This was a very informative session elaborating on the role of BAs in the past, how it is now, and how it will look like in the future. In addition to having 3 great speakers talking about their experience as BAs, we did a group exercise, brainstormed and shared what we think about role of BA and created affinity map.
Past:
BAs involvement only in the early stage of SDLC (yes, traditional waterfall SDLC). BAs’ job entailed:
- Working (usually) in seperate teams
- Identifying stakeholder and talking to them
- Looking into existing systems, processes and documents
- Business Process Modelling (BPM) and process map
- Diagramming, use cases, user stories
Present:
Agile is a big thing for a lot of organisations, most teams and organisations are aware of and are learning about agile mindset and trying to work in agile environment. Most popular flavours are Scrum and Kanban.
- Mindset: Let me get into your problem rather than sitting down and writing down
- BAs are involved in work till late stages of SDLC
- BAs should break things down into parts and be aware of interrelationships i.e. system thinking
- Teams are smaller and are cross-functional
- BAs need to constantly engage with stakeholders
- BAs need to validate assumptions
- There is a lot outside technical skills BAs need to know about like EQ, active listening, T-shaped BA
Future
There was lots of conversation on how the future of BA role will look like specially given the rise of machine learning and AI. But there were the main themes
- Lot of people suspected more emphasis on soft skills rather than technical Standardisation of skills: 60% skills will be the same
- The rest of 40% is industry based knowledge
- BAs act as consultant, something that is happening now. Getting into problem rather than sitting down and taking notes
- BAs directly contribute to product and value creation not just analysis
- BAs might code sometimes, they do bit of everything
Majority of room agreed BA role would be least affected by AI. While roles like developers and testers (specially) might be changed by machine learning and AI and automation, soft skills such as listening, EQ, Emotional Intelligence, conflict management, team and leadership are not to be replaced by machines or algorythm. The result is people will make better, more informed decisions but at the end it’s the people skills that will be in demand.
