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I’m working with a product that deals with a number of enhancements and 3-4 scrum teams delivering those throughout the year. There’s a single Product Owner who sits across all enhancements, and the BA may have 1-2 enhancements on the go at any time. Currently the BA is also the Scrum Master, and the Product Owner with a BA background has been Scrum Master as well.
There is currently talk of moving the Scrum Master role away from the BA’s and giving it to an Admin/Project Officer in the Development team. They will perform all Scrum Master duties during sprints, the Product Owner will continue to perform their role… where does that leave the BA?
If the Scrum Master facilitates daily stand-up, Sprint Planning, Retro, Review and Backlog Refinement sessions, developers & testers are doing estimates, product owner/business are doing prioritisation… at the development stage what is typically left for the BA to do? Most, if not all of our stories have AC’s and gherkin statements (Given When Then), so I’m not entirely sure what role the BA has once we get into Development if the Scrum Master and Product Owner essentially drive the sprints. I see the BA as more of a gap-stop to ensure nothing slips by and any new stories have the necessary detail to be part of the backlog. We’re in an environment where we have high level user stories (BRS format w/ Epics & Features) signed off at an executive level before we start sprinting, and we’re starting to use a Sprint 0 where we develop the detailed user stories and estimates for as much of the backlog as possible to ensure we’re on scope with the BRS. As the sprints progress though, I see less and less need for a BA to see the enhancement through the Development stage and we have no part in Deployment at all.
Thoughts?
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Hi Mike,
My initial thoughts are: the Admin/Project Officer can’t be just any kind of Admin/Project Officer – Backlog grooming usually requires some kind of elicitation technique or understanding of detail required or how the AC’s and gherkin statements impact the estimates and testing.
That said – sometimes it will work in the Product Owners favour to have someone focussed on driving the ceremonies and keeping track of sprint planning / execution status (Especially if there are four scrum teams to be across) whilst also having a BA on board to carry out the actual story development portion. Ie: ensuring any new stories have the necessary detail might fill the gap there as you’ve suggested. I’m sure there are other peripheral/rounding-out tasks (that might fall to a Change Manager) that could also sit with the BA… -
Hi Mike
I’ve seen the ceremonies process get out of control if there isn’t an “independent office” type managing them on behalf of the Product Owner. One challenging product I was involved with had only 1 Scrum team! The BA has a crucial role describing the requirements that the product owner is happy with, the developers to take on board to build and unit test, and also for the testers (BA’s?) to test using the acceptance criteria. I’m assuming this will remain? -
Thanks for the replies so far.
Rosemary – the BA scope for enhancements to the system is fairly limited. We don’t engage in any business process work other than pre-BRS when documenting as-is and to-be so that we can identify any potential changes to process the system enhancement will have. It’s up to the business to ensure their processes are updated, so unfortunately no involvement from us once we start developing. BA’s are also hands off on handover and go-live, other teams handle all the change management, support documents etc.
Charissa – I’m not sure the Project Officers background, but there has been talk since I started earlier this year in them taking on Scrum Master. I imagine I’ll be involved in their upskilling and handover if everyone agrees to shift the responsibility. When this happens, the devs, testers and scrum master will all sit under 1 manager rather than spread out across reporting lines, which may be why they’re doing it. I fear their retro’s will suffer if their Manager’s 2IC is facilitating ceremonies like that though. The BA will still management requirement elicitation and the Product Owner will prioritise and groom the backlog with the business.
Paul – The BA will still be responsible for acceptance criteria and any GWT statements to support testing, but we’re completely hands off testing once the developers release a build candidate. There’s a UAT Coordinator who manages the development of all UAT test cases and coordinates with the business owners to ensure the business complete UAT prior to Production release. The Product Owner basically introduces the business to the coordinator and he takes it from there.
I suppose it’s a typical government department where tasks are broken down to a micro level and split across multiple teams, especially since it’s a continual program of work delivering individual enhancements year on year. There’s no project managers, but there is a board that provides governance and oversight of the program. My fear is the BA will be lost once an enhancement hits Development, but then again that means we could potentially start all the Discovery work on the next enhancement to ensure the program backlog continues pushing forward. With the bottleneck sitting in development and the number of teams + environments available, I’m not sure we’d be able to run too far ahead in Discovery anyway, especially since Dev Leads are meant to join us to help size the enhancements early while we develop the BRS.
Thanks for the feedback so far, keep it coming 🙂
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Hi Mike,
We know the business analysis is key to the scrum team. The Scrum Guide outlines some great points on the development team – especially with the titles Product Owner & Scrum Master but while these are ‘role titles’ it is important to consider the activity, tasks, deliverables, techniques and competencies. So in this case what value does Business Analysis play in this team (or stage for your scenario), then whether the team has the adequate capability to effectively deliver this value and the BA can play multiple roles if they have the capability. Scrum Guide 2017
So if you extract the BA from the Dev Team during Development, are you confident that Business Analysis will be used to ensure the developed item meets the desired outcomes? What about defects? What about decisions made re acceptance criteria that may not be met due to time/complexity? Who is tracing this back to the sprint goal and product outcomes?
One factor to consider here is the option for the BA to fulfill the function of Product Owner in support of the Product Manager. So the Product Owner being more detail oriented, aligning the backlog to the product vision, providing input into the backlog items, and ensuring the developed product and the product going through development aligns to the goal of the iteration. See Abi’s & Tim’s presentation regarding the Product Owner
This then leaves the Product Manager to manage the overall product vision, roadmaps, marketing, revenue etc which will be reported (I imagine) at the board level.
For the BA it is about looking at our capability as a service – Business Analysis – rather than looking at our capability as a Role Title – Business Analyst. Remember the IIBA states, you don’t need to be titled a Business Analyst to be performing business analysis activities, therefore business analysis can be performed by various roles – so long as the individual possesses the capability.
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Thanks Gareth. Our Product Owner comes from a BA background and has done both roles here, so I’m pretty confident the analysis work would continue without a BA once we get later into Development. I still see value in a dedicated BA when elaborating cards, preparing for sprints, building BDD’s and AC’s… but once that backlog is basically done and we’re at the last few sprints I’m getting the feeling we should role the BA out and start Discovery for the next piece of work.
The BA’s are not involved in defects here and we’ve not had any instances of AC’s being too complex etc. When that happens at the story level the Product Owner is responsible as responsible person for backlog and delivery.
In a government department environment, it’s very much about a clear RASCI and staying within your lane, so while people may the have skills and capabilities, it’s very much about their role title that drives who should do what.
I’ll send Abi a message to see if the presentation is available somewhere. I’ll spend more time with the team here working through our RASCI and how we adjust for the change in roles and responsibilities.
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