Chefs, Contracting Officers, and Sisyphus: Musings of a Business Analyst

Fellow Guild member Matt Deniston has a great post on the difficulties of analyzing business requirements for an integration project.

So how do you arrive at the reality of the System? You need time. You need tact. You need tenacity. You need to either entertain and amuse, or you need very patient patients.

You need to talk to five to ten other equally seasoned users and get their variations and slants on the System. You don't meet with these users once, you sit with them many times over the course of weeks and echo back what they said last time and share gleanings from conversations with their colleagues. You iterate through models and illustrations of their System with them. You make sure they say the same thing three times in row before you act on it.

You will likely be surprised. Often what the user said last time was anywhere from not quite accurate to entirely incorrect. The real System often works differently than the user thought. The thing that never happens does in fact happen. The tool that only does this, sometimes does that too.

What I've recently relearned, so help me Sisyphus, is that if you apply the same, relatively rapid analysis approach proven in the kitchen to the contracting officer's cube, you'll likely end up with a really unthinkable mess.