How to be an agile business analyst

Five years ago, I self-published a book. I always thought it'd be neat to have an audio book version. Now, thanks to AI, I have one.

I had great intentions of continuing my exploration of backlog refinement this week. Unfortunately, one of our dogs got sick and we’re still not sure what exactly ails him.

Needless to say, I didn’t have a chance this week to dedicate the time and attention to crafting a new article like I wanted to, so I’m going to keep this one short and take the opportunity to announce a new resource I was fortunate enough to be able to produce.

Read about how to be an agile business analyst

Almost exactly five years ago I put the finishing touches on my first self-published book. How To Be An Agile Business Analyst. Here’s the blurb:

How To Be An Agile Business Analyst is about applying your business analysis skills in an agile manner. Keep in mind that the agile here describes how you approach business analysis.

This book helps business analysts be an effective member of a team working in an agile fashion. It explains how to add value to your team and how to apply your business analysis skills. It will help you understand how you can use your business analysis skills to make sure your team builds the right thing.

Read the book to discover the five characteristics of an agile business analyst and how to adopt those characteristics. You are an agile business analyst when you:

• consider your context so that you use appropriate techniques.

• help your team focus on outcomes over outputs and use that outcome to define success and measure progress.

• use tried and true business analysis techniques to build and maintain a shared understanding of the problem your team is trying to solve.

• make sure decisions get made, whether you have the responsibility for deciding or not.

• use short feedback cycles to learn about your users needs and adjust your product accordingly.

The book also explains the roles and responsibilities you may experiences and explores the impact an agile approach has on a common business analysis process.

Get this book to help you demonstrate to teams in your organization why they should have you on their team. At the end of the day, isn’t that really what matters?

You can get the ebook direct from kbp.media or you can get the paperback from Bookstore.org and help a local bookstore in the process. (This is an affiliate link).

Hear about how to be an agile business analyst

If you prefer to listen to your books, you’re in luck. This week I got an email from Amazon letting me know that I could now turn my book into an audio book using virtual voice narration.

This seemed like a helpful use of AI, so I gave it shot. It was fairly quick to set up, with most of my time spent picking a voice to use.

So if you’re interested, you can find the new audio book on Audible. If nothing else, take a listen to the sample, although I’d love it if you picked up a copy. I’d love it even more if you let me know what you think.

And next week we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks for reading

Thanks again for reading InsideProduct.

If you have any comments or questions about the newsletter, or there’s anything you’d like me to cover, let me know.

Talk to you next time,

Kent