How a business analyst bring value to agile delivery in the public sector
Consulting as a business analyst (BA) in the public sector, I’ve noticed a certain perception of BAs by others working in this space. The role is sometimes thought of as archaic – stuck in a waterfall era of 50-page requirements documents and write-ups the length of a university dissertation.
Today, the key focus of digital transformation projects is on the service standard. This is heavily focused on user-centred design and has little room for traditional BA focus areas like stakeholder needs, business process or requirements. But these factors will often have a huge impact on project delivery.
All this leads to some clients questioning the value of adding a business analyst to a project. They already have a user researcher, service designer, delivery manager and product manager. Can’t these roles cover off what a BA does, and save money in the process?
There are certainly overlaps between these roles. But on a fast-moving project, each discipline already has a lot of ground to cover. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed many projects without BAs run into the same sorts of problems. So here I want to point to four key ways that a BA can add crucial value to projects in the public sector.
1. Focus on the stakeholder
User researchers and service designers have the vital task of understanding user needs and designing a product or service to meet those needs. The business analyst’s focus is first and foremost about delivering value to the stakeholder.
User needs should always drive design, but that shouldn’t be at the expense of stakeholder needs. These are vital when it comes to delivering value – especially if those stakeholders are the ones footing the bill.
Ideally, stakeholder analysis and engagement should run in tandem with user research. That gives a project team a holistic view of the problem space, as well as the context to deliver effective solutions.
2. Go deep on the detail
A good BA can go into any project, in any domain, and become a subject matter expert very quickly. We are specialists in absorbing and communicating information, from stakeholders, documentation and the project team itself.
Unlike product managers, who own the overarching vision for the project, BAs thrive in the weeds of low-level detail. We understand and map out every as-is and to-be process. This helps us demonstrate the impact of change and analyse the gap between current and future states.
This is work that’s particularly important in discovery and alpha phases, where a project team has very little time to grasp the details and deliver informed recommendations.
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3. Build and track requirements
No-one wants a return to requirements documents the length of a novel. But the project team still needs to know what to build, and in what order. So how do we present requirements in a way that suits the workflow of agile delivery? The answer is through user stories.
BAs take findings from user research and stakeholder engagement and transform them into a list of high-level requirements. These can then be broken down and changed as needed during agile delivery. They then work with the product manager to develop the roadmap and backlog. This will make sure a team can stay flexible, address the right problems, and change course if necessary.
4. Bring cohesion to a complex space
Public sector projects can be a minefield of policy constraints, conflicting stakeholder groups and shifting priorities. A product manager will have high level oversight of this. But it’s the BA who owns the detailed contextual knowledge of the problem space. This knowledge makes the BA an ideal go-between the different disciplines on a project – the stakeholders and developers, product and user-centred design.
The relationship between a business analyst and user-centred designers is particularly key. Research and design might uncover a solution that meets every identified user need, but there has to be a consideration of what can be realistically achieved. First the BA will work with the project architect or developers to assess feasibility. Then they’ll look at viability, balancing the perceived benefits of a design solution against cost, potential risk and any other constraints. This will ensure the project’s overall success, rather than just its success in meeting the service standard.
Making change happen
The business analyst has come a long way since the 1950s, when there was first a need for someone to sit and translate between the technical and non-technical. Times are very different now. But change remains constant, and there is no one better to have on your team to inspire that change than a BA.
If communication between stakeholders and different disciplines is causing confusion or issues in your team, or if you need help to make change happen, reach out to Zaizi to see how one of our expert consultants can help.
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