Hi Barry,
Is it no true that BA's are not supposed to be the SME? Your role in that session should have been that of a facilitator or in your case, since you were new to the organisation, a spectator to learn more about the business. I do not believe that the BA should know the business inside-out, this can be very dangerous for a BA as you will tend to work as a 1 man team when gathering requirements. Your contribution to the session could have been asking questions to understand the business and why things are done the way it is done, etc, but should not have been measured by what you know about the business.
Regards
Pieter
Pieter:
It has always been my experience that SME's - even very experienced SME's - are not nearly the "expert" that they are charged with being. One can work at a job for 25 years, but, unless he/she has systematically flowed out his/her associated processes/tasks, he/she will only have a disjointed understanding of how things work. And very, few SME's have the skill to accomplish this analysis.
So, yes, the BA must become the true SME. Not at the very detail level for given process X, but surely at understanding how processes interrlated, both with other in-scope processes, and with external processes.
Tony
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