Business analysts are key players in any information technology (IT) change initiative. Their knowledge and expertise make lean requirements elicitation easy and effective. In this business analysis role, they need the competencies of a product owner and product manager to get their job done.

Business Analysts Need to Support Lean and Agile Development to Remain Relevant

As a business analyst, your role is to build initial business needs for products or services. Whether you express those needs as user stories, feature lists, or simple requirement statements, they drive developers work on Agile and traditional software projects. Your job is to brainstorm with the business-side team to identify functionality that the proposed product or service must deliver before developers begin building it.

A product owner then takes these ideas and manages the priority and sequence of delivery for developers. Finally, the business analyst works with the team to create scenarios of how users will interact with the next release of the product or service. Scenarios serve as test criteria that prove the product or service delivers the expected business value.