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:
- Ability to think ahead and beyond technology for the product/system roadmap
- 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
- Critical thinker to be able to think of the right solutions for the problems of the stakeholders/ project sponsor
- 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
- Take different roles as the need of the hour demands e.g. product owner, tester, facilitator, etc
- 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.
- Act as a facilitator in reducing the turn around time for the clarifications from stakeholders to developers.
- Be fast, agile and on top of your toes to clarify and communicate any changes in customer priorities to the team
- Act as a mentor to developers
- Create a better understanding of the objective of the product in the team
- Ability to investigate and understand the business and think what will work for the customer rather than go with the traditional approach
- In a distributed development project - Facilitate frequent and effective communication modes and mechanisms between the stakeholders and the development team
- Arrange collocations for distributed development teams as much possible to make communication as effective as possible.
Suggested reading-
Structuring requirements in agile projects