Hello there! If you’re a Business Analyst involved IT system implementation, you’ll no doubt be aware that agile project delivery is now all the rage.
Those who are still relying on traditional waterfall software delivery techniques will find their skill 
sets increasing outdated in the marketplace.
Imagine trying to start a project and pulling out your waterfall, documentation-heavy methods and tools, and your key stakeholder asks “Why so much documentation? We just need a whiteboard and some post-its! My boss is asking me to go agile and launch something quickly to the business!”
I’ll be honest with you – as a BA today, if you’re not clued into agile terms like “Scrum, Product Backlog, Sprint Retrospectives, increments and MVP” – you’re risking your credibility and career.
But how do you start learning and transitioning to an agile delivery mindset?
If you’re spent years as a BA writing business requirement specifications, use cases, non-functional requirements specifications and the like, it can be tough to switch.
Attending expensive online courses or part-time certifications is an option – but I find that many of them don’t discuss the perspective of a Business Analyst.
On top of that, here are some other common questions I get about Agile Business Analysis:
- Are Business Analysts (and Project Managers) relevant in an agile project?
- How do you transition from waterfall mindset to an agile mindset?
- You’re an IT Professional who has experience in programming in e.g. Java, .NET or technical architecture – how do you become an Agile Business Analyst?
- Does an Agile Business Analyst need to know a lot about the “business”, e.g. industry and domain skills like banking and insurance?
- You’re a Business Analyst familiar with large-scale core system delivery techniques, but you’ve been doing waterfall projects over your career. How do you break into the agile delivery space?
- You’re not in IT (e.g. you may be in Finance or Marketing) and don’t know how to become an Agile BA, or are worried you need to know IT first
- What is my career path as a Agile Business Analyst?
- Are Agile Business Analysts paid well? What’s their average salary?
- Which companies do Agile Business Analysts work for?
- Where are the job opportunities and how do I snag an interview if I have no prior experience as an Agile BA?
Well, all good questions and certainly ones which I hope I can answer for you.
My name is Gary Tan and I’m a management consultant who specializes in IT strategy and system implementations. I’ve been a Business Analyst for 15 years and I’ve seen this industry from a consultant’s perspective and also from my experience working in banks.
Whilst I’m familiar with the waterfall and the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), over the last five years I’ve been engaged in agile project delivery with my clients.
The market is asking for these agile skills and I, for one had to transition from a very waterfall mindset to an agile one.
The questions from many of my juniors who want to become Agile Business Analysts has prompted me to consolidate all my know-how about real-life agile project delivery from a Business Analyst’s perspective into one huge resource – a book entitled “The Agile Business Analyst“.
Inside, I first give you a solid overview of how a Business Analyst can work well in agile project teams – particularly in facilitating discussions about business value, prioritizing the Product Backlog and applying agile BA techniques to create Minimum Viable Products that customers love.
1. What Is the Business Analyst’s Role in Agile?
Many of you think that the Business Analyst role is no longer needed in an agile project team.
You may even be afraid of applying to an “agile” Business Analyst job role or opportunity because you can’t articulate how a BA contributes in an agile team.
After all, in Scrum, there are only three key roles – Product Owner, Scrum Master and Development Team. Where’s the Business Analyst?
The few statements above could not be further from the truth.
The Business Analyst’s role is absolutely relevant in agile and is in fact critical in facilitating and prioritizing agile work items to create incremental business value.
And that’s where my book comes in. I provide you with a practical, comprehensive overview of how a Business Analyst works in an agile project so you can contribute strongly to any agile opportunity you come across.
My book will help you:
- Understand how a Business Analyst contributes in an agile project team so that your can articulate your value to a potential employer or Project Sponsor.
- Understand the THREE most critical skill sets a Business Analyst must bring to the table so that you can hit the ground running when starting an agile project.
- Understand how Business analysts work on producing dialogue, not documents in agile projects so that you can foster better communication amongst the team members.
- Understand how Agile BAs partner closely to the Product Owner so that work can be prioritized and decomposed into small pieces for quicker business benefit delivery.
- Learn how the Product Owner and the Agile BA are the “Value Managers” of the product, and the THREE key goals they must always keep in mind in developing a product.
