BA Role: For Here or To Go?

 All images are from https://pixabay.com 

THE KEY QUESTION

“For here or to go?” What’s going on? Isn’t this a term from the food and restaurant industry?? Of course, we all are familiar with this term all across the world. What does this have in common with the role of a Business Analyst? Or am I mixing up something? Not really. It is a similar question to whether, as a BA Manager, it is better to have the BAs from my team come to the office (for "here") or that they work from home or remotely ("to go" meaning allow to work from home or anywhere)?

FLASHBACK

If this question were asked way back in 2006 or so, the answer would have most likely been “for here” meaning work from office. :) It would be a rare project, if as a Business Analyst one would get the opportunity to work full time and remotely. I was fortunate to get such work from home opportunity and I did travel to customer's office location or locations mainly for the requirement workshops for a week or two. Once back to working from home, days used to be never ending though with virtual meetings and calls. I quickly got attuned to this way of working as I loved the freedom to also adjust my work routine round the clock and carve out personal time in between as per my work schedule. During the same era, I had also started getting one or two days a week 'planned work from homes’. It was on a case-to-case basis though, and not for every BA on the team.

PATTERNS AND REPETITIONS

The IT industry landscape has kept changing and interestingly in a cyclic and/or in a repetitive manner. There are patterns and insights as you may notice. More and more jobs got outsourced to India or other countries and places, to optimize costs and while still maintaining the quality. BA role was not initially one of the outsourced ones; as the BAs were required to be at the client location. However eventually world became flat and BA role also gained momentum and got aligned very well with "remote working or work from anywhere".

Agile became more of a de-facto standard, manifesting itself across many organizations and across many product teams. Yet again though, everything comes with "conditions apply":). Meaning, all goes well as long as the business analysis work is getting delivered successfully. The BAs got hired based on their expertise, knowledge, commitment to work and attitude to truly amalgamate with the other BA team members, customers, business stakeholders, technical /engineering teams/QA teams and so on.

Furthermore, pandemic forced each of us to work completely in a remote manner, making physical, emotional and mental health the utmost priority. Work from home became a norm. And then we all saw “back to office movement” wherein employees are being encouraged to work from the office again. Yet again we also saw genuine reasons to continue work from home as well.

ASSESSMENT CRITERIA

Coming back to assess the question raised at the beginning of this article, whether as BA Manager I would prefer BAs on my team work from office or remotely. Before answering it and seeing the pros and cons of each, first let's example what a BA role is typically comprised of and what are the key tasks of a BA. 

Business Analyst acts as a multi-dimensional bridge among the customers, business stakeholders and the implementation teams. He or she helps translate or transpose business needs and requirements into understandable solution components. They cover a whole range of tasks including but not limited to the following tasks:

• Understanding and documenting the customer requirements

• Writing acceptance tests and functional tests for those requirements

• Study of the existing systems, processes, interfaces etc.

• Elicitation of the requirements right from the initial business needs to conducting the detail requirements analysis of those

• Facilitating the solution designing based on the requirements

• Collaborating with the engineering teams, QA teams, Project Managers

• Conducting the functional testing/product testing and acceptance testing

• General project management

• Product management, ongoing review/approvals, continued change and requirements management throughout the lifecycle of a project

At different stages of a project or product development, the answer to the key question may vary. If it is in the initial stages of the project, BA role may be required to work from office or from client location. In this phase, more people interactions are needed in particular with the customers, domain SMEs and end users. During the initial planning and setup of a project and its BA processes, again BA role maybe required to work closely with the business stakeholders.

Once the project is setup in its direction, the requirement to work from client location may ease off a bit and work can be done more remotely, while adjusting the timezones and calendars to suit the project's needs. Later again during the design phase, it will continue like that until finally during the acceptance stage, again BAs may need to work from office or from the client location.

Now this is a general pattern when it comes to BA role and its cyclic nature of work. It gets an intense spike in the initial stages and later again during the testing and acceptance stages. With agile, again often these boundaries are blurred too. Let’s look at pros and cons of business analysis working from office as well as from home.

