Diego Pacheco Tech blog

The "analyst" is a very old role. I really think the tradicional role does not make sense anymore, we should see analyst as a discipline/skillset and not as a role. If the last 20 years of software engineer teach us something is that engineers are in the best position to work on proper solutions, however, someone needs to worry and focus on the business problem. IF you are in an Engineering Organization, engineers are great as POS / BAS but if you are dealing with delivery discipline and working with non-it people, engineers might not have the best set of skills to do the business analyst part. However, there are many things BAs and even Designers(UX) can learn from engineers. For this blog post, I will like to focus on the skills and the transformation BAs need to face today to keep up with current market needs, innovation and competition in order to be ahead of the game.

First of all, I want to explain why I added a puzzle as an image for this post. This is a metaphor I'm using with several people I work. People sometimes get lost and cannot keep with modern software initiatives. Well, agile is saying that for ages and people still don't get it. There is a huge difference between Simple and Complex systems. More and more making a digital product is from far to be a simple task. However, we still want answers that we cannot get. Sometimes this creates anxiety and we need to learn how to deal with failures, chaos, bad feedback and even that our solution my suck. Ouch thats very dark, right? No, not really, this is the reality, the REAL WORLD is a cruel place and ADULTS need to call tough decisions every day. So what's the deal with simple linear systems? well they imply that quickly you can understand what you are doing and make predictions about the outcomes. Well, digital products are not like that, we cant make predictions on simple line...

Product culture and mindset is one of the most important shifts enterprise companies need to go through. Project mindset has several flaws and yet we still follow it and thats need to change.  Project culture makes us focus on the wrong outcome like Dates, Escope, Feature, Cost instead of value and User Obsession. Since 2014 I follow Allan kelly work and read his books and saw several of his videos. I also exchange some emails with him back on the days. I was amazed how makes sense to back into 2014. Even almost 5 years passed and companies still don't get it. There are other movements that push to the same direction as NoEstimates , Beyond Budget ,  OKRs , Modern Agile ,  LeanStartUp . All these movements / Books have great synergy and they basically make you thing software development in a completely different way.