Ewald Van Niekerk, Development Team Leader at Britehouse, talks about the golden thread of business analysis in solution delivery with Charlene Seini, in business analysis and the software developer.
Job titles don’t always necessarily reflect responsibilities. Please tell us what you do and what your role entails?
My role entails mainly software development, although I do touch on many other business areas. We closely follow the Agile methodology in which I am closely involved, driving adherence to Agile ceremonies and attending backlog grooming sessions, where I wear a business analyst hat and bridge the gap between business requirements and technical challenges.
In what way does business analysis interface, support and / or enable your accountabilities and responsibilities?
When business analysis is performed correctly, it provides me with clear guidelines of what to do. It illustrates the business need for a feature and how we should create it. It speeds up the development time and ensures that business complexity is explained and then correctly translated into code.
In what way does poor quality business analysis impact and / or limit your ability to deliver effectively?
Poor business analysis slows down (or even completely halts) software development in our team. When we receive a piece of work, we break it down into very granular tasks. We do this to eliminate ambiguity and focus on a straightforward feature, but when the task comes in and its goal is to solve multiple business issues, instead of keeping it simple and true to its form, breaking it down doesn’t help. So in short, complex features are hard to unpack and lead to many inconclusive discussions and causes delays.
How could business analysts optimally focus and deliver in order to better support your capability?
The key is simplicity. When a need for a new feature or application arises, the requirement needs to be for that need only.
It shouldn’t contain fixes for other business issues; business analysis should be done in a precise manner to address that requirement.
Business analysis is not exclusive to business analysts; it is a discipline performed throughout business change. What business analysis activities do you perform as part of your role?
To support the business in creating new applications, I am closely involved with process design (both the as-is and the to-be), as this provides an early indication as to how the application will function. Data models are a complementary perspective I also create, as well-designed data models are key to up-scaling applications. Then, during systems analysis, I contribute to help form how a requirement will be implemented and coded.
‘Business Analysis And The Software Developer with Ewald Van Niekerk‘ was first published in the 2016 Inter-View Report. You can learn more about business analysis and the software developer by chatting on Twitter with @EwaldVChurch and @CharleneSeini.
