Ownership - Analyst
Analysts are great when it comes to mapping a domain, fathoming complexity and expressing it in a clear, rational, understandable form. Analysts may not always have a solution at hand but for sure they know when a need is fulfilled or a problem is solved. Analysts' skills make for great Product Owners.
Analysts are responsible for the functional analysis of products and services on behalf of the customers. They define the requirements for its features and contribute to populate the work backlog. They are tasked with maintaining consistency between product's functionalities and ensuring that the requirements are clear and well-described, ready to be worked on by the team.
They do not handle the technical direction of the project (thus, they do not evaluate individual implementations from a technical perspective) nor the management of deadlines, budgets, and external priorities unrelated to the product.
Caveats
The analyst must maintain continuous involvement with the client and the project, much like the Project Manager. They are not usually assigned on-call as they are the owner of client request analysis and need continuity and full visibility to perform effectively.
They must comprehensively analyze and manage client requests throughout the project's lifespan. This requires a sufficient technical background to put forward proposals, without necessarily making technical decisions themselves, taking into account the impacts those have on the implementation.
Ownership
- Analysis and definition of functional requirements
- Preliminary analysis during the pre-sale phase
- Quality assurance and smoke testing
Practical tasks
- Contributes to pre-sale estimates
- Performs initial analysis and development of the functional technical document (with the Project Manager and Solution Architect)
- Collaborates with the Project Manager in drafting the project plan (roadmap)
- Leads functional requirements validation
- Defines the requirements (with the Client)
- Drafts the issues in terms of functionality description, acceptance criteria, and validation scenarios
- Maintains requirements documentation
Tangible outputs
- Documents with pre-sale estimates
- Functional analysis documents (conceptual map, structure, etc.)
- Project backlog and requirement documentation
- Acceptance test cases
Interactions
Please, visit the Interactions between project roles section.