There is no future for business analysts in IT. This is the scary conclusion I've come to in watching the agile and devops space for the last few years. Product owners own the backlog, the ScrumMaster does whatever is necessary to help the team, and the development team is now working more closely with the PO and stakeholders to understand what they truly want and need us to build. So if there developers are getting closer to the people asking for the work, and understanding the business and their objectives better and better, why is a business analyst even needed on a development team any longer? I write this from the lens of working in compliance, where lots of people think BAs are still needed, but when you look at revenue generating products no BAs are needed, and I don't think they're needed for internal departments either, at least not on the tech side.
I haven't come to this conclusion lightly. A big chunk of my work is business analysis, I am technically a business analyst right now. But I don't see a future for me as a dedicated business analyst, and I don't see a future in it for you or anyone else either.
The ScrumMaster owns the process and protects the team, but also works to remove impediments and does whatever is necessary to help the team succeed. If a ScrumMaster is doing their job, coaching the Product Owner and the team on how to be more effective, than the feedback loops should be so tight that we don't need big up front analysis, no massive requirements documents, and no one stuck in the middle trying to play telephone between stakeholders and the engineers. The bread and butter for a business analyst is acting as that go-between, relaying information, and questions, and clarifications back and forth. How ludicrously inefficient! As we understand our stakeholders better, the vision our PO has, the business goals and objectives we already know we're building the right thing so we no longer need that role.
The product owner works with stakeholders and the development team. They use tools like impact mapping to figure out goals and objectives, needs for the business, value that can be obtained from whatever we build. They use tools like user story mapping to flesh out what is needed, how it goes together, and what order we want to deliver small slices of value so we aren't waiting for some big bang release one day down the road. A good product owner reduces context switching and builds the most valuable thing, one thing at a time, until it is either complete or it's not the most valuable thing anymore. A reduction in context switching means everyone from the business stakeholders to the dev team is focused on just that thing - we can build, and demo, and get feedback, and adjust our approach, repeat ad infinitum.
Not all hope is lost my fellow business analysts.
I agree with Mark Schwartz in his book "The Art of Business Value" where he says technical business analysts are some of the best suited to become product owner. We know more about what's possible, and are better at digging down behind the what to find out the why we're even being asked to build this thing. I think Sr. Business Analysts should look at the product owner role very seriously.
I also think business analysts can make great ScrumMasters and coaches. We often do whatever is necessary to help the team, and I think many analysts see more bottlenecks and problem areas because they work across more of the value stream. I strongly believe good ScrumMasters should coach the PO, the development team, team managers, and even coach operations teams and help move people towards DevOps. This may require the average business analyst to step up their knowledge and get up to speed on some new concepts, but definitely a great option.
Finally there's the product owner team. The PO can't do everything by themselves and they need help. Building a team around the product owner can lead to improved outcomes and better queuing up of future work, better user stories, requirements that are more clear and useful to the developers. The product owner team, in my opinion, would be the PO, one or two designers (UI and UX folks), the architect, and a couple business analysts. However I think these should be more Junior and mid-level roles with the idea being they eventually grow into product owners.