From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

The business analyst role in agile

From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

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The business analyst role in agile

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- Like an organization without customers, I can't imagine an Agile project without analysis. Being an Agile BA is about facilitating dialogue about customer value with the team, making the product owner's decisions more efficient, and analyzing for gaps and impacts. Agile as an approach for projects is all about ensuring what is built is valuable. We can build a solution really well and really fast, but if it doesn't provide value to the users, it doesn't matter. And that's where BAs come in. Your work is crucial to Agile's value driven mission. Business analysts on Agile teams recognize and protect value throughout the life of the project, and they do this by producing dialogue, not documents. 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 small pieces. Each piece delivers value to the customer and is small enough for the team to accurately estimate. BAs need to be solid analyzers who can facilitate shared understanding among a diverse group and identify those increments of value. But do we need to document something? Isn't that the question? Well, this is a normal question for BAs who've been practicing business analysis for a while and are accustom to the BA role being about a written business requirements document and sign off. The focus of an Agile BA is not documenting so something can be handed off, but rather it's getting the right conversations happening so the team has a shared understanding of what they're building. 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. Agile BAs partner closely to the product owner to determine what's valuable. The product owner makes the decisions and the BA is there to make this as easy as possible for the product owner by analyzing, facilitating dialogue, and getting the right information to the product owner. Agile BAs get work done by using high impact collaboration and communication techniques, rather than using documents to define the process. BAs on Agile teams work partially on supporting the work currently in progress, and partially on preparing for future work to be done. They are in the current work, the upcoming work, and looking at the longer term. Agile BAs are looking at the big picture of where the solution is headed.

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