Planning your work as a BA is important, however many teams and organizations do not value this planning and if you ask for time to do the planning, you will often be met with resistance. It’s sort of like when the your family is hungry for dinner, they don’t want to hear or see you sit down and plan what to make, they just want to eat! Yet, you must plan to make it happen! How formal the plan is, and the formalities around if the plan is reviewed with others can dramatically vary from team to team and organization to organization.
The bottom line is, YOU NEED TO PLAN as this will help you think through what you need to do in order to get to a high quality requirements process and collaboration.
First, lets look at the key planning differences in agile and traditional planning:
Traditional requirements and BA processes plans the requirements phase as a single phase of work and includes things like: – Who needs to be involved? – What scope areas will each person be needed for? – How much time will you need from each person? And, requirements planning with things like: – What will your requirements process look like? – What deliverables will you create? – Who will you collaborate with on these deliverables? – When will you need these people to help? – When will it all be done?
Agile BA Planning is more continuous so the Who, How Long, and For What questions are, “all the time, continuously” and do not need as much definition. Instead, you are planning more for what value increments will be planned in what order? Or another way to say this, what features in what order? From there, you can talk about a plan to include who in what features? And a general process of how you will collaborate on creating the user stories, acceptance criteria, and other artifacts with the various stakeholders and the team, and how you will manage the backlog with the team.
Traditional requirements and BA processes plans the requirements phase as a single phase of work and includes things like: – Who needs to be involved? – What scope areas will each person be needed for? – How much time will you need from each person? And, requirements planning with things like: – What will your requirements process look like? – What deliverables will you create? – Who will you collaborate with on these deliverables? – When will you need these people to help? – When will it all be done?
Agile BA Planning is more continuous so the Who, How Long, and For What questions are, “all the time, continuously” and do not need as much definition. Instead, you are planning more for what value increments will be planned in what order? Or another way to say this, what features in what order? From there, you can talk about a plan to include who in what features? And a general process of how you will collaborate on creating the user stories, acceptance criteria, and other artifacts with the various stakeholders and the team, and how you will manage the backlog with the team.
Discuss this plan and its common elments create a template
Making a Requirements Workshop Successful https://www.ba-cube.com/blog/mp-files/requirements-workshop-planning.pdf/
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