Top Remote Collaboration Techniques for Business Analysts 

Let’s explore the remote collaboration techniques and tools used by business analysts (BAs), including stakeholder mapping, simulation, online whiteboards, project management tools and more.

Business analysis in the time of remote collaboration

Within an enterprise, business analysis is a continuous improvement process performed at strategic, tactical and operational levels. During this enterprise evolution journey, a BA plays an important role in discovering, synthesizing and analyzing the information from various sources, including tools, processes, documentation and stakeholders. This information represents the stakeholders’ actual needs.

To successfully meet these business needs, a BA collaborates with colleagues and stakeholders to develop ideas within cross-functional teams. Often, this collaboration occurs through in-person interactions, with the BA visiting the customer’s site to hold workshops, engage in whiteboard sessions, etc.

While working remotely and/or in a distributed environment, a BA needs to apply the following techniques to communicate and collaborate effectively with the team and stakeholders.

Stakeholder mapping

The purpose is to identify and list the relevant team members and decision-makers, to analyze and understand their perspectives and to connect them based on the objective, motives and value proposition.

Based on identified artifacts, business analysts create stakeholder maps. Some examples include stakeholder matrix, stakeholder onion diagram and RACI matrix.

Requirements definition with multiple aspects

The purpose is to provide a holistic view of the requirements through use cases and scenarios, flow diagrams, process modeling, wireframes/mock-ups, etc.

The BA communicates and collaborates with stakeholders (product owner, business team, solution architects, etc.) during the requirements-defining process. This involves presentations, online workshops, team-brainstorming, meetings and follow-ups on clarifications and open tasks.

A pro tip: create a mind map or use the Ishikawa (aka Fishbone) diagram to structure your thoughts and provide a holistic view of the requirements.

The simulation technique

The purpose is to understand how the system works and define the UI and data flow interaction using simulation.

UML and BPMN diagrams are widely used to specify the process flows and their results in particular cases.

Using this approach, the BA creates an activity diagram to describe what needs to happen in the system, organizes brainstorming results through feature mind maps, creates product roadmaps and illustrates how entities (people, objects or concepts) relate to each other in the system using the Entity Relationship (ER) Diagram.

Online whiteboard tools

To engage and collaborate with their team, BAs can use online whiteboard tools. There are many tools available online, both free and licensed, which you can use in real-time for more effective collaboration. 

Meeting recordings

The purpose of meeting recordings is to focus on the conversation, supplement the notes and evaluate and refine the facilitation skills.

There are many recording tools available online. Some of the widely used tools for this purpose are the Windows voice recorder or meeting recorders available as a built-in feature in Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, GoToMeeting, Webex, Skype for Business, BlueJeans, etc.

Collaborative games

The purpose of collaborative games is to help foster team spirit, engage everyone in a fun and safe way, explore and share knowledge and experiences on a given topic and identify hidden assumptions, risks and solutions, which is difficult to do during normal interactions.

BAs can use collaborative games as an icebreaker during elicitation and collaboration. This encourages participants to collaborate to build a joint understanding of a problem or situation. Some examples include the Affinity map, product box, fishbowl, empathy map and draw test. 

Project management tools

The purpose of project management tools is to ensure proper access to the project status (from inception to delivery) for the team and stakeholders. There are many project management tools used by BAs depending on the corporate policy and project requirements. 

The above-mentioned techniques help BAs to collaborate and manage the project activity and will aid all team members and stakeholders in project management and delivery.

Explore our jobs at epam.com/careers and join our international team of top-tier BAs.