Being a Business Analyst
Memories of my initial days of being on the profile of a Business Analyst, gives me a strange feeling.. After completing my masters in computer application, I worked as a programmer for sometime. Later, as I got inclined more towards the requirements and analysis part of the projects, I was given a chance to be a Business Analyst with a not so well known company in Pune. My task was to understand the requirements of the ongoing projects and map the business processes and document them as requirements. After some experience working for this company in Pune I moved on to a company in Mumbai with a shiny dream to work on broader level requirements and bigger projects.
Now here started the problem.. I felt that the techies who were into the programming side started looking at me as a competition. Weird.. isn’t it? Why competition with a BA? I still wonder.. was it because of the perception that a BA does less of technology and more of business or was it the requirements I used to jot down in use case documents? Can requirements be annoying for a programmer? I guess so… while working on the requirements for a product based company I often felt the heat and had to redefine the requirements of an in-house software product. (If you are working for an in-house software product with internal requirements, be ready to change the requirement multiple times.) In fact many times the requirement process is actually driven by the Team Leads and Project Managers.
With the job description of a “Business Analyst” I somehow always felt excluded from the so called techie group of the company. Since a BA bridges the gap between Business side and Technical side, my ownership in the projects I worked on was always confusing.
If it’s the technical guys who own the project, business side treats you like a techie who hardly adds any extra value to the project. If business side has the ownership of the project, techies make it real difficult for a you to make them work as per the requirements provided. (Not to forget the time factor!)
By – Rishi Srivastava
