Practice Archetypes — Why Quality Variance Isn't A People Problem

Hire better analysts. Run more training. Quality follows.

I used to believe it too. Then I watched this happen.

A large program added a second senior BA to lift quality. Both excellent. Within a month, the program had two structurally different flavours of requirements — different formats, different depth, different traceability. Quality variance went up. Reconciling them became someone's unofficial job.

Here's what I actually think — practice quality is an architecture property, not a people property.

You cannot hire your way out of a broken structure. Every capable person you add to it produces more volume and more variance inside the same missing system. The skill goes in. The consistency never comes out.

The consequence if you keep the old belief — your hiring budget keeps treating a design problem as a recruitment problem, and the gap compounds with every new starter.

Here's the question worth sitting with: if you swapped every BA on your team tomorrow, would the practice's quality hold?

If the answer is no — the practice was never the people.