- Learn how BAs on Agile teams work partially on work in progress, as well as prepare for the future, so that agile delivery is seamless between sprints.
- Understand and interpret the values and principles in the Agile Manifesto from a Business Analyst’s perspective (rather than that of a software developer’s) so that it is clear why BA is so valuable to agile teams.
- Understand why Agile BAs need to give up heavy, document-driven processes for creating software with detailed plans.
- Learn THREE ways to get feedback associated with the actual software rather than feedback on a document.
- Learn FIVE secrets on how you can to improve customer collaboration, rather than wrangling about scope and deliverable negotiation.
What Agile Concepts Do Business Analysts Need To Know?
An Agile Business Analyst has great career prospects – if you look in the market today, you’ll see many job openings and interesting projects for these roles.
You can also get paid extremely well and meet a lot of new people.
Within a few years, you’ll be ready to be labelled a “Product Owner” or even “Agile & Digital Transformation Lead” – simply because new technology projects rely so much on agile techniques.
Now, to succeed as an Agile Business Analyst, there are some fundamental concepts you do need to understand.
I’m talking about the way the Agile BA thinks and goes about his or her projects.
Their mindset is NOT the same as for traditional Waterfall BAs.
This is so important. If you don’t understand these basic agile mindsets, you may end up saying the wrong things at an interview of being inefficient in your agile project.
If you read my book, you will understand what these basic Agile BA concepts are.
My book will help you:
- Understand Agile Concept #1 – “Increments of Value”, so that as an Agile BA, you bring clarity to diverse requirements and break work into small increments of value.
- Understand Agile Concept #2 – “The Last Responsible Moment”, so that you gain more flexibility for change during the project.
- Understand Agile Concept #3 – “The Minimum viable product (MVP)”, so you build a small, workable version of a product that balances cost, risk, and value.
- Understand Agile Concept #4 – “Experiments”, so that you can get your agile team to quickly get from idea spin mode to action.
- Understand Agile Concept #5 – “Value Stream”, so that you can organize and deliver around what’s valuable.
- Understand Agile Concept #6 – “Outcome-Focused”, so that your agile team works fiercely on valuable outcomes over everything else.
Agile Business Analyst Techniques
There are many techniques available to the Agile Business Analyst – reading, attending courses, on-the-job experience, etc.
But I find that one of the biggest problems is that agile methodologies are often tuned to the Product Owner, Scrum Master or Development Team.
There is only scattered and adhoc information available to the Business Analyst. You don’t know what you’re reading sometimes because agile as a topic is so vast and so wide.
You need to pick up agile knowledge in a very focused and structured manner.
And that’s where my book comes in. By reading it, you’ll:
- Learn about Agile BA Technique #1 – “Product Decomposition”, so that you can break down a product into smaller, constituent parts.
- Learn about Agile BA Technique #2 – “Context Techniques”, so that you can show stakeholders the big picture of what the product is supposed to look like.
- Learn about Agile BA Technique #3 – “User Stories”, so that agile teams understand precisely what they’re building.
- Learn about Agile BA Technique #4 – “Acceptance Criteria”, so that you know precisely whether a user story is working as intended and satisfying the customer.
- Learn About Agile Technique #5 – “User Story Maps”, so that you help the entire team see the “forest through the trees”, by organizing user’s stories in a visual format.
Agile Business Analyst Jobs
Agile Business Analysts are in hot demand. If you take a quick look at the job classifieds, you can see many job opportunities that come with very generous pay packages too.
The truth is, all major companies out there are executing some sort of technology and digital transformation at any given time.
Financial institutions like banks, insurance companies and other financial services providers (e.g. FinTechs) need Agile Business Analysts who can plan and execute agile delivery. These skill sets are almost always in demand in the job market.
If you’re in the market for a Agile BA job, my book can help you:
- Learn how to break into agile system delivery even if you have no prior experience so that you can package yourself correctly and finally get into this space to start building up your expertise.
- Learn about the salary of Agile BAs in the market so that you can negotiate a better deal for yourself in your next interview.
- Learn what jobs you can apply for as a Agile BA so that you can focus your job hunting efforts on the most suitable and high-paying jobs.
