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.
A lot of great answers here, but there’s another possibility I haven’t seen mentioned yet. When you are gathering information like this it says to the engineer that you want to change things, and they don’t know if that change is going to make things easier or harder for them. Usually things only ever get harder as a project lives longer. So they’ll be less incentivised to help you unless you give them an idea of what you intend to do and specify what problems you intend to solve to make life easier for them personally.
Also, as an engineer, things like this I generally see as less important than making sure the product works and that development is processing on pace. Having to explain everything about my job to someone coming in with 0 prior knowledge is a huge waste of time.
One tip I saw mentioned works well in this situation: get them to start complaining about things they hate about the current processes. Everyone likes to complain because it is cathartic.
It will help if you can educate yourself before talking to them. Present the info you have and ask them to fill in the blanks or make corrections. Must engineers like to solve problems, so present this as one for them to solve like a puzzle. Engineers are generally not novelists. Don’t ask them to just start spitting out history of The Process to you.