I’m a business analyst, and a big part of my job involves working with engineers and product managers to gather detailed, in-depth information. For reasons I don’t fully understand (though I have my theories), I often find that engineers, in particular, seem oddly reluctant to share the information I need. This makes the process more challenging than I’d like. Does anyone have tips or tricks for building trust with engineers to encourage them to share information more willingly and quickly?
EDIT: Here’s a summary with more details for those who requested more info: I’m working on optimizing processes related to our in-house file ingestion system, which we’ve been piecing together over time to handle tasks it wasn’t originally designed for. The system works well enough now, but it’s still very much a MacGyver setup—duct tape and dental floss holding things together. We got through crunch time with it, but now the goal is to refine and smooth everything out into a process that’s efficient, clear, and easy for everyone to follow.
Part of this involves getting all the disparate systems and communication silos talking to each other in a unified way—JIRA is going to be the hub for that. My job is to make sure that the entire pipeline—from ticket creation, to file ingestion, to processing and output—is documented thoroughly (but not pedantically) and that all teams involved understand what’s required of them and why.
Where I’m running into challenges is in gathering the nitty-gritty technical details from engineers. I need to understand how their processes work today, how they’ve solved past issues, and what they think would make things better in an ideal world. But I think there’s some hesitation because they’re worried about “incriminating” themselves or having mistakes come back to haunt them.
I’ve tried to make it clear that I’m not interested in punishing anyone for past decisions or mistakes—on the contrary, I want to learn from them to create a better process moving forward. My goal is to collaborate and make their jobs easier, not harder, but I think building trust and comfort will take more time.
If anyone has strategies for improving communication with engineers—especially around getting them to open up about technical details without fear—I am all ears.
Well that might explain some things.
Not to throw shade at your company but that process is so backwards that it’s no wonder the engineers are sparse on the details. I saw another comment likening software development to a crossword puzzle, which is a pretty good analogy. To further it, changing software once it’s done is like trying to swap out a clue/ word once the rest of the puzzle is built. It’s theoretically possible, but depending on how the puzzle is designed, it can range from an absurd amount of work to nearly impossible. Given the way you’ve described the state of things, your engineers are probably low on goodwill to boot.
I’ve worked on cobbled-together crunch-time hell-projects and the last thing I’d want after getting free would be a random BA coming to me about details that more than likely packed with the project PTSD and would very much like to forget. Doubly so if it’s issues that I bought up early in the design/ development process (when they would have been comparatively easy to fix) and was dismissed by the powers that be. I can only speak for myself, but I can only take so much “that’s not a priority”, “we don’t have time for that”/ “we’ll see if that becomes a problem in the future and deal with it then” before I throw in the towel, stop keeping track of everything that’s wrong, and just bin the entire project as dumper fire run by people who would rather check boxes than make things better.