The business analyst role in agile

dinsdag 7 februari 2023 11:32

The business analyst role in agile

An Agile BA is:

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.

Business analysts on Agile teams:

1. Recognize and protect value throughout the life of the project,

2. Facilitating and producing dialogue, not documents.
3. Generates dialogue to facilitate value driven decision making and priority
setting.
4. 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.

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.
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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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The Agile manifest
dinsdag 7 februari 2023 11:41

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Agile principles 1–4 from a business analyst perspective
dinsdag 7 februari 2023 11:45

Agile principles 1–4 from a business analyst perspective

The principles of the Agile Manifesto bring clarity to what being agile truly means.
It's more than doing agile, it's about being agile in our behaviors and mindset.

BAs facilitate the dialog that helps the product owner prioritize what the team
builds. BAs understand what will delight users and satisfy customers. BAs support
continuous delivery by facilitating the breaking down of functionality into small
pieces of value. No one else provides this perspective. Business leaders see large
chunks of functionality and the technical team focuses on technical components
and technical layers. As a BA, you advocate for the users and customers by
identifying small increments of value that users can see and experience. BAs
define these increments so they can be prioritized, estimated, and worked on
efficiently.

Welcome changing requirements even late in development. Agile processes

harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

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As BAs, we facilitate the team in discovering emerging thoughts and ideas that
will make the product more valuable. External market changes and feedback from
customers continuously influence the product and BAs help incorporate this
feedback into the product backlog and priorities. Changing requirements are
good. They mean the product is getting better than previously imagined.

BAs are key to helping customers and business leaders realize the intended
benefits of a product sooner. BAs slice work into small increments of value and
help the team analyze business value, technical dependencies, and technical debt.
BAs are a critical player in facilitating the needed dialog on the team to not only
ensure the software works but then it's also valuable. It can be one thing to build
great software and yet a different focus for the team to make it valuable from a
customer perspective. Many times, discovering the value to customers means
experimenting and learning from seeing users use and react to working software.

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BAs are engaged and available to the team on a daily basis. They facilitate
continuous conversations throughout the day using high impact collaboration and
communication that results in rapid learning and fast decision making. When this
is done well, requirements and documentation are kept lightweight. The focus is
on dialog rather than cranking up documents. These are the first four principles. I
hope you are seeing how important these are to your role as BAs. Next, we'll look
at principles five through eight.

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Agile principles 5–8 from a business analyst perspective
dinsdag 7 februari 2023 11:51

Agile principles 5–8 from a business analyst perspective

BAs serve the user, customer, and the organization. They help the team
understand each piece of work and how it aligns to the vision. They help the
product owner prioritize, make decisions, balance trade-offs, and remove
features or work that doesn't align with the product vision. On agile teams, BAs
are empowered to be part of us by facilitating collaborative requirements,
techniques that invoke deep conversations. BAs also are empowered to facilitate
conversations and document just enough at the last responsible moment.

On agile teams, BAs don't hand off requirements and stories to developers.
Requirements are based on conversations. Documents or details typed into a tool
are placeholders for conversation or memories of conversations. The team
collaborates on a daily basis to understand stories and features. The BA uses
conversations, facilitated sessions, and structured dialogue to keep the team
engaged. Agile teams value face-to-face conversation with the team over
documentation and hand offs. Virtual teams can also use many tools to facilitate
face-to-face dialogue as well. Tools that use virtual whiteboards, virtual sticky

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face-to-face dialogue as well. Tools that use virtual whiteboards, virtual sticky
notes and video are common for virtual agile teams. These virtual communication
tools are much more powerful than document hand offs and simple voice
conversations.

Agile teams demonstrate progress with working software, not documents about
working software. We want the product owner, business analyst, and some user
representatives to see working software as often as possible during the sprinter
iteration. We want feedback associated with the working software to guide
detailed requirements and designs. Agile teams prefer to finish increments of
value instead of increasing the amount of work in progress. The BA demonstrates
this principle via prioritized stories, well-defined acceptance criteria, prototyping
and experimenting. BAs elicit feedback from users as the sprint progresses.

The sponsors, developers and users should be able to maintain a constant pace
indefinitely. BAs work on requirements just in time. This is not reactive work but
actually quite proactive. BAs work with the product owner to understand the
product vision and roadmap. The BA helps the product owner refine the backlog
in the big picture view as well as the detailed views. The detailed views are only
needed for the upcoming work items and BAs also help the teams size and
estimate work. When the backlog is well refined, the planning and execution of an
iteration flows smoothly and maintains a steady manageable pace/

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Agile principles 9–12 from a business analyst perspective
dinsdag 7 februari 2023 11:58

Agile principles 9–12 from a business analyst perspective

BAs work with the development team to understand technical risks, architecture,
and technical depth. The BA boosts technical excellence by helping the
development team understand the product vision and roadmap. In turn, the
development team helps the BA and product owner with prioritization, by
communicating technical risks and helping the team understand how decisions
impact value to the customer.

The BA and product owner are working together to make sure only the most
important things get done. They evaluate backlog items to make sure they align
with the vision and the future. BAs refine the backlog to shift the team's focus to
the highest priority items. BAs need to have a ruthless focus on value and analyze

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the highest priority items. BAs need to have a ruthless focus on value and analyze
items submitted to the backlog for their contribution to value. This principle also
applies to the work of BAs in terms of what gets documented. Lightweight
documentation and models are key parts of the principles for BAs. Only do
enough work to meet the purpose and add value to the team. This may mean
taking a photo of a drawing on a whiteboard, rather than recreating it in a
modeling tool.

The BA has a big part in prioritizing what the team works on. To do this well, BAs
must identify and act on changing requirements. Requirements emerge and
evolve as the team learns. Architectures, requirements, and designs change.
These changes cannot be predicted. The team needs to work hard to discover
them from building, experimenting, and getting feedback.

BAs participate in the team's retrospectives. Frequent retrospectives drive

continuous improvement and change the way the team works, to maximize value
to the users and the organization. As BAs, it also helps to look at our own work
and retrospect with ourselves on what went well and what we can do to improve
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and retrospect with ourselves on what went well and what we can do to improve
things for the next iteration. For example, did we, as a team, engage in deep
dialog and discovery of requirements? Did I do lightweight modeling and did it
help the dialog with the team? Was I focused on value to the customer? We have
covered all 12 principles. The principles give BAs guidance on how to demonstrate
the Agile values. Remember, Agile is more about these principles than any tool,
methodology, ceremony, or technique. You can bring a little agility to any project
environment.

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