BAs WORKING FROM OFFICE (CUSTOMER LOCATION)

PROS

• It helps a lot if BAs interact very closely and in person with the customers and other stakeholders to build initial rapport, to understand the roles/processes and systems. One also gets to groom into the 'office' mode of working.

• With agile and co-located teams, especially BAs,it helps to understand the business requirements and customer pain points quickly. Techniques such as observation, ad-hoc or planned interviews help a lot during this phase.

• BAs can expedite risks or project concerns if any in a timely manner while being at the client site, especially during the early phases

• BAs can keep better work-life balance meaning chances are high that they can stop the work as the office hours close and switch to mental mode of personal time more easily.

CONS

• Typically, the customer site visits, workshops and alike will cost a lot to the organization. The organizational budgets need to support these kinds of workshops.

• These may also involve flight and stay accommodation as well in order that the right BA works on the project. These costs may be much higher as compared to off-shored or remote BA.

• Work may still go off the office working hours, expand across multiple devices such as laptops, tabs and mobile devices. Work may also continue through early mornings and late nights especially if the customer stakeholders are themselves located across varied geographies.

• Commute to and from office can be a stress in itself especially balancing family demands and situations such as elder care, child care, patient pet care.

BAs WORKING FROM HOME OR REMOTELY

PROS

• Often it is a cost saving alternative to the BAs working from office, especially in the phases when strategy level analysis is already done and deeper dive gets started. It really depends on the phase of a project or product development.

• With virtual and agile teams, it is almost equally possible to conduct the requirement workshops, reviews and interviews effectively even if the skilled BAs are working remotely

• Since commute times are saved, it may often lead to adjusting the requirements related meetings and workshops, daily stand-ups etc. accordingly to one's personal schedule/demands.

• Working early mornings and/or late evenings is possible, as a team, especially completely different time-zones such as US/India.

CONS

• Contrary to the 'fancy image' one may have of remote working BAs, reality may crash-land itself in unusual manners. (See the fantasy image above image :)) It may get very difficult to adjust or strike work life balance while working from home, as compared to working from office. Especially during the phases such as strategy analysis (high level analysis).

• Connectivity/network may become a hindrance in some situations especially requirements workshops. Plus, not meeting people in real or in person may lead to some kind of loneliness which one must learn to address and handle positively.

• For phases such as (as-is process analysis, acceptance testing, functional testing) the Business Analysts will need all the access set-up done successfully, otherwise it may lead to project delays.

• As a business analyst, resolving issues may get challenging or time consuming unless the entire team is adept to working remotely (not just BA team but as an organization).

• Online meetings fatigue. We all have experienced it during the pandemic and it doesn’t need a ‘mask’. It requires concrete efforts to pull oneself back out of ‘fatigue mode’ into a ‘happy and healthy mode’, especially if the virtual meetings are happening in a continual mode-for hours after hours. 

FOR HERE OR TO GO?

All is well on an ending note though😊. Having looked at the critical BA tasks and pros and cons of working from office vs from home or remotely, I think it is advisable to make this decision depending on various parameters listed above, prioritizing customer's needs, organizational budget and culture first. Thoughts?

Author: Swati Pitre, CPRE®, CBAP®, is Sr. Business Analyst, Consultant and Trainer

Swati Pitre, CPRE®, CBAP®, is Sr. Business Analyst, Consultant and Trainer with 25+ years of industry experience across various domains and geographies. Her specialties include Product Development, Process Improvement, BPM, Predictive Analytics, Quality, and Governance. She also undertakes various training courses such as CPRE®/CBAP®/CCBA®/ECBA® Prep Courses, Comprehensive BA Job oriented Course, BPMN, Agile BA Course, and several other customized courses. She is also an enthusiastic Toastmaster/Public Speaker and has completed the Effective Coaching Pathway at Toastmasters International.