New Kid On The Blog

20-FEB-2008:

Not many people understand what I do for a living. Sometimes not even myself. When I first moved to the UK, I had a tough time defining my roles to the head hunters so that they could match me to the right jobs.

I have a degree in IT and I worked as a programmer during my internship and for 3 months after my graduation. After that, Accenture (known as Andersen Consulting back then) offered me a highly paid job (for a fresh graduate) and I was known as an Analyst. What does an Analyst do? It varies and it depends on what projects you're working on, but mostly you just do whatever ... WHATEVER your boss asks you to do. For 4 years I was with Accenture, my role (or roles) were pretty undefined. Sometimes I would write business proposals, sometimes I would write tender specifications, sometimes I prepared powerpoint slides for my boss, sometimes I did testing and sometimes I just attended a lot of meetings for nothing.

My boss then left Accenture and joined Astro, and I followed shortly after. My job title in Astro was Solutions Architect. Haha ... it sounds ridiculous even when I think about it now. During my one year there, I've never architected a single solution. I got pregnant shortly after I joined Astro and my boss assigned me to a "relaxing" role so as to not stress me out. I was doing quality control for most part - which means here that when the vendor delivered a piece of software or functionality, I did the QA and signed on a piece of paper that said "okay". Simple stuffs ... just sign my name. :p

Now, I am a Business Analyst and here's what I do. I'll try to explain this right for the benefits of the non-IT people (and also for the IT people who have forgotten what they've learnt in school). When a project has an objective to deliver a piece of software or functionality, I come in to define the requirements. For example, the project that I'm working on right now involves building a new set-top-box (i.e. your Astro box). So what I do is to:

1. Define the use cases - IT people, do you remember what use cases are? UML? Basically I define all the scenarios in which a user will interact with the set-top-box. For example, how do I select a channel? I go to the TV Guide, select a category, browse the programmes, etc. It's more complicated than that but I'll explain later. Now, let me tell you what else I do first.
2. Define the detailed requirements (the fine prints) - this is a catalogue of what the system should do, the contraints, etc, etc. For example, TV guide must store 7 days of programming, it must display within 0.4 seconds after user requested it, etc.
3. Analyse the technical constraints - this, I mainly talk to the technical people and then document the constraints. For example, if satellite signal is lost, it can't display programme, so error handling is required, etc, etc.
4. Run workshops to get all the requirements signed off, i.e. everybody agrees that THIS is the system they want to build.

The final part is the toughest most of the time. Sometimes you get really funny responses that you don't know how to react to.

So my most recent use case documentation consists of scenarios where:

1. The user selects a future programme and schedule a recording.
2. When the time comes, the system records it.

In use cases, I need to define the Actors, triggers, pre-conditions and post conditions. In this scenario, the Actor is the TIME because it triggers the system to record the programme. Although it is bloody obvious what TIME means, standard documentation requires me to DEFINE what it is. So I wrote:

"Time - A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future."

One guy came back with a comment in an email saying: "I’m also not entirely convinced by the definition of ‘time’, I feel that time is inherently reversible at a quantum level and it’s only the innate entropy of biological processes that lead to a delusion of perception of singular causality."

I was like . We're not talking about Michael J, Fox and his time machine here. But he signed off in the end after I did some convincing to ignore the broader definition of time for the purpose of the context we're talking about.

So, do you understand what I do now? I can never make my dad understand it.

# posted by Skye @ 4:51 am