Thanks for sharing your experience and question Charan. I recommend that you take a look at my article 10 Tips for Writing Good User Stories, which offers guidelines for creating effective user stories. Hope this helps!

I am new to this field, I recently joined as Business Analyst. My senior BSA started writing user stories and assigning it to me and working on those. I don’t know how to show result for the work I have done and how to complete my cards and do my analysis.

Thanks

Hi Tom,

Thank you for sharing your context and question with me. It sounds like you are in a difficult situation. Based on what you have told me, it seems that you are currently a member of the development team. If that’s true, then you should not be assigned any work but choose tasks in the Daily Scrum in collaboration with the other team members.

To improve the situation, I would suggest that you have meetings with the Scrum Master, product owner, and your line manager. It may be not be easy but try to understand the Scrum Master and product owner, practice active listening, and try to empathise with them. Then share your perspective and emotions. Additionally, consider addressing the issue in one of the next sprint retrospectives to decide together how you can improve the situation.

If you have already done this or if these aren’t viable options, then try to change teams for now and reconsider your longer-term career prospect and future at the company. As a product owner, you will need in-depth technical skills only if you look after a technical product that is integrated into a larger offering. Otherwise, you are better off developing the specifc product management capabilities the role requires.

Hope this helps and good luck!

I have recently taken a new Senior Business Systems Analyst role with an agile development team. I have over 25 years of BSA experience. Previous to my current role, I was a Product Owner/Technical Product owner for a different product and development team. I loved my job and was very successful at it. I worked hard with long hours but absolutely loved the work. Unfortunately, I had a life threatening medical issue and missed 15 months away from work in the hospital and recovering afterwards. Before I returned to work, the team and the product were moved to another part of the company after some restructuring. The senior management decided to assign their own product owner. So, when I returned to the company after my medical leave, they were trying to find a spot for me. It’s an excellent company; they stood by me through my illness and recovery.

Here is where the difficult part is. I am struggling to become part of this new team. They have some dysfunctional issues they are trying to work though. They also have a new resource manager who is from an outside company. The Product Owner is technically savvy and is dedicated and available. The Scrum Master is an over achiever who actually performs more than one role. The development team and my resource manager have been giving me developer type work assignments such as extracting logic from examining the code. In addition, they are expecting me to automate the functional testing. I have struggled with these technical tasks because I haven’t done them before and there is no training other than 15-20 minutes to handoff the work. The application is basically a RESTful api provider to integrate some enterprise applications. It’s a very technical product with no UI’s.

The Scrum Master and System Architect are also assigning me a lot of trivial, low-value add tasks (administrative assistant type tasks). For example, I had to call the help desk and waited in the queue for 3 hours waiting to find out all of the permissions and security groups that the developers belonged to. I had to do this effort because the developers wouldn’t answer my questions. The developers think that since I am not doing development work that I don’t belong there.

The PO does not want to spend time with me and leaves me out of meetings and emails. So, I struggle to fully understand what’s going on. This is an overwhelming challenge for me. I’ve been in the position for 10 weeks. There are several problems, the main one being that my success needs their cooperation; their success does not need or depend on my role/contribution. In other words, my objectives and the rest of the team’s objectives don’t align.

My management knows that I want to do Product Owner work but there aren’t opportunities in this company at the moment. I am doing the best that I can in my current situation and maintaining a positive attitude. In my professional network, I have heard of other business systems analysts being stuck in a similar situations. Many have moved away from BA/BSA roles into being a PO, Scrum Master or developer. What is your advice for my situation? Should I resume my PO career elsewhere? Should I stay and learn as much as I can about technical/developer work?

Thank you!

Hi Amanda, Thank you for sharing your feedback and question. I fully understand that you would like to focus on your job as a business analyst. In Scrum, however, discovering and describing requirements is a joint responsibility of the product owner and the development team. To help you decide how to best apply your role, I recommend reviewing it in one of the next retrospectives. Share your observations, idea, concerns, and needs with the Scrum team members and listen to their perspectives. Then decide how to best progress. Hope this helps!

I wanted to get your feedback on the following situation. I just started a job as a BA for a company that’s never had a BA role but found it necessary to help the team. The devs and the project manager are so used to doing all the work the BA would be doing, the biggest example here is gathering requirements. The devs are totally capable of doing this but the goal is to get them coding more instead of doing things I could do. Any tips on how I should go about transitioning? Somethings I’m sure the development team has been used to for years! Change is not necessarily wanted by some developers but needed to help improve processes currently implemented. Also I’m only 3 years into my career as QA/BA/a little bit of development/Scrum Master. I got hired on for a pure BA role though, so it doesn’t help that I’m also new and still learning.

Any feedback would be great! Thank you!

Hi Simon,

Thank you for sharing your question and feedback. I would suggest that achieving compliance, be it with internal standards or external ones like regulatory requirements, should be the responsibility of the entire development team. How the team carries out the related tasks is up to the group: It’s part of the team’s self-organisation. In other words, a business analyst who works on the team might carry out the compliance tasks just like a tester would typically carry out testing tasks.

Does this help?

I love your site (thank you) – I am currently working with some BA’s in a Scrum environment. Whilst I understand that the efforts of backlog refinement are a team effort it is sometimes necessary for BA’s to work on other supporting items such as Compliance Docs – As this needs to be done would you include it in the Backlog and estimate accordingly or view it as a separate piece of work managed elsewhere?

Thank you for sharing your question Clare. To help you make the right choice, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that requirements engineering changes when Scrum is introduced. It is a collaborative effort shared by the product owner and the development team. In other words, the dev team should actively contribute to discovering, describing, and refining product functionality. This seems to rule out the second option you mentioned.

Additionally, when working on larger products, a single product owner is often not enough, and product ownership has to be shared amongst several people. A good model is to have one overall product owner and people who own product parts: feature and component owners. If that’s a model you decide to adapt, some of the BAs could work as feature owners. This may well require that the individuals acquire new skills and/or deepen existing ones: Working as a feature owner means working in product management.

Does this help?