Over the last few years, many people have asked me for tips, techniques and skills you should develop when managing a group of business analysts. This article is an informal list BA managers might consider, especially if they are transitioning into management from a Business Analyst role.

Develop a BA Process

Provide a framework to which all your BAs work. Not only does this give them a consistent approach, but you a get a consistent way to assess their progress. Business stakeholders and IT staff should recognize a similar pattern in every project. In doing this, you are also training your stakeholders to think like a BA. After repeated exposure, they can foresee the next steps and come more prepared to meetings and projects.

Develop Consistent Tools and Standards

One of the worst things for a business user or developer to see is different documentation standards from each BA. I insist that everyone uses standard templates and adopts a consistent approach to diagrams and other supporting information. Be sure to make your templates flexible and try to refrain from producing overwhelming or heavy documents. I encourage BAs to try to separate documents as logically as possible. Having a functional requirements document full of use cases, mockups, data specifications and a report catalogue can quickly become a 100 page+ document and business and technical staff struggle to read it.

Get Involved in Planning Projects and then Leave the BA to it

One of the realizations when you move into management is that you cannot be everywhere all the time. More importantly, you understand that you don't want to be everywhere all the time! It's challenging when you move from being responsible for your own projects, running meetings and getting involved in as much detail as you like, to only having time to view projects from the periphery. One of the methods I use to stay involved, but not participate on a day to day basis, is to work with the BAs at the start of the project, to ensure they plan their efforts and evaluate the scope of their projects in a consistent and clear manner.

The scope evaluation typically takes the form of what I refer to as Power Verbs. These are the action points that you can then use to maintain your sense of the project. For example, if the project was to move house, the Power Verbs might be Investigate, Decide, Prepare, Pack, Move, Unpack, Recover. I would then spend time to expand each Power Verb into a series of action areas. These action areas then allow the BA and the manager to ensure that a project starts off with a clear understanding of potential scope. For the manager, this affords an opportunity for context any time they need to get involved, because they a basic understanding of the overall process.

By overseeing planning and providing a solid framework within which the BA can operate, the BA is free to use their own techniques and methods, while the manager is comfortable knowing the scope will be addressed.