Tag Archives: Business Analysis

Episode 128 – Elabor8-ing the Agile BA with Ryan McKergow

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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)

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Episode 111: M&Mailbag

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peanutmmCraig and Renee, sitting in a shoe-box sized hotel room in Sydney eating peanut M&Ms, decided to rustle through the mailbag and answer a bunch of outstanding questions.

Note: this episode is not sponsored or endorsed by M&Ms but we certainly enjoy their product!

Crossing The Chasm

  • more and more organisations seem to be crossing the chasm to Agile, but too many are still just doing and not being Agile
  • inimal viable product (MVP) is still the trend word, the next stage is Minimal Viable Experience and then Minimal Viable Robustness to Minimal Marketable Product and finally Continuously Evolving Product
  • Enterprise Transformation Meta Model
  • Agile is a true north concept, not sure that you will ever get there

Suggested reading list on where to start with Agile:

What certification should a new Scrum Master get:

Building your own scaled framework

  • Holacracy and Reinventing Organizations
  • need to answer questions around ensuring quality, growing capability, benefits realisation, etc…
  • at what level do the questions need to be answered
  • Minimal Viable Organisations
  • scale on the operational cadence of the problems of the organisation, not following a framework
  • how often do we check that our approach is meeting our needs

Visualising business analysis in a Scrum team

  • 3 Amigos approach
  • call it what it is if you’re sprint length is longer than it is
  • focus more on Kanban flow

Reading List

  • Renee is reading about climate change (and how that applies to Agile) including “This Changes Everything” by Naomi Klein
  • Craig is reading “CTRL-SHIFT” by  Jessie Shternshus and Mike Bonifer

TheAgileRevolution-111 (71 minutes)