Change

Lean Analyst

business analysis is so important to agile people that we do it every day - it is not a role or a phase, but a set of skills
-- everyone should understand the business value of the activities they are engaged in (JPS)
- with many people doing analysis, the risk of bottleneck is eleviated

 analysis activities:

They’ve got to negotiate between a wide range of people.
They have to communicate the requirements to the development team.
They have to represent what’s going with the development team to the overall business community.

analyst skills

The ability to communicate with people, to ask questions, and get information out of them.
To negotiate priorities between different groups - because the business stakeholders never have one single voice on their own. They need somebody to help facilitate that, somebody who knows the business to begin with.
The business domain knowledge, period, is important. It is something that everybody needs to have, not just business analysts.


We need more than what a business analyst can typical do

-prioritize the requirements, because we work in priority order, which enables us to produce higher return on investment.
- make decisions right now; even if it is not perfect decision, give us your best answer now, but let us know that it’s not the best one…

We don’t need a big document. We don’t need to have somebody to go back to the Steering Committee and wait for the official meeting two weeks from now to make a relatively trivial decision. We need the decisions now…

But, if your vision is to write detailed use cases or write detailed data models or whatever your models are of choice and then hand it over to the development team; that’s not of much value. That’s actually increasing risk. We don’t need that.