October 10, 2016

Business Analysis & Product Management in Agile

40 minutes

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, InfoQ Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, talks to Kent McDonald, Steve Adolph and Ryland Leyton about the state of business analysis and product management in agile product development. They were participants in a weekend workshop where the Agile Alliance and the International Institute of Business Analysis were collaborating to produce a revised version of the Agile Extension to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Analysis skills are necessary for successful product development

- We don’t question and challenge the rationale and strategic alignment of projects enough, which results in lots of waste from doing the wrong projects or building the wrong features in a project

- The best return on investment that you can get is to stop wasting your money

- Value is hard to define but crucial to identify; the definition of value will be different in every context

- Agile methods provide for learning and rapid feedback, which enables us to optimize value and ensure strategic alignment in product development

- User stories are conversation placeholders, not orders to be fulfilled

Notes and links can be found on InfoQ: bit.ly/2e32o5X

- 6m 20s Analysis skills reside in many different roles and doing analysis in agile development is far less prescriptive that has been the case.

- 6m 44s You need to have a very comprehensive toolkit and have the ability to relate the tool needed to the context of the work being done.

- 9m 13s Advanced organisations are changing when they utilise analysis skills to determine which initiatives should be worked on and how they align with organisation strategy; being able to review these decisions even after an initiative has started, stopping development work when it is no longer valuable.