Entries for September 2008

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Whether you’ve never heard of Agile or you just finished your nth Agile project, you need to understand that Agile is here to stay! Are you, the Business Analyst, an extinct species in this new world? Is your career changing? Do you need new skills?

Agile guru and visionary Scott Ambler talked with Adrian Marchis, ModernAnalyst.com's Publishing Editor, and shared his vision on what’s next for Agile and his thoughts on the role of the business analyst in the Agile world.

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Change seems to be a popular word in this pivotal election year. When I think about change, I recognize that it impacts each of us in many forms. One of the biggest changes I’ve experienced as a Business Analyst was the transition from working requirements in a traditional project lifecycle to an Agile methodology. The change was introduced to my project team as a management directive with management support.

Our project was an enterprise initiative funded as a multi-year program. The program was comprised of three parallel workstreams with shared releases. Our workstream’s objective was to build out data and data services for the other workstreams and the enterprise to use. The team was made up of experienced Information Technology (IT) professionals and a brand new business unit. We were halfway through the program’s duration when our workstream was called upon to employ Agile methods. The other two workstreams we serviced stayed with traditional waterfall software development, which presented challenges interfacing with each other. The entire program had already completed a Business Architecture phase that outlined the program’s objectives, future state vision, and capability implementation plan.

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As an analyst practitioner I took it upon myself to act as a proxy for the product owner – which in a corporate environment came with the challenges of multiple stakeholders, the fact that you are not the product owner and thus don't really have the final say, and a number of other challenges that typically stump people trying to move to agile.

My circumstances were unique in some ways. I had worked in the organisation for some time and had established good relationships with all the key stakeholders. They really did trust me with their requirements because, over time, I had learnt (and shown I had earned) their business.

I also maintained high bandwidth communications with the stakeholders throughout the project and kept them informed of what was happening and how the system was shaping up in the context of their business needs. And expectations were managed.

 



 




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