Professional Business Analysts / The politics

Most requirements conflicts are resource conflicts

Two functions are not disagreeing about the system.

When two departments cannot agree on how a process should work, the disagreement is frequently not about the process. It is about which of them absorbs an effort, carries a risk, or loses a discretion. The system is where that argument becomes visible because the system requires a decision, but it did not originate there and it will not be resolved by better analysis.

The failure mode is an analyst attempting to resolve it analytically: more workshops, more detailed options, a comparison matrix. Each round produces agreement in the room and reversal afterwards, because the actual objection was never stated and therefore was never addressed. The signal is a decision that keeps being reopened by someone who was present when it was made.

The useful move is to name the trade honestly and route it upward. This option puts the checking effort on one team and the delay on another. That framing is uncomfortable and it converts an unresolvable design discussion into an ordinary management decision, which somebody has the authority to make.

What an analyst should not do is decide it quietly by choosing a design. That resolves the immediate blockage and leaves an unowned decision that will be relitigated at the worst moment.

The related failure is treating the escalation as a defeat. An analyst who routes a decision upward sometimes feels they have failed to resolve something, and the opposite is usually true: recognising that a matter is not resolvable at the level it is being discussed, and framing it so that somebody with authority can decide it quickly, is a substantial contribution. The alternative is weeks of workshops that produce a decision nobody has the standing to make stick.