What I learned about Agile

Customers need change every day. We need our products to keep up with those needs. In a modern environment an agile approach is absolutely essential for delivering exceptional results and products catered closely to the client's demands.

Being an Agile BA is about facilitating dialogue about customer value with the team, making the product owner's decisions more efficient, and analyzing for gaps and impacts. Agile as an approach for projects is all about ensuring what is built is valuable. We can build a solution really well and really fast, but if it doesn't provide value to the users, it doesn't matter. And that's where BAs come in. Our work is crucial to Agile's value driven mission. Business analysts on Agile teams recognize and protect value throughout the life of the project, and they do this by producing dialogue, not documents. A BA on an Agile team generates dialogue to facilitate value driven decision making and priority setting. A BA analyzes product owner priorities and works to decompose them into small pieces. Each piece delivers value to the customer and is small enough for the team to accurately estimate. BAs need to be solid analyzers who can facilitate shared understanding among a diverse group and identify those increments of value. User stories, acceptance criteria and story slicing are some of the widely used techniques vital to the team's efficiency and helps the project be always within the scope and provide value.

My conversations with different BAs from the top 5 Canadian banks have shown me how preferrable an Agile team is to its counterpart, however its important to ensure all team members are onboard with this approach as stray individuals not following the principles and methods of Agile can drastically slow down the project. Agile is a team effort at its core which is important to keep in mind.