Does Business Analysis Need a Manifesto?

Does Business Analysis need a manifesto? I’ve been considering this point quite a lot over the last few months and am as yet undecided. This thinking has been stimulated by a number of factors, namely:

·???????? I hear so many BAs saying “Nobody understands what we do…”

·???????? I hear a lot of BA Practice/Community Leads saying that the role is constantly being under-sold or under-appreciated by Senior Managers because it is by its very nature a difficult role to measure in terms of added value and correspondingly hard to assign a budget to*.

·???????? It is hard to measure success as a Business Analyst because of the breadth of activities the role encompasses. Sure, it’s easy to measure the correctness of a data model; are all the entities and attributes correct? Are all relationships mapped correctly etc?** It’s a lot harder to measure the point when a BA facilitated a workshop that really cracked a problem; or the time they asked a killer question that exposed and helped solve a potential show-stopper of an issue.?

·???????? A manifesto never did Agile any harm… The founders of Agile issued a manifesto which was based on a lot of common sense, waved it above their heads for a while and pretty soon statements like “you don’t need a BA in a scrum team” were being treated as gospel by all and sundry. (And yes, I do still harbour a grudge about this because it set the BA Profession back by a decade and besides, who would like someone pronouncing a near-death sentence on your chosen career role!?)

But there are equally valid reasons why we BAs may not need one, namely:

·???????? Would it constrain us rather than empower us? Care would have to be taken that any manifesto would have to make clear the full scope of the BA role. Not only the full scope but the full potential of the role in an organisation for the organisation itself. A quick count up of the work products a BA can produce as specified in ‘Business Analysis Techniques – Third Edition’ by Debra Paul, James Cadle, Adrian Reed, Jonathan Hunsley, Paul Turner and (a-hem) myself, reveals 125 techniques that a? BA can employ during their engagement with a project, with only 25 of them directly concerned with requirements definition. Yet time and time again we hear “BAs do requirements”. How about “BAs do strategic context or situation investigation or feasibility assessments/business case development?” Let alone business process improvement, business acceptance testing, business change deployment and stakeholder engagement. ?????????????

·???????? Would we use it? Or would it remain in the filing cabinet downstairs in the basement room with the sign ‘BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD’ on the door*** A manifesto is for external consumption. It is, according to Wikipedia “A written declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party, or government.” Now the BA community cannot be described as a political party, or government (Although, Lord knows we might make a better job of it than some of the current alternatives) but we are individuals and groups and therefore a manifesto may help define the group’s thoughts and views. But it will only do the group good if other people read it! So a BA manifesto would have to be made obvious, published, discussed and endorsed by professional bodies wherever possible in order to add value. It would need to be shouted to the roof-tops at every available opportunity, put in front of CIOs everywhere; and that takes courage to do. It’s easy to talk the talk but can we walk the walk? In other words…

·???????? Could we live up to it? Let’s face it, writing user stories in a feature team gets to be a nice, comfortable-ish routine after a while. And it’s important; it needs to be done to deliver the final product. It’s also easier to hit your end of year objectives when you’re in a nice comfortable rhythm. So why jeopardise it by doing something new, asking awkward questions and getting noticed? Why not just ‘do requirements’ for the rest of your career? By the way, it’s perfectly fine if this is the route for you, as I said before, it needs to be done; but if you’re a BA that feels they could do more the constraints start to chafe after a while. But living up to a manifesto would take time and investment, from both you and your company. Which means you’ll really have to work hard to sell it and become it. You have to believe it and live it.

So that’s it; for me the jury is still out, but then again I’m in the autumn of my career. I work for myself part-time now (which makes end-of-year appraisals a bit of a doddle) and don’t interact so much with the wider world. I have the luxury of time to be able to express my thoughts and throw things out there. Mind you, I had a habit of doing that when I was employed full time! I’m just trying to stimulate debate amongst the community as a whole about what might be the ‘manifest destiny’ of the Business Analysis role. ???

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*Hence the saying that no-one wants a BA until they need one (and by the time they realise they need one it’s probably too late….)

**Although one could argue that if a BA is given the wrong information then it isn’t originally their error – but let’s not get into that debate, as any role can use that excuse!?

***To paraphrase the great Douglas Adams ?