How would you explain the value of a business analyst to a client who believes an administrator and a developer are sufficient?

1. I would avoid defending the role in the abstract and instead point at where projects without one typically lose money.
2. Admins and developers are excellent at building what they are asked for. The expensive failures happen upstream: building the wrong thing correctly, discovering conflicting requirements at UAT, or delivering functionality nobody adopts.
3. The BA's economic contribution is reducing rework. A requirement corrected during discovery costs a conversation; the same correction in production costs a release.
4. The BA also owns the connective tissue that neither role has time for: traceability from objective to test case, decision records, dependency tracking, and cross-departmental facilitation.
5. In practice, I would offer to demonstrate it on one contested area rather than argue — run the discovery, produce the process map and prioritised backlog, and let the client judge the difference in the delivery that follows.