And to answer your questions:

“How about you? Do you see yourself as responsible for ensuring the solution fulfills the requirements? How have you either assessed proposed solutions or been involved in this part of the process?”

I don’t work directly with developers but I work in a team whose primary function is to support our commercial department by proposing solutions for prospective clients (as part of the sales and bid process). From understanding requirements to contributing to solution discussions and ensuring the proposed solution meets the requirements, is feasible and cost effective for the business.

Last year I worked on a project where I had to look into options to meet a product gap for an increasing need that propsective and existing clients have. It involved looking into in-house and external options.

I started by gathering requirements from a number of interested clients and then working with others to find out the options available to us. I had to assess each option against the requirements and other business criteria.

I ranked each option against what seemed to be the most common requirements, listed the pro’s and cons and then presented back to stake holders for a decision to made.

It was small scale and really enjoyed it. I didn’t know at the time that it counted as relevant BA experience. I’m now involved in such activities on a more regular basis.

Thanks for posting this article. I’m new to the site and relateively new to the BA role in general. So I find it helpful reading these practical examples to items in BABOK. Will definitely help in unearthing previous experience that counts.

Regards
Amede

Tanya – I totally agree with your response and find it very helpful. We may not come up with the solution, sometimes we may contribute to it but still not have the final say however it is important to stay close to both the needs to be met, and the proposed solution ensuring that it is assessed properly and stakeholders have enough information to make that educated business decision. This is definitely a point for me to remember given the nature of projects and tasks I get involved in.

Thanks.

as my experience grow, yes the statement is absolutely rellevant. If I compare with software engineering, we don’t have to dweel deep into programming languages, but we should know about the algorithm that lies beneath it.