There are many challenges being a
business analyst. The role evolved with the limitation that existed when
technical competent personnel designing solutions with their captivated
solutions driven approach. These personnel were more concerned with driving
solutions that they know rather than focusing to understand customer’s actual
business requirement.
#1 Promising the Impossible
As a Business Analyst we use a
number of tools to analyze the customer requirements in detail. But at many
times the main problem is that, Business Analysts not knowing the limitations
or the capabilities of the proposed technology. Many projects are specific core
technologies driven hence, when attempting to analyze requirements the business
analysts need to understand the capabilities and limitations of the proposed
technology. Many experienced business analysts would challenge this statement
by stating that Business Analysts should focus only on the requirements and not
the solutions. In the environment that we work on currently customers are eager
to know how it will look and feel when they actually see the system, hence
prototyping is a widely used requirement elaboration method. Thus demands
Business Analysts to know the boundaries of the playground.
#2 Multiple Vendors
Multiple vendors are demanding
document perfection day in and day out. In majority of the cases nowadays in
projects requirements and development done by one vendor, quality assurance by
another vendor. Business analysts are
constantly challenged with the understanding development team has and the quality
assurance team has. It is extremely important to ensure that we attempt to
eliminate the gap between the two teams. Although how perfect the documentation
is there would be gaps in communications in the practical world and with the
tough time lines we work nowadays. The method I adapt is have a look at the
test plans and the test scenarios at a very high level. This will always help
to assess how much the QA team has grasped from the requirements perspective.
#3 Stringent Timelines
Stringent timelines has become a
part and parcel of the Business Analysts job. We are continuously pushed to complete
work on impossible time lines resulting in probably compromises in quality of
the work we do. To best way to manage difficult timelines is plan ahead. Business
Analysts tasks also fall into a waterfall methodology where we wait till we
finish the first task to proceed to the next. The method that I use is
simultaneous documentation. While attempting to elicit, analyze and elaborate I
start documentation. This not only helps to get the consent of the client while
doing the requirement elicitation phase itself. After every meeting I ensure to
send a lengthy meeting minutes with action items and the part of documentation completed
for that session. This constantly gives opportunity to get feedback from the
client.
