Agile Business Analyst, Skills and Traits - Adaptive US

Are you a traditional BA and gearing up yourself to move to an agile project?

Are you a Business Analyst working on an agile project and going through an identity crisis?

Here are a few points which will work wonders for making your role a success:

1. Ability to think ahead and beyond technology for the product/system roadmap
2. See things in a different perspective to bring about improvements to business process which will result in any of these benefits like cost reduction, removal of process bottleneck/time lag, defect/waste reduction, improvement in user experience, revenue growth, Defect reduction
3. Critical thinker to be able to think of the right solutions for the problems of the stakeholders/ project sponsor
4. Think and act like a product owner who will have the entire product vision in his/her mind while also be able to detail out the requirement for the sprint in hand
5. Take different roles as the need of the hour demands e.g. product owner, tester, facilitator, etc
6. Act more like a bridge/shock absorber between teams while there is heat in the conflict of meeting the dates, prioritization or resource issues, etc.
7. Act as a facilitator in reducing the turn around time for the clarifications from stakeholders to developers.
8. Be fast, agile and on top of your toes to clarify and communicate any changes in customer priorities to the team
9. Act as a mentor to developers
10. Create a better understanding of the objective of the product in the team
11. Ability to investigate and understand the business and think what will work for the customer rather than go with the traditional approach
12. In a distributed development project - Facilitate frequent and effective communication modes and mechanisms between the stakeholders and the development team
13. Arrange collocations for distributed development teams as much possible to make communication as effective as possible.

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