From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

Day in the life of an agile business analyst

From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

Day in the life of an agile business analyst

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- Being an agile BA is a very busy role. If it's a part-time role for you, your project may be heading for trouble. An agile BA typically works very closely with the product owner every day and often takes on many of the product ownership duties as the product owner role is huge and intense. So what does a typical day of an agile BA look like? Well, you'll see a variety of meetings, facilitation and analysis tasks, along with relationship building, negotiating, and reviewing the previous days software progress. It's a fun and exciting role that is challenging to say the least. You'll likely start your day at the team stand up meeting and following that review some work completed by the team and provide feedback on software progress. From there, you may have spontaneous or planned meetings with the team, product management, and leaders. You'll also be prepping for some meetings that you facilitate about the product and do some analysis on the backlog. It's a role with competing priorities. A mix of people and analysis skills. It requires time alone to think and time for group dialogue and facilitation. You need to see the big picture and the details, often at the same time. It requires tact, influence without authority, and great facilitation skills. Your days will be busy with collaborative meetings at white boards, conducting analysis, and prepping for engaging conversations along with detailed analysis and tidying up user stories and acceptance criteria. The days of sitting around a conference table with 20 people should be long gone. Take a look at the exercise file for more details on the typical day of an agile BA. You can see it's a very busy day. The best part is the lack of busy work, meaning work that keeps us busy but has little value. For example, creating documents full of details that no one reads could be considered busy work. Having a more meaningful conversation about the same details is valuable. Things like irrelevant documentation or paperwork should really only be done if it truly adds value to the product. Documentation that serves as a valuable memory of a conversation or a reference point of something discussed is common, but keep it light weight. An agile BA can be a high impact, high influence, high relevance role and it's up to you to take on the role and make the most of it.

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