Business Analysis is a job that makes more sense when you work closely with customers at onsite locations but it doesn’t always happen that way. Many a times Business Analysts work from offshore and help the technical team clarify key questions. The offshore BA sends questions through email, schedules virtual meetings with business stakeholders and tries to get clarity on requirements. Now, all of a sudden, an onsite person from your team starts to interact with the customer and takes the lead on requirement clarification but you know it will not work as you have been through the questions and you only know the background of them. Hence the onsite person needs a knowledge transfer from you so that he understands the intention of the questions. You seem to feel bad that why you are sitting in offshore and not at the client side. You may have your personal reasons to stay back in offshore but it’s painful sometimes.

What should be your strategy when as a BA you are stuck in offshore:

1. You cannot be a generic BA in offshore, rather you need to know the technology to become Functional Consultant so that you can discuss key techno-functional aspects with developers and suggest a solution to your client.
2. You cannot be in a 9 to 6 job, rather make yourself flexible to overlap the office schedule to spent some hours with customer schedule either early morning or late night.
3. Define a clear responsibility for the onsite person of your team. Both of you should not do the same set of work, rather ask him to take handover from where you leave it day before.
4. Make sure you are not left out from some critical meetings that happen in onsite. If the schedule doesn’t match with you, ask someone to record the meeting and share with you.
5. Always take email or chat approvals from your stakeholders for any decision you make. Do not assume. Keep all approval mails in a single folder.
6. Don’t take up unimportant and unnecessary works just because you are in offshore. Avoid saying YES. Learn to understand your role in the project and focus on the specific outcomes only.
7. Don’t get too much involved in outside project work to impress your boss. If you manage some time, learn something, document it, align it to your current engagement and share it with others to show your Knowledge.

BAs in offshore may face a lot of issues for not being available in the client site. I have tried to highlight some points so that you can enjoy your place and still be key player in the team.