I have some question for you on your current work environment:

- how well does the work scope gathered by the sales team get translated to technical requirements for the programmers right now?
- how are the timeline planning done for the work to be done right now? and how well has the splitting of work into smaller manageable chunks being done right now?
- for the technical requirements, how well written are the acceptance criteria for each deliverable piece of work by the programmers for them to refer to?

These are actually things that you can work on. As you mentioned, there's no test cased prepared. this is where you can step up to practice on your BA skills. You may find yourself in a situation where you get push back from your colleagues on the need to do all of these, and if you do, try talking to your management to sell them the idea on why it's important to do all of this, and you can volunteer for it.

This way even if you don't get to do a dedicated BA role in your current company, you are at least able to get an idea of what a BA is supposed to be doing day to day (reading about it, and experiencing it for yourself are rather different things), should you choose to look for a new job later.

My friend got tired of coding and landed a BA position elsewhere.

Dongibap.

This post has been edited by UserU: Jun 8 2021, 08:56 PM

Hmm thanks for the suggestion!


how well does the work scope gathered by the sales team get translated to technical requirements for the programmers right now?
- They're quite bad in this, for now only 1 or 2 senior programmer and lead who is very experienced can provide help to other programmer on this when people are confused, while the document produce by sales team are not actually consistent. Some project might have better documentation while some maybe just few pages of simple description, lols.

how are the timeline planning done for the work to be done right now? and how well has the splitting of work into smaller manageable chunks being done right now?
- No exact timeline planning , each of the programmer will handle one project , unless that guy can't handle then will ask for help and spilt task by diff function / pages. So I heard some programmer sometimes can't deliver in full even client is already waiting for long time / obviously the proj is being delay for too ling.

for the technical requirements, how well written are the acceptance criteria for each deliverable piece of work by the programmers for them to refer to?
- No, for the technical requirements nothing to refer

Honestly I just go in this company not too long... I know it's a small company when interview but I don't know about the process at all that time
I did ask like if there will be other role such as BA or not and they only say will open the role in future but not sure when and I not really sure will they do it or not haha.



Your friend damn lucky la.. one of my ex-colleague also manage to straight jump from programmer -> BA , but I guess besides luck also need some soft skills that I lack now maybe

Oh sayang, hang lama sangat duduk kerusi programmer.
I, one year become SE change to BA straight away, because do not have a passion for coding even I'm good with it. But I prefer to meet user, clients, love to do the presentation etc. just like the BA role.
Sekarang baru 32 tahun. Gaji pun ciput je. Haha!
My suggestion, cuba adjust dulu resume, cross check dgn JD BA. try to massage your resume to show that, you have experienced with something related to the BA role.
Simpan lah dulu duit ambil prof. cert untuk PM ke BA ke. Focus on experience first.
Most company, tak adalah follow 100% macam dalam cert pun. Cert is just a bonus.

Thanks for your suggestion ! ok la gaji don't means everything if you enjoy what you're doing now.. will try to amend my resume again and see if have more chance

from your description, it does sound like there's ample opportunities for you to play the role of a BA at your current work place, although your designation may not be of a BA. Take note that if you do wish to do this, it'll be as additional work on top of what you're currently doing as a dev. You can discuss with your team lead or management further on this and see how it goes.

also, keep in mind that the work done by such roles are not in a silo. often there will be overlaps, especially among the more senior dev roles, or among the team or tech leads. and it's for this reason why being able to jump from being a developer to a BA is not a matter of luck, but is more to do with the experience that you have as a developer beyond merely doing programming work

Thanks for your suggestion and info provided , really appreciate this. will have a talk with my team lead.

since u involve with coding, u didnt interested with test engineer/QA ?
at least not much coding like developer/programmer

Under tech PM-related fields, what do BAs *actually do*? Can someone give an idea of the day to days, please?

when you say PM, do you mean Product Manager or Project Manager?

project manager...

i've been doing a lot of reading tbh on project management, the role of the tech team etc

but in all seriousness, what exactly does a business analyst do is really beyond the grasp of normal reading. and why are BAs even separate from PMOs? shoudn't they all be within the same group?



This post has been edited by Endeavour: Jun 14 2021, 05:36 PM

So the problem with long experience in coding is your resume all is coding coding coding SDLC bla bla..

When you apply something not coding like BA, Audit, Network, Security, Project Mgmt, Big Data, Analytics, Digital Marketing.. recruiters will look and say "oh everything coding.." "NOT SUITABLE".

And even if you did do some polishing to add some fringe things to say about your experience that might touch a little bit onto those non coding areas, they are just that. Fringe or "Side Dish" while your main course/experience still coding.

Plus, many of those fields I mentioned need some certs as well.

So probably it is most feasible to jump only when you have attained the relevant certs?

simply because there's no one fixed definition for such roles. different places may define the scope of the different roles differently.

for us, we have both PM, and BA. How we determine the difference between the two? there's certainly overlaps, that's for sure. however the main difference for us is in where the job of the BA ends, and where the PM's role begins when it comes to overall project timelines. Within each team or work stream, the timelines are managed by the tech lead and the BA together. the PM then consolidates all the data points together from the different teams or work streams, and consolidates it to get an idea of the overall project health, as well as handling of resource allocation or reallocation where work streams finishes and new ones starts, etc.

BAs and Tech Leads work with users on the details of the deliverables, while the PM works with users on the high level timelines, handles overall timeline negotiations, etc. The PM does not go into the deep details of the work to be delivered, either from the business or technical perspective unless there's an urgent need to that requires his/her help to resolve with the stakeholders.

Recruiters failed to understand that sometimes developers can be very proficient in non-coding areas as well because we've been implementing solutions after solutions for various type of businesses .

Yet not many developers can front customers or have the soft skills like communication skill, negotiation skill, timeline and scope management, conflict management etc

This post has been edited by MiLKTea: Jul 4 2021, 01:43 PM

MBA, PMP would help.

What kind of business analytics do you mean?

In broad there is two type of BA - one type is doing stuff on functional specs, UAT, system implementation and so on. The second type is those that help business to identify opportunity, grow revenue, propensity models etc. To me technical background more towards first type of BA, is that what you want?

TS work in Sarawak?

Sarawakian but work at KL