BA as Stenographer

Am I schizophrenic?

Just one day after mouthing off about BAs injecting themselves into the requirements process far too much I feel a need to go on a rant about BAs acting as glorified stenographers. Just writing down whatever the user says and presenting it as a requirement.

I don't think this contradicts my last post, as I'm talking about different types of requirements. When you're collecting business requirements your job is really a drawing out, elicitation and ellucidation, when you're developing functional requriements is where you actually ahve to analyse and be creative yourself.

The problem comes when people get it round the wrong way, they get all creative about business requirements ("Hey! Lets solve this problem no one cares about in a way that no one wants.") and then just write down every functional requirement ("If the user says they want a thousand pop-up boxes every time they do everything who am I to say that could get annoying?").

User Requirements fall somewhere in the centre I suppose.

So now I end up right where I always end up. The fact that people don't differentiate between types of requirements enough.