Iām 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 donāt 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 Iād like. Does anyone have tips or tricks for building trust with engineers to encourage them to share information more willingly and quickly?
EDIT: Hereās a summary with more details for those who requested more info: Iām working on optimizing processes related to our in-house file ingestion system, which weāve been piecing together over time to handle tasks it wasnāt originally designed for. The system works well enough now, but itās still very much a MacGyver setupāduct 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 thatās 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 wayāJIRA is going to be the hub for that. My job is to make sure that the entire pipelineāfrom ticket creation, to file ingestion, to processing and outputāis documented thoroughly (but not pedantically) and that all teams involved understand whatās required of them and why.
Where Iām running into challenges is in gathering the nitty-gritty technical details from engineers. I need to understand how their processes work today, how theyāve solved past issues, and what they think would make things better in an ideal world. But I think thereās some hesitation because theyāre worried about āincriminatingā themselves or having mistakes come back to haunt them.
Iāve tried to make it clear that Iām not interested in punishing anyone for past decisions or mistakesāon 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 engineersāespecially around getting them to open up about technical details without fearāI am all ears.
thereās a few things here that trigger red flags for me:
oh good! because itās probably ill-defined and nobody really knows and figuring that out involves a lot of reading other peopleās shit code and we have work to do
oh you mean do worry - you want to know exactly how it worksā¦ sorry bud, no time, thatās a lot of energy
ugghghh documentation is for people that donāt understand that documentation is out of date the second you write it: donāt drag me into your futile attempt to make a static artifact that iāll need to maintain in the future when i update a living system
okay but thatās really dismissiveā¦ this is work that people have put in - even if itās shit and everyone knows itās shit, itās disheartening to have things thrown outā¦ and what they do now they know how it works, they know the caveatsā¦ youāre talking about coming in, getting a cursory understanding (what you think you can understand everyoneās problem when the people that built the thing donāt have the full picture?) and then planning out and telling them what to do
if you want help from engineers, ask them for help to build a new thing: donāt ask them for help to explain something so you can tell them what to build. weāre creative, and we love solving problems and we hate robotically implementing someone elseās vision