How have BA Professionals adapted to the agile world?

They’ve adapted really well!

In fact, IIBA’s most recent Global Business Analysis Salary Survey found that nearly 70% of respondents have worked in an agile context. From 2017 to 2019, the use of agile techniques increased from 50% to 71%. That’s a 21% increase in agile practices being applied by organizations.

 

The key is to leverage what you already do well and build onto it with the specific skills you need to be a highly productive member of an agile team.

Start with what you are really good at today. As BA Professionals, we have a history of delivering value. We’ve always been about collaboration. We’ve always been about sourcing out people who have the information and connecting them with people who need that information. We’ve always been about eliciting good information to support value delivery, and we’ve always been about sharing that information to ensure the solution being built meets customer needs.

Those foundational pieces are just as relevant in the agile world. What changes is how much of this you do, how you do it and when you do it.

So, instead of eliciting business information – such as goals, objectives, needs and requirements upfront, you elicit just enough information to support near term delivery of value.

Instead of assembling ALL the business information upfront, you assemble just what’s needed to support near term delivery.

Instead of capturing ALL the business information and sharing it in one standard format like a “Requirements Spec”, you are flexible in how you capture information and who you share it with.

So those are the ways in which we have adapted and evolved. And that’s really about developing your agile mindset, adding knowledge of some key agile practices, and adding some key agile analysis techniques to your toolkit.

 

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