Making the Agile Team: How a Business Analyst Adds Value to Your Roster

What about me?

As a trained Business Analyst (BA) and President of the Greater Atlanta Chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), many of my fellow BA cohorts whose project teams are moving to Agile often ask me how the BA fits into the Agile Scrum Team. This is a particularly important question to answer because the role and the value of the BA are both defined differently within many organizations across the globe.

Agile enthusiasts and others like myself can only offer an opinion because Agile (and Scrum specifically) is silent on the BA role or how the BA adds value to an Agile project. There are only three (3) standard roles on an Agile project:

1. Product Owner (PO)
2. Scrum Master
3. Development Team

What does Scrum say?

The objective of an Agile Scrum team is to continuously deliver product value to the organization at the end of the specified time-boxed period. The PO is tasked with defining the product vision, detailing the product features, including input from Stakeholders, and identifying and rectifying any impacts to existing business systems or processes. The Scrum Master manages the software development process, removing any impediments that are blocking the team, and supports the team in maximizing their development and delivery activities. The Development Team conducts any requirements analysis, user story review, software coding, and software testing and integration. As the strategic leader responsible for communicating the product roadmap, the PO communicates the return on investment for the product and prioritizes the backlog. The PO is also responsible for tactical activities such as refining the user stories and obtaining consensus with the team on product features.  In a waterfall environment, these activities are conducted by the BA.

What did you call me?

According to the IIBA Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK), the role of the Business Analyst is to act as an agent of change.  The BA works to identify and define the solutions that will maximize the value delivered to organizational stakeholders. BAs also work on defining the goals and requirements for programs and projects as well as supporting continuous improvement in the organization’s technology and business processes. A BA usually possesses domain knowledge that is helpful in eliciting and understanding the requirements for a project.

I’ve seen a few recommendations for where the BA fits best in an Agile Team:

• As a member of the Development Team – conducting requirements analysis and also assisting with testing. According to Agile, the Development Team is responsible for requirements analysis, coding, testing, and delivering the product. Here the BA contributes to requirements analysis and testing.
• As the Product Owner – serving as the decision maker and owner of the vision for the product. A very senior or enterprise architect level BA is a good fit for this role, as rank in the business is important to be successful.
•  As a member of the Product Owner’s Team – taking direction from the PO, authoring user stories and working on all of the tactical aspects of managing and refining the Product Backlog.

In my experience, the best role for a BA is to serve as the “Associate Product Owner” in an Agile Scrum project. We often find that the true Product Owner is fully engaged in an operations business role and cannot effectively pull away from this role to provide the support needed to the Agile team.  As a result, the team’s velocity decreases due to either rework (due to incomplete user stories) or refactoring (due to inaccurate user stories).
 

As the Associate Product Owner (APO), the BA is a member of the Product Owner Team and fulfills the tactical responsibilities of the Product Owner, with the most important responsibility being to ensure that there are least three (3) sprints worth of completed user stories (with acceptance criteria reviewed by the team) in the Product Backlog so the Development Team can work without interruption.

I told you I can help!

As a member of the Agile Scrum team, the APO focuses on requirements-driven planning that aligns to the product roadmap. The APO conducts forecasting by reviewing downstream user stories and meeting with stakeholders and other relevant parties to refine those stories in support of creating “working software over comprehensive documentation” by documenting just enough detail to meet the needs of the team. Although user stories and acceptance criteria are the standard format, it is many times useful for the APO to leverage those Business Analyst skills to create any artifacts required to communicate the user story, whether they be use cases, diagrams, flow charts, wireframes, user experience and interaction design comps, or user acceptance test cases. As a member of the Agile Scrum Team, the APO is focused on supporting the vision of the Product Owner by any means necessary.

Best of luck to any newly forming Agile Scrum teams. Don't be lulled into thinking you don't need a BA, as I hope I've made a strong case for why you should recruit a BA if you don't already have one.