Business analysts: why are there so many of you?

[Bee]

Well thanks to Bee this thread went south. It was quite an interesting read up to post 73 and there are so many comments since that need correcting it's gone all squiffy.

You need to understand the business and how the teams could be organized in order to understand my posts. Sorry buddy.

[LondonManc]

I know and I agree with you, but what you are going to do if the client wants?

In what sense? Have you got a particular example?

[blackeye]

Good developers don't necessarily make good BAs either

A good developer may have poor interpersonal skills but a perfect aptitude for programming; I wouldn't let him near the end user but I'd expect him to code me the best system possible.

Having worked with developers - I would be hesitant to put 95% of them in front of a director level business leader in the Banks I've worked in.

[Fronttoback]

The dev needs to focus on the implementation and usually have a limited view of the business.
Can be very good developers and not so good BA, this can be useful when the client want's a BA/Architect.

You make me laugh judging developers as good or bad- do you know what they do? I mean apart from redo your analysis.

To implement the requirements the developer needs to understand *everything that the BA has understood*. And that's just the functional aspect of the system and the data model.

Now I have to slice and dice it into a number of pieces that fit what is already there, what you'd like it to be going forward,
etc. All you have to do is understand what a business user (usually average intelligence) is telling you. We have real, *hard* problems to deal with that have often not been
solved before that you never know about. You don't have to worry about scaling the system and things like this - do you think that is easy? And often I have to repeat the analysis of the BA at the same time, because it doesn't make sense.

And once it's in then I have to deal with the operational stuff such as performance. Also, when a production system goes down and I have to work out what has gone wrong and fix it fast - this is very stressful. What stress do you take? This is a big aspect of the job you dont have to experience. Where are you? On the next project doing gap analysis. More talking over coffee.

I studied compsci, it was 95% male. Most BAs are female- they have therefore come from other non-Software disciplines than compsci. You can jump into a software BA role because basically anybody can do it.

And I'm not even going to get started
on skilling up- what skills do you have to maintain? Q&A and Excel, oh and directory structures. I've probably learned an A-level worth of stuff in the last year that will be useless in two years. And most of that I've had to pick up on the fly or in my own time (usually working late). By comparison, what is your struggle?

You only deal with the tip of the iceberg. Enjoy it while it lasts! BA is a confidence trick. And you get paid roughly the same as me! Who is the bigger mug?

[LondonManc]

Having worked with developers - I would be hesitant to put 95% of them in front of a director level business leader in the Banks I've worked in.

Indeed. Looks like it's about making sure you get one of the good 10% of BAs in on your project then

[northernladuk]

And you get paid roughly the same as me! Who is the bigger mug?

Bee is a permie so I doubt that.

[SueEllen]

You need to understand the business and how the teams could be organized in order to understand my posts. Sorry buddy.

What business is that?

[SussexSeagull]

So only 10% of BAs are any good and only 5% of Developers have people skills?

[MrMarkyMark]

What business is that?

Permy business, obviously

[Lance]

I studied compsci, it was 95% male. Most BAs are female- they have therefore come from other non-Software disciplines than compsci. You can jump into a software BA role because basically anybody can do it.

I don't know the comment about females reminded me of this but I'll tell it anyway.
I was onsite at a 3rd party recently (a supplier to my client) talking with a BA about a system that they were struggling with as it was allegedly unstable.
To cut a long story short, they weren't using the system as designed (COTS package) and had spent a small fortune on customisations that were rushed as part of an M&A deal.

I asked a few questions and it seems that they have people with one mainframe screen they are reading data from and typing it into a web based system manually. All day every day. Several people.

And the BA thought I was asking for magic when I asked why someone hadn't thought to join the computer systems together with a data interface.
I fear that this is not an uncommon failing with BAs.