I have always felt that the one essential trait that lifts a business analyst above the level of pure methodology is curiosity. To get good requirements, you need to be very curious about your topics. I’m glad to see my belief echoed in a good article by Kupe Kupersmith on his blog at the Business Analyst Times. In his recent post, “You Need Desire to be a Desired BA,” Kupe asserts that natural curiosity is a part of everybody’s personality, and BAs who exploit it are better at eliciting requirements:

If you have the desire you will adapt your approach over time to do what is right for the customer. You’ll question practices that are done just because that is how you or others have been doing it for years. You will become persistent in trying to find out the root cause of the business opportunity or challenge to feed your natural curiosity.

Frankly, all of life seems richer if you face it with a natural sense of wonder at how things work and what they mean. Good requirements elicitation comes not just from the initial questions we prepare for our information sources. It emerges from our follow-up, from the first answer followed by more questions to work out details, understand meanings, trace consequences and implications. As a one-time journalist, I often equate requirements-gathering to a kind of investigative reporting, where you never accept the first answer as the whole answer.

A natural curiosity also feeds itself, acting as an inspiration to continuously learn, and to not assume that what is true on one day will remain true forever.