So what do senior business analysts actually do?

Some people might say that this is what a business analyst does:

Then business analysts get promoted to “Senior Business Analyst”. Life is good and you can see at a glance that it is quite relaxing for them:

In fact if you go “agile” then you should be able to get rid of those big unwieldy business cases, which means there isn’t much left on the senior BA’s plate at all (I can’t even be bothered to draw the new diagram).

But before you act on that thought – there may be a little more going on behind the scenes than you noticed at first glance:

So there is a chance that your best business analysts are doing a bit more than just interviewing people and completing templates.

In fact if all they are doing is interviewing people and completing templates you might have an issue, regardless of whether or not you are agile and whether or not you are using great templates for you projects.

And if they are doing a lot more, then you might find that investing in their capability has some substantial benefits.

It is probably a lot cheaper to invest money in a good BA and their ongoing growth than to miss great opportunities or invest money in bad projects that you could have seen were not really going to work if you had a good BA.

Anyway, that’s just my opinion.