focus though of an agile BA is not documenting to handoff, but rather is getting the right conversations happening. It's less about a handoff and more about the team's shared understanding. Now this does not mean that documentation doesn't happen or exist, but it does mean that documentation is different. Agile documentation serves the team as a conversation igniter or a memory of a conversation. Documents serve as an asset continuously updated and used to help teams have deep conversations. Documentation includes structured user scenario information, lightweight visual models, tables and other reference information about users, data flow, business rules and processes to aid good conversations. BAs on agile teams work partially on supporting the work currently in progress and partially on preparing for the future work to be done. They're in the current work, upcoming work and looking at the longer term. Agile BAs are looking at the big picture of where the solution is headed, as well as making sure the details are aligned to that bigger picture as the development team works.

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