I've been a BA for a few years and have recently started working in an 'Agile' environment. Due to the current financial situation our company have let all the contractors go and this is impacting all project teams as we are all losing valuable resource needed to correctly work in an Agile manner.
Has anyone else experienced this lately? Does anyone have any advice on how to counteract these measures and still remain Agile?
George wrote I've been a BA for a few years and have recently started working in an 'Agile' environment. Due to the current financial situation our company have let all the contractors go and this is impacting all project teams as we are all losing valuable resource needed to correctly work in an Agile manner. Has anyone else experienced this lately? Does anyone have any advice on how to counteract these measures and still remain Agile?
Hi George,
Unfortunatelly, the situation that you are describing is very common these days and not specific to just an Agile environment. As a matter of fact, Agile folks would argue that an Agile team could very well get by without a business analyst since the developer can talk directly to the business. Also, many Agile folks associate the Business Analyst with creating documentation and in lean time - documentation is one of the first things to go.
From the workload perspective, do the best you can! Focus on high-value activities and cut out non-essentials.
From a job security perspective, focus on providing value to the business. As long as you provide a service which impacts the bottom line you will be one of the last to go.
- Adrian
Thanks Adrian,
It's mainly our QA/testing resource that's gone so while our Analysis & Dev schedules are ok, the release to Live has been hit hard. It's a difficult (and frustrating) situation as I believe in the Agile way and BA's have made themselves essential to the team, the 'glue' if you will.
I appreciate your comments and thanks for the reply.
George
I agree. Basically the team has shrunk, so you can do less work per iteration.
Two practical things to think about are adopting some of the XP code quality practices and addresing UAT activities at the end of each iteration. This spreads the testing work across time more evenly. (Of course you may be foing this already.)
Bottom line: If a team of 10 loses 1 person, it slows down by 10%.
We are back to the "time-cost-scope: pick any two" question.
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