How to incorporate Business Analysts into Scrum and sprints?

If your product is simple, business analysis is typically done by the product owner itself. The product owner is responsible for the return of investment so the business analysis is a natural part of this responsibility.

The complex product however often fulfill the requirements of different market segments, user, with different jobs, pains, and gains. The product owner will need help to understand the context of the system and all the important details. A business analyst is a role in a traditional non-agile environment who takes care of an understanding, analysis, and proposal to target these areas.

Business analysts are in some agile teams regular members of agile teams who work closely with the development team on sprint backlog items that should be delivered in the sprint. In such a case the work of business analysts is transparently published on Kanban boards of the team.

Another approach we see in real life is business analysts who are part of the Product Owner’s circle, a micro team of people who prepare backlog items for the next iterations upfront for agile development teams. Some other roles who work in the Product owner’s Circle are people from sales, marketing, UX, architects, and operation. The main goal is to have requirements ready for the development communicated with stakeholders. This approach leads to a separate kanban board for the product owner’s circle micro team where they track the status of preparation of requirements. Once prepared, items are dragged to the team’s kanban board in the next sprint planning session. SAFe calls such PO circle’s board Portfolio Kanban.

Portfolio Kanban