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.
It sounds like your job might be needlessly hard.
Coming up with a design for a new process that will fix all issues at once is very hard; you’re very likely to miss something important. Making such a process change in one go is also hard, even if you somehow happened to end up with a improbably good spec. Doing it by interviewing people sounds kinda doomed.
An easier path might be to take whatever holistic understanding you have right now and start in some corner of the problem where there are clear issues. Bring engineers and people who use the system together. Have the people who use the system walk through their common workflow together with the engineers, noting what parts are usually hard or slow them down. Keep people focused on improving things rather than arguing about how you got here.
Together come up with small achievable process or software fixes you can implement and evaluate quickly (like in a week or two). If it works out, you have now made a real improvement. If it didn’t work out, you understand the limitations a bit better and can try again, as it was pretty quick.
Helping to deliver real improvements in a way that’s visible both to the involved engineers and the people using the system will buy you a lot of credibility for the next step.