The key is to be professional. “Nothing personal, just business” can be unpleasant, but getting in the middle is more so. Being professional means a clear idea what service you are providing, who you are providing it to, what their needs are, where your boundaries are, and who is the ‘least common manager’, i.e. the lowest management level with shared influence if there is conflict. BA boundaries are of a different nature than other service boundaries because they perform a liaison, bridging, or coordinating role. But there still are boundaries.

There are a lot of situations, but I gather you are an employee (not consultant) with a management chain separate from the stakeholders.
* Is the us-them IT and Business? If so, you can’t fix it in one project as in Doug’s interaction process example shows.
* Who is the sponsor? Is the champion accountable for the results?
* Who is your customer? may be the sponsor, or current project may be just one of a larger, business as customer, engagement. IT is probably a major consumer, are they the customer?
* Is there a project charter with business goals and measurements?

The underlying ‘brutal reality’ is if it is in your scope to bring the parties together, and if so is it in their interest?

If there is a win-win, go for it. Recognize that it may take a large amount of progressively visible prep work. The BA role as liaison take on a mediator character here. Most mediations start with separate discussions where the mediator is able to build some common language and conceptual framework before direct negotiations. It works. (2 war stories for a beer, 4 for 2, 8 for 3, …

If there is the “if this works, I lose my job” fear or reality it’s important to distinguish fear from reality. Fear may require additional management cooperation to work with. Reality may be a “be professional” situation.

In some cases people manage to encapsulate resources or build fiefdoms. For example, preventing raw access to a data base. You may be in a position of either breaking them or letting the project work around to a middling result. A good situation to be very confident you have done your homework are right before initiating a breach.

There are also the rest of the situations, including the one you actually have not addressed by any of these.

To net it out: The BA needs to move beyond the IT mind set into the liaison role. This requires a particular attention to maintaining a professional approach to include, and exclude, stakeholders.

I started pinging my primary stakeholders and sending them emails or calling them to see how they were. Just a little relationship building. That led conversations that were mostly about nothing, but led to conversations where they opened up about issues. Whether the issue was with IT or the issue was amongst their own team, I always ask how I could help. Usually, they just wanted to gripe, but slowly they realized that I had some decent ideas and I WAS willing to help.

Make yourself an advocate to the customer; they need one. Stand up for them! As Laura’s site suggests, start bridging the gap that can be very divisive between the two units. Start thinking of things that IT can do that will help the customers help IT. For instance, I recently rewrote a process that spanned from business over to IT. The trigger to start doing it was that IT was spending huge amounts of customer dollars sitting in meetings to review incoming requests for change when the customers hadn’t even communicated. So the short version is, I built a shell and then contacted my favorite customer and asked her to partner up. We delivered a solution together to our senior managers and are both responsible for ensuring the adoption of the changes…her on the business side, me on IT. Together we succeed or fail.

Identify things that can better both areas, but DON’T fix it yourself, even if you can. Your business partner will rebel if he or she feels like IT is jamming something down his or her throat.

Again, hope this helps.
Doug

Doug

Then, there are a couple of other things that you can do to help yourself. Are you prevented from talking to only specific stakeholders? Are there others that you could get to with similar knowledge? Has the project undergone implementations in the past that may have captured some of the knowledge that you need or produced relationships that you could leverage without getting directly involved in the conversation? You’re going to need to think creatively in order to accomplish your goal…..which you probably need to define for yourself to keep your head straight. Exactly what is your personal goal here? Service the customer? Be an IT automaton doing what you’re told? Be an analyst? Your goal will clear the path and show you the correct direction…which will guide you around these obstacles. That’s sounds a bit corny, I know, but it really is important.

Hope this helps
Doug