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.
Ok, so I AM asking the engineers that. But we need to be angle to track the implementations for each client, and that is why we are using JIRA. I’m very open to alternative ideas, but one of the problems is that teams involved are using salesforce, JIRA, and ~~Atlassian~~ Azure, and this is causing a serious dearth of communication, as well as there being no way for anyone to get a bird’s eye view of where implementations currently stand. Frankly I have a lot more autonomy and control over this thing than anyone in this thread seems to be used to, so if people have better process ideas, I am all ears.
Since one makes the other, it's like saying "Rav4 and Toyota". I'm assuming you mean Confluence (aka Flatulence; or Confluenza for the stress-based sickness from watching the spinning please-wait-web-loading symbol too much).
Quit it.
No one uses those tools; they get used by the tools. They're slow, cloud-based, usually under-budgeted for the great gobby java blob-wrangling clown shows they are.
If you're asking deadline-driven engineers to use a slow cloud app like that, with their caffeine levels, and invite real feedback without fear of penalty, you're going to get some interesting opinions. Please, try to find something more usable for the non-deadline-helping work-tangents like documentation; which are important, but not on-fire-important like every other bloody thing on the list.
Sorry, meant Azure
Ok, so it seems that you're only talking about managerial stuff, whether to use Jira or Atlassian, engineers don't usually care about that, and there's usually no technical reason to use one or the other, so it could be that you're asking them to explain how a car works to try to figure out the best shoe to wear.
Also no one that's not involved in the project will have better process ideas because we don't know the process, and apparently neither do you from what you're saying, it's the thing the engineers "refuse" to explain to you. I think at the end of the day you need to sit down and explain what the higher ups want and listen to their ideas on how to get there.