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.
Accept “I have no idea” as an answer, and don’t use it as an opportunity to push things in the direction you want.
learn to account for people being wrong, and don’t punish them for it.Engineers want to be accurate. They don’t want to give answers that they’re unsure about or just speculating.
Early in their careers they’re often willing to, but that gets beaten out of them pretty quickly by people with deadlines. Expressing uncertainty often means the person interprets the answer in the direction they want, and then holds the engineer to that answer.
“It could be anywhere from 2-8 months I think, but we won’t know until we’re further into the design phase” is taken as 2 months, planned around, and then crunch Time starts when it starts to go over. Or revising an estimate once new information or changing requirements are revealed is treated as incompetence, even though more work taking more time is expected.It’s in the self interest of the engineer to be cagey. “I don’t like to give estimates this early” is much harder to turn into a solid commitment than an earnest best estimate given the current known state of the project.
Similar for resources required or processes. Anything you don’t say is unlikely to be held against you.
This is brilliant. I often suspected they did not want to “incriminate” themselves, and I have tried assuring them that that is in no way what I am about. I am looking to optimize processes, and I am very eager for their ideas on what would work better than what we’ve been doing.
I’m an engineer for past 20 years ,and the moment I get a whiff of some biz person fluffing bullshit I check out. Not saying you’re like that but something to be mindful of
So be real, honest, straightforward, put in effort into understanding the technicals so youre not just a sales annoyance or engineers will write you off right away IMO
Also I don’t think some people realize how busy or hard engineering can be. I’ve been working my ass off on a ground up new product and a lot of stuff just falls to the wayside out of lack of time
There’s also [email protected] [email protected] among others
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 proceeding 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. Most 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.
Real life mechE here. I’ll tell you how my brain works.
99% of the time when I get an odd request from outside of the department, it goes one of many ways:- the request is literally not in my scope of work and I let them sit for a day or two and then politely deny with a CC to my manager.
- the request is so vaguely worded that I could give a 2 sentence answer or a 20 page pdf answer or a PowerPoint full of flowcharts, and all would be “right”, leaving me in a state of decision paralysis and needing clarification.
- the request is something I can help with but I don’t know your technical capability levels, so I try to keep it very generic and high level as to not simply knock you over with a technical dictionary.
- the request is in my scope of work and very doable, but I do not want to inadvertently share information that I may not be allowed to divulge freely to other parts of the company.
And of course, there’s a lot of CYA reluctance too depending on what’s being asked.
If you’re asking first or second level engineers things like “how does your technical work flow do it’s thing?” you are starting at the wrong level for a documentation project of this massive scope. Engineers have managers whose job is to translate requests into technical terms and figure out who is the best at doing what. That’s what mine does: he takes a super weirdly worded ECR (engineering change request) and translates them into technical steps and clear direction for me. Then I can pick out the details needed to make it happen, confirm them, and document them.
You need to define clear needs out of your request: start with your end goal, the processes you need, the mechanical details of the processes you need to write, how much detail you are comfortable with, and the format in which you want it . and take all of that to the senior or director level of whatever department manages those systems. They may or may not know the exact information you need, but it should be their job to delegate and translate the request such that their reports can collate what you need in the form that you need it. And because it’s the director delegating, the engineers have inherent CYA and will be a lot more comfortable giving you what you need.
