Agile Business Analyst

The role of Agile Business Analyst is increasingly popular within our agile teams. But how can this role be defined in relation to the other known roles in agile teams?

What is a Business Analyst?

The Business Analyst (BA) is in traditional methods, the interface between the IT team and the business teams. He will analyze information processes in order to make good functional specifications come from the decisions made by strategy decision-makers.

The Business Analyst arriving in Scrum?

When the Business Analyst arrives in a Scrum universe, he can take one of the following 3 roles:

Business Analyst in Product Owner

It is not uncommon to ask the Business Analyst to take the role of Product Owner; however, it will have to be trained because they are not the same work. However, this is a logical continuation in agile transformations.

Be careful, however, to bring this Business Analyst to become a member of this team even if he is considered to be a member of the “business” units of the company.

An Agile Business Analyst like an Expert

This is the most interesting positioning of the Business Analyst (BA) in an agile project. The BA will become the expert for a specific part of the product that requires real expertise.

For example, if you deliver an accounting application, the Product Owner will not necessarily have all the expertise necessary to perform on the writing of the user-stories and their management rules. On complex applications, it is seldom to be an expert on all the topics. So, we will take one (or more) BAs who will be the expert about Balance Sheet and Income Statement for example.

He will help the Product Owner (PO) to write user-stories that will be on his expertise. On some products, the process analysis will take longer than the development time but thanks to his work, the developers will be able to quickly develop the set of rules written very clearly on the user-stories.

This is what I call a true Agile Business Analyst.

However, the product owner will take the final decisions in the event of disagreement.

This case is more seldom, but it is possible to see the Business Analyst become the Proxy PO of the product. Don’t hesitate to see the article already proposed previously on this role to understand it.

Article: What is a Proxy Product Owner?

Conclusion Agile Business Analyst

Agile Business Analyst is a role that can bring a lot of benefits to agile teams, especially when you work on complex applications.

Indeed, this role of agile organizations should not be excluded even if this role does not exist in basic Scrum teams.