Building A Better Tomorrow

My Dear Princess Normal & Dear Fellows,

I go back to work tomorrow. Remind me again what it is that Business Analysts do?

People actually ask me that sometimes. And it is REALLY hard to answer. Because of the following not made up reasons:

- When you are a developer, you kind of think that business analysts don't do ANYTHING. They just dump vague requirements on your desk and then YOU have to speak to people to figure out what they actually meant.

- Now that I'm on the other side of the fence, I have found this to be TRUE. I remember my first BA job, the senior blokey had written a requirement that "the system should calculate the required value of each entitlement" and I asked him (as another BA) "How does it do that then?" His answer was that it was "an implementation-level detail". Which meant the developers would have to work out things like that. He was far too busy deciding which font to use.

- Also, it depends where you work. In some places BA's can get quite technical. In others you are not allowed to work with any tools more technical than a crayon.

- Typical BA job adverts ask for skills in "facilitating meetings" (which basically means you show up with yellow stickies enough for everyone and break up any actual fights). They also like "requirements elicitation" (which is just asking people what they want) and "process mapping" (which is the ability to draw diagrams illustrating that you should poo before you flush and not the other way around). In other words it's all very vague and no-one really knows what it all means.

- Ooh, also they want you to be "Agile". For non technical people, "Agile" is a very strict set of rules on how you work that makes you much more efficient. Only the rules are so strict that no-one EVER does them and so it's impossible. So "Agile" is like this ideal that you can pretend to know about even though you never really do it. A bit like Buddhism, or the Paleo diet*.

So tomorrow should be interesting. In the meantime, here is a picture of Jasper between my legs under a blanket. He is not Agile.

S.

* I asked the interviewers last week if they were "Agile" and they said, "Well... yes... sort of... we try to be". And then we all smiled knowingly at each other because we know that means you are not really. Good to get these things sorted early, I think.