The Agile Forest

Seven years ago I was involved in an open debate at an IIBA meet up on the role of Business Analysts within an Agile environment. At the time my opponent contested that Business Analysts were defunct under Agile and were no longer required. I debated that they were still needed but that their role changed somewhat.

My main argument was that they were no longer the provider of lengthy requirements documents written in advance with little to no collaboration in the team. This didn’t mean that Business Analysts were no longer required to write any form of documentation, just the amount of documentation, the collaboration involved to reach a common understanding and the timing of when the documentation is done changed. With this reduced amount of time directly spent writing ‘War and Peace’ requirements they would instead use their time in a new skill set – as facilitators. I saw the role of the Business Analyst as being very compatible with the Scrum Master role, where the Business Analyst could encourage an environment of collaboration and ensure that the ‘promise for a conversation’ occurred. Business Analysts would still need to have skills drilling into the root cause of problems, to understand and analyse and question the business process, but in a good Agile team everyone would also have this skill.

Time has moved on and most of what I predicted for the Business Analyst role has come to pass within Agile environments. But I believe that it is time to make a new prediction.

We have come a long way towards mastering the art of building the product right, our next journey is to build the right product. After all, according to Lean principles, the biggest waste is the waste of overproduction and this can take the form of producing an unneeded or incorrectly targeted product.

Thus, in today’s ever shifting environment, I see the role of the Business Analyst as that of being at the heart of data. I see the role transforming to focus more on data analytics and the understanding of data associated with the product. Some may say that this is the role of the product owner, to which I probably wouldn’t disagree with and as such I see the Product Owner and the Business Analyst roles merging even closer together but with an incredibly strong focus on data.

So what is all the data that is being analysed about? Four things:

1. Are we improving the number of customers seeking our product?
2. Are we retaining our existing customers?
3. Are customers getting value out of our product?
4. Is our product revenue model generating net profit?

If the answer is yes to the above questions, founded soundly on data then your product is in a great place. If you cannot answer these questions then you really should start working on it (before you go out of business). For those of you familiar with the Lean Startup model then the above discussion should be something very familiar to you, for I believe the Business Analyst role should be centered around enabling the data gathering to support a Lean Startup approach.

You don’t have to be a start up to gather this data. You don’t have to measure once every three months. You can start measuring your existing product and incrementally improving on the four questions right now and everyday from this point onwards. Armed with this data  you can know whether a change you made today will make a difference to your business tomorrow.

Maybe the role shouldn’t be called “Business Analyst” anymore . Maybe we should start to create “Product Analyst” roles instead?

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