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.
This is a hard one. Because this is not about engineers, but their nature as people.
An anecdote: A lawyer, once casually asked me - if I were to design a building (this was hypothetical, because I am not a civil engineer) and after construction, was to realise some mistake that would cost lives, would I go on to tell them about it - and his tone seemed like he considered it common sense that I won't report it.
So, at least in his mind, it is common sense that people hide their mistakes.
I am a kind of person that doesn't know that people find it difficult to understand concepts out of their domain (mostly because I understand most, well explained stuff, irrespective of domain) and if someone were to ask me about my work, I would easily wander into the details. After a few years of industry experience, realising that to not be the case, I tend to be more abstract.
If you want the engineers to tell you more in depth about the technical stuff, I'd suggest you to show them your aptitude to understand their stuff and you will see them going more into detail of it. I had a manager (kind of), who was also an engineer and used Linux on a regular basis. I found it easy to discuss more in depth regarding solutions (the product was using Linux too) due to his familiarity.