Business Analysts: Why are you so scared?
Let's look at the reasons!
When you started it all sounded exciting and fun - to be a Business Analyst. Who wouldn’t be excited anyways, as you get to ‘gather requirements’, ‘draw process diagrams’, ‘create documentation’.
But little did you know the real world is messy. The process, requirements, solutions and human emotions are all jumbled up like spaghetti. You get a bowl of that, and your client/work expects you to untangle all of it.
Business Analysts, I know exactly why you are so scared as I have been there:
1. You find yourself facing a client whose business you barely know, and they begin throwing acronyms like SME, CSM, KPI, ROI.
2. You hear blend of business processes, some vaguely familiar and others entirely new. While you try to grasp hold of what a business unit is talking about, some other team jumps in and add another layer of process on top of it.
3. If there’s a technical team member involved in discussions, they already know how to design the system, they start throwing ideas around how they can best solution it. Wait a minute but you are still trying to understand the acronyms.
4. Then technical intricacies emerge: you hear there is need of integration, call APIs from another system, implement web components, iFrames to display information to users. So half the time you are lost.
5. Then the dreaded thing happens. The project team asks you to document all of this.
6. The project manager will ask you to put user stories ASAP (another acronym which unfortunately you understand). The team needs to start figuring out the solution. The Sprint is set to start soon but here you haven’t learned to walk properly yet.
Welcome to the real world which is always messy!
But, why am I telling you all this? Because you are not alone in this journey. All other BAs have to go through this as well. So, let’s acknowledge first it is not going to be easy.
So what do you do? How do you bring clarity of thinking in such chaos?
I’ll outline that in my next post.