The Business Analyst team should first know about a project when the sale is coming close to completion. While we will hear about it on the weekly calls, the process should be to tag the business analyst team in the sales opportunity investigation ticket either when that sale is finalised or we are certain to get the work.

The discovery phase is about making sure what the customer has been sold is what they want. It will involve getting as much information about the project and customer as we can before we have an initial call to verify our understanding. We can then probe the high level requirements already given to understand the scope and goals of the project.

The documenting phase is about getting the detail of the project. This will involve the BA team producing a customer facing document that must detail all of the information that the customer has provided for the project as well as key information on how the process will work. A rough rule of thumb should be that if the customer has questions about the project then the answer should be within the documentation. For most projects these documents should only be a few pages of succinct information understandable to a non technical audience. You should expect it to be contextualised with any user guides, fact sheets or appendix needed to facilitate understanding of the products we sell.

In addition there would typically be a set of stories and acceptance criteria giving a detailed description of the projects deliverables and test scenarios. It is this that the development team should consider the single source of truth to be developed and tested against.

Output:

• A word document that is customer facing

• A Technical Specification that is internal facing

• An internal meeting to demonstrate the customer facing document to high level stakeholders

• A sign off call with the customer

• A set of stories in Azure DevOps

• An internal meeting to refine the stories with the development team that will deliver the project

Once the customer facing document is signed off and the stories refined and added to the backlog the BA team consider that project 'done' and its moved in to 'project support'. At this stage we will attend any meetings we are needed on and support the development team as needed with any questions. While the project is within development any scope changes or clarifications will go through the business analyst who will update any collateral as needed. The BA will feed their documentation in to the acceptance in to service process.