EXPOSED
The documentation core of this job — writing requirements specs, drawing process flows, building cost-benefit spreadsheets, translating business asks into technical stories, drafting test plans and user guides — is exactly what LLMs already do at usable quality. What survives is the political and organizational work: sitting in a room with a finance director and a warehouse supervisor who disagree about what 'inventory' means, and owning the call on scope, sequencing, and vendor selection. No license, no signature requirement, so the only moats are stakeholder trust and accountability for whether the system actually gets adopted.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Requirements documents, as-is/to-be process diagrams, UAT scripts, data-mapping tables and gap analyses are structured text generation that models produce at first-draft quality, which caps this at 9; what pulls it above the 6 line is elicitation itself — discovering that the shipping team maintains a shadow Excel workbook nobody mentioned in the intake meeting, and running the workshop where three departments are forced to agree on a single definition of 'active customer'.
Fully desk- and screen-based. A 4 reflects a job done entirely in Jira, Visio, Confluence and Teams calls, with the only physical element being occasional presence on a plant floor or in a clinic to watch how the current system is actually used — observation you could do over video and often do.
No licence, no signature requirement. No state licenses systems analysts, nothing you produce carries a stamp, and when a requirement is missed the vendor contract or the CIO absorbs it; the 2 rather than 0 acknowledges that CBAP/PMP or vendor certifications appear on job postings and occasionally on SOW staffing requirements, but they gate nobody's work.
Some relationship component. A 10 is earned by being the person the operations VP calls before she calls IT — years of knowing which of her workarounds are load-bearing — but it stops short of the 13+ band because you are usually staffed to a project, replaceable at the next SOW renewal, and the sponsor's real relationship is with the delivery partner or the platform vendor.
Meaningful discretion. The 12 sits at the top of real discretion: you decide what goes in release one versus the backlog, whether to configure or customize, and which vendor demo actually meets the requirement — calls that cost millions and get overruled by a steering committee, which is exactly why it isn't 15.
Has AI actually changed your work?