- Learn how to join Top-Tier Consulting Firms as a Agile BA so that you can be part of the prestigious and highly-paid consulting fratenity like McKinsey, Bain and BCG, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, EY, etc.
- Understand how to write a solid Agile BA resume so that you can get interviews at the best Agile BA employers you’re applying to.
Agile Business Analyst Career Path
So what does a Agile Business Analyst do over the long term? Does he or she get “stuck in a role”?
In my opinion, far from it. I know Agile Business Analysts who have gone on to become Product Owners, C-level executive or have jumped into business development.
Many of them become “Agile & Digital Transformation Leads” and join large organizations delivery new technology projects via agile.
Others go on to start their own businesses, concentrating on providing advisory on agile methodology to companies.
If you want to understand the medium and long term career prospects of a Agile Business Analyst, my book will help you:
- Learn how to transition from a traditional, waterfall-based BA to Agile BA so you can finally upgrade yourself and enter those hot, exciting new wave & digital technology projects your younger colleagues involved in.
- Understand the job prospects of being a Agile BA so that you can greatly increase your chances of finding a job that you love.
- Learn about the pros and cons of being a Agile BA so that you can see whether being a Agile BA is for you.
- Discover a case study of how I learnt Agile techniques after spending a decade as a traditional, waterfall-based BA so that you can understand, in real-world terms, what it takes to become and succeed as a Agile BA.
Other Valuable Information
Hey, and that’s not all. On top of the above, you’ll also learn about:
- The FIVE critical software programs a Agile BA must master so that you can become a more effective agile practitioner.
- Learn about the FIVE websites you need to learn all about Agile BA techniques so that, just like the pros, you can regularly read just these five websites for agile news and developments – instead of wasting time surfing all over the web.
- Learn about the TEN great companies to work for as an Agile BA so that you can apply to and clinch the best job offers in the market.
So What’s A Resource Like This Worth?
If you scour the Internet to find related information about agile domain knowledge, it most certainly will cost you a lot of time.
And you may not even find what you’re looking for – most likely there’s bits and pieces of information here and there which don’t give you a real-world, end-to-end view of banking.
This book is the cumulative result of my 15 years’ expertise in Business Analysis – there is simply NO other resource like it out there. Not even on Amazon – most of the books there are thick textbooks on specific agile delivery topics and don’t reveal much about what it is like being a real-world Agile BA.
A full overview of agile project delivery and how a Business Analyst can best contribute – from facilitating discussions about business value, prioritizing the Product Backlog and applying agile BA techniques to create Minimum Viable Products that customers love.
Once you read it, you can benefit from it almost immediately and start applying that knowledge on your next agile project.
For a limited time only, I am offering The Agile Business Analyst at a price of $12.99. This is an incredible price for gaining all that knowledge about the agile business analysis.
Click “Add to Cart” to get your copy – for a $12.99 investment you’ll receive an immediate download in PDF format.
Since the book is available as a PDF – you can be reading it and discovering all this agile project know-how in a very short time.
My Personal Guarantee To You
And don’t worry, if for any reason you’re not happy with my book’s content, you have a complete guarantee to protect your investment.
100% RISK-FREE 60 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
If you don’t think the information in The Agile Business Analysts will give you exactly what you need to forge a career as an Agile Business Analyst, then just contact me within 60 days and I’ll refund your money immediately with no questions asked.
I’m here to help you. I am not interested in accepting your money if you are not satisfied with my product.
Because I want YOU to experience the same happiness, joy and confidence as I did when I finally learnt to carve out a successful Agile Business Analyst career.
Now, you can only get this product from me. It’s not available in libraries or anywhere else on the Internet. In fact, I have only just written it for release on this site alone. And you can get all of this information downloaded to you right away.
To order your own personal copy, click here and lock in a price of $12.99. I’ll send the PDF book to you right away.
I’m confident you’ll find the information in The Agile Business Analyst extremely helpful in helping you run agile projects successfully.
But if you find the book is not a good fit for you, we offer a no-questions-asked 60 day money back guarantee. Simply drop me a note at this link and I’ll refund your money.
And remember – as always I’m here to help you in any way I can. Let me know if you’ve any questions at all.
Wishing you much success,
