When it comes to software requirements elicitation, elaboration, and validation, what are the biggest problems business analysts have?
Carkenord: The biggest challenge is business people don’t always recognize what they need or what is capable for them. So they have trouble communicating with IT. And IT doesn’t understand the business side, so they give them an elegant solution that doesn’t do what they need. Business analysts need to help business people figure out what they really want. The BAs really need to sit down and talk with them. I think the development environments continue to be more and more productive. Developers can build things very fast, but we don’t know what we want them to build. They can build a lot of things, but are they meeting business needs? What techniques and strategies serve business analysts best when it comes to working with stakeholders? Carkenord: We have a lot of techniques. There are actually hundreds of analysis techniques. Part of the challenge is learning which works, because each project might necessitate a different way. Read an excerpt from Barbara Carkenord’s book “Seven Steps
