Focus & Simplify - Life as an Entrepreneur using social media

A few months back when I was working on a project a thought cross my mind about, would a company require an Agile Business Analyst / Project Manager or a Person who had a combination skill of Both? A few years back, I would have said “No, you don’t”. Today for the web the whole development cycle has changed. You need to move fast and have flexibility. The objective of an Agile project is to provide maximum value to the client as soon as possible.

It would be a dream come true if business users, developers, testers, management all agreed with the development methodology that needs to be put in place before the start of a project. But this rarely does take shape. Hence on most project you usually have the standard PM, BA, Test Manager, Testers, Support person.

Anyone who has interacted with business users on a medium to large project will have faced situations where assumptions are made and making decisions is something that keeps getting postponed. Business users are generally representatives of different roles and functions of an organization. Some users do not bother about the other parts of the business, they want the new applications to be working as the current application with a few modifications, etc. Keeping these users focused on what we set to achieve when we started building a web based solution is something a talented people’s person with a business/ technical background should handle. This usually should be a combination role of a BA/PM

Being on an agile project gives the business users many chances to make changes. Developers are human too. While most of the times agile helps to nail the requirements right and the users may benefit with some really cool user friendly functionality, this same process could lead to “unnecessary functionality”. Managing the ideas, changes, etc need to be aligned to the original business objectives and deliver most value in a short span of time there by moving on to the next set of goals. This needs to be performed by a BA or a person who is project managing and analysing the requirements.

What agile aims at, is to have smaller full developed modules for a system and change as required. When a small bug turns out to be a big enhancement, this bug should be treated as a new story and this story needs to be developed as a module. The tasks mentioned above, along with writing user stories, supporting implementation of the functionality, planning the iterations and releases, testing the developed functionality, etc. together creates an interesting and challenging role for an individual who could call themselves a BA or PM/BA.

Developers who are really good at development, I am talking about developers who understand how to build applications without the need to have funky drag and drop tools, usually test their code, rationalize and challenge some requirements . In my experience, such developers would prefer to take an active part in development and testing but would prefer someone to communicate with the business users as they can focus on the solution. They want to write good code. That’s what they are best at. That’s where they will deliver maximum value.