Improving a Project’s Success by Conducting a Business Analysis
First of all, what the heck is a business analysis? Well, a business analysis is the discipline of identifying business needs, reviewing them, and finding solutions to various business-related problems. This process is also understood as a set of techniques and tasks that work as a link to stakeholders, helping them understand the organization’s overall structure, as well as the operation and general policies. A business analyst has the capability to take big tasks and compare them to how our organization operates, which will enable the analyst to decompose larger tasks into smaller, more manageable ones. By doing this, our organization can deliver goal-oriented value to the stakeholders that will show tangible results.
A thorough business analysis can bridge the gap between IT, business, developers, product owners and external stakeholders just to name a few. Some key reasons why a business analysis is useful include the following:
- It allows you to understand the structure and dynamics of the organization
- It helps identify problems & understand them, so that you can find solutions
- It allows you to identify improvements and recommend solutions that can help you achieve short & long term goals
- It helps you to identify and easily articulate the need for certain changes
- It helps to maximize the