Business Analysts and their roles into an Agile environment

The business analyst plays a defining role in creating a single vision for the product out of a diverse set of needs and wishes from multiple stakeholders, by enabling a diverse group of customers to speak with a single voice.

They must constantly ensure that the project is able to deliver the maximum value for customers and adapting to the business needs, and the features requested by the users align with the product’s business goals, especially as the business goals change during the time.

The business analyst has a central role in ensuring that the product screenplay clearly defines the product’s strategic alignment to the business need. The analyst holds shared responsibility in defining the strategic criteria for completion of the project.

The techniques of business analysis don’t change dramatically in the agile environment, but the timing and how they are used do. Artifacts as personas and data models, for example, continue to be employed, but are kept as lightweight as possible. Low fidelity artifacts, such as diagrams, maps, and lists, provide more value to an agile project than long, textual requirement specifications. Low fidelity artifacts are used to build the software for a specific iteration and only need to be understandable to the team during the iteration. On the other hand, Long-lived artifacts should be used beyond the scope of the development. They should be used to communicate what the software does and why it does it.

Agile offers the opportunity for business analysis to benefit from the frequent feedback provided by the business, by reviewing the results of successive iterations with the business stakeholders, having the opportunity to refine the product’s specifications and ensure they are aligned with the business, and identify and reduce risk he project as soon as possible.

In waterfall projects, requirements are developed in their entirely prior to the development phase. As risk elements are uncovered and business needs evolve, certain requirements may change or be eliminated, which results in a waste of work. By providing just-in-time requirements, there is less rework of requirements because only the requirements required for the current release are define in detail and developed.

There are a variety of ways a business analyst can be engaged on an Agile project:

• In some projects a dedicated business analyst role is unnecessary. This is not to say that business analyst is not conducted during the course of the project, only that any member, or members, of the overall development team, may do it.
• In more complex environments the analyst might be the facilitator, bringing divergent business stakeholders together and helping them speak with a single voice so the project team are not confused by contradictory and conflicting perspectives.
• The analyst might act as the product owner/customer representative where they are empowered by the business to make decisions on product features and priority.
• The analyst could act as a surrogate product owner, in situations where the business product owner not available.
• The analyst might act as the second in command to a business product owner with limited availability.
• An analyst could take the role of business coach in an environment where the business product owner in competent and committed, but has limited IT project experience and the rest of the development team are lacking in domain knowledge.

One of the key elements for a business analyst working in an agile environment is the ability to use feedback to drive change. The BA must constantly review requirements with the business stakeholders and ensure that any shifts in business needs are accurately reflected in future iterations of the product. In an agile environment, the success of the business analyst depends on his interpersonal skills as communication, facilitation, coaching and negotiation.

Acting like the “bridge” between the development team and the customer, the business analysts should constantly think as a customer, primarily on the time of:

• Acceptance and evaluation criteria definition
• Business rule analysis
• Functional decomposition
• Interface analysis
• Non-functional requirements analysis
• Problem tracking
• Prototyping
• Requirements workshops
• Scenarios and use cases
• Scope modeling
• Survey/questionnaire
• SWOT analysis
• User stories 

Agile business analysis is related to increase the delivering of business value to the customers of the project/product to be developed. To be productive on an agile team, business analysts are active participants, if not the actual facilitators of planning, analyzing, testing, and demonstrating activities.

Business analysts play a key role in facilitating a shared understanding of the business need for the project with all the stakeholders. It is the role of the business analyst to ensure there is a share, agreed vision of the product across the entire team. This requires the analyst an extremely high level of skill in communication, facilitation, and negotiation. In addition, they should have the ability to listen and understand feedback from all stakeholders and use this feedback to drive the changes required to the requirements and priorities of the project. In the agile environment, understanding and synthesizing perspectives alongside the ability to hold successful conversations replace the need for formal, detailed, long-term artifacts such as requirements documents.

In a brief, Agile Business Analysis is about ensuring the right information is available to the development team in the right level of detail at the right time so they can build the right product.

To read more about Business Analysis, I recommend the BABOK® Guide as a great source! Enjoy!