My job title changed last year to Tech Business Associate. We are moving now to an agile team and I was told that they don’t know what my position will be doing on that team. I’m scared because I feel like this means this role is right for layoffs anyone else experiencing this?
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I’m the person who said to train up in Agile. The bank is opening up Scrum Master and Agile Coach roles (search for them) and while they use a lot of fancy industry verbiage it is not that different from what you’re used to doing, not the way they do it here. Go through whatever the in house training is for Agile, sign up for the Agile Community of Practice, if you can get yourself positioned right you can pivot while people around you are waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
My guess is you can’t get a straight answer because your boss doesn’t have one or because the answer isn’t good, or possibly because the boss is scared to the point of paralysis. If there’s no place for your group in the agile environment, you may need to make a place.
I know there are great BA’s in the company but in our teams I really do not know what is the role of TBSA. I am leading/tech lead in our agile team with few devs and 2 TBSA. TBSA do nothing in our team, just call themselves as scrum master without even knowing how agile works , all tech stories I create n PO creates business one. These BA’s are wasting dev team effort and doing only politics. I am having 10+ of exp in agile outside of wells and I never thought some teams in wells are so bad and our team BA’s are not accountable for anything. I know it’s not good for them, company needs to clean some BA’s who are here for long time and adding no value. I personally respect everyone but everyone who works in the company should be accountable in one or the other ways. Company is good but need to change the culture to compete in the market.
Agile is great if done correctly. Unfortunately many corporations are implementing SAFe as a form of true Agile. It's better than waterfall, however, it still gives upper management a controlling hand which ultimately slows down. SAFe is kind of a b–tardized Agile. Enough Agile in it to improve things, and enough command and control to keep executives pacified.
They have a lot of applications on agile that do not lend themselves well to that methodology because they have too many tentacles. Those kinds of applications cannot be compartmentalized so easily but what the hey, let’s do it anyway. But they just wanted to say they are agile, they didn’t do any analysis ahead of time.
That’s like going all in on test automation when they can’t keep a test environment running day to day. Oh yeah, they do that too.
Agile done correctly does work. Calling user stories requirements and doing waterfall in 2 or 3 weeks and calling them Sprints does not work.
So sick of “agile” and “sprints”. Someone one told me that the definition of an agile sprint is a chicken running around with its head chopped off.
If you have a lot of time on your hands, you may as well do some of the Agile modules on Pluralsight. Maybe you can use that to BS your way into a new role here, maybe it’ll help you in your next job hunt, maybe managers will decide that their version of “agile” still requires BAs, but at least you’re doing something other than waiting on the shoe to drop. My experience so far is that the ones who are most sure about what “agile” means are the ones with the least experience in it, but YMMV.
The next town hall, Navigating an Agile ship in a sea of Red Tape, will identify the 127 steps to update a report column header on an SSRS Azure Cloud platform.
Being a Product Owner is awesome.
Similar situation in my role. Former EBSC now TBSA. Lost the big waterfall project I worked on, now just a glorified paper shuffler who pushes a button on occasion. Our manager is freaking out about metrics since leadership calls are all about people tooting their own team's horn.
People are starved for metrics now since everyone has to justify their existence. We're literally looking for new ways to report stuff that proves we're here doing work. Tech is in for some serious cuts, they're just doing the assessment right now to see what teams overlap, which teams are providing better value, and which teams can be gotten rid of.
It leads to crazy mixed messaging. Weeks ago it was "find any new work you can", then it was "we'll be taking on some new work, but with fewer people", now it's back to "we need data to give management to justify our existence."
They obviously want to psychologically torture and scare everyone into leaving.
If your not going to be a product owner then you will most likely fined yourself on the outside looking in.
We are not practicing Agile... this will crash and burn. Speaking from experience
In an agile model the developers work directly with the customers and learn the business straight from them.
Or so goes the theory. I'm not sure that many devs are well rounded enough to execute such things. Any dev who can also learn the business and directly liaise with it could manage her own team. And at any rate would be worth more than we pay standard issue devs.
Apparently they think people who know the business should not be on an agile team. Ridiculous. No wonder code is failing.
I think a lot of us in tech are in the same boat there. We hear another reorg coming also.
We were Business Systems Consultants. BSC’s. We were told our rules do not fit on an agile team. Still can’t get a straight answer as to what we will be doing.
What were you previously?