Craig chats with Ryan McKergow, a Business Analyst and Agile Consultant at Elabor8, at the YOW! West conference in Perth about being an Agile BA:

• Business Analysts work with business people to understand the problem they want to solve and then work with developers to take those expectations and help them build the system
• Writing stories and requirements is the boring part of the job – the exciting part is getting different people problem solving together
• Paul Rayner’s YOW! West “EventStorming” keynote and Craig’s brainwave around Value Stream Mapping 
• Ryan’s talk “Don’t Be A Zombie Reading Your Stories…” at YOW! West
• Story Kickoff – having a conversation at the start of a story (one of the three C’s), get the whole team in front of a whiteboard and drawing it out
• Reduce the amount of time between analysis and development as much as possible, try not to have a lead time of more than one sprint ahead where possible
• The further ahead you complete analysis, the more likelihood you will introduce waste and rework
• Showcases and review sessions are a good engagement piece to replace traditional signoffs and to build trust
• Document conversations as acceptance criteria within stories, but the tool or document does not replace conversations
• Best way to learn new approaches is to give it a go
• Eventstorming, customer journey mapping and design thinking are good tools

TheAgileRevolution-128 (25 minutes)