The business analyst role has evolved into a very vast role. It can be present in a wide variety of domains and functions. The duties of the role itself may vary quite a bit as well. In fact, the running joke in the BA world is that when job duties do not point towards an obvious job title, call it a BA role.
Within the IT world, agile has changed the functions of the team members, including how a BA functions and adds value to the team. As a negative effect of the myth that agile doesn’t need documentation, BAs are often not included in teams. However, let's look at 3 key BA contribution in an agile team.
Product Backlog
One of the key functions that a BA completes in an agile world is the maintenance of a robust product backlog. Quick changes and rapid development needs an active supervision of what is being prioritized and developed to ensure the right product is being delivered. This product backlog needs to be groomed ahead of sprints and kept in an ever ready state to ensure quick access to the next best function to work on. Downtime is minimized and functions are adequately documented to keep up the living documentation.
While it is encouraged within agile teams to keep up the communication with POs as and when needed, you need a single point of contact that maintains the relationships. BAs are a perfect candidate for this work, as they can monitor all channels of requirement clarifications to ensure there are no conflicting requirements. This is ever so important in Agile considering the strict timelines and (potentially) multiple teams working on different facets of the same feature.
With agile, all “developers” may not be privy to the business case and need, but the BA will be. This allows the BA to set expectations and explain the rationale behind a lot of the functions that are available in the pipeline to be developed. At all times, it is important to make sure that the best business value is obtained from the product.
Soft Skills
Although this may be stereotyping certain roles and skills, a BA tends to be quite strong in soft skills - communication, facilitation and presentation. In order to make sure the right ideas are communicated during show cases, it is in the team’s best interest to put forth the strongest “sales-person” to ensure continued support and funding for the work. In pure agile teams, all tasks should be a team effort, however, in the interest of time and until all team members are at equal level of presentation skill, a BA will be invaluable to the team.
Along with presentations, a BA can also facilitate the right conversations within the team and outside the team. Often individuals in technical roles tend to be self-starters and might prefer working in silos. A BA can open up the channel to ensure the right interactions.
Business Sense
While those technically inclined are able to assess the technical feasibility of a solution, BAs focus on whether it makes practical or business sense. For example, while all data can be made secure, does it make sense to hide the banking transactions of a client from them directly? Here is where functional analysis of a solution is important.
Depending on the type of domain, further contributions of a BA can be highlighted. In some cases, the role can also be coupled with another agile role, however, it is important to note that the team must contain a member with these skills to support the continuous development process within agile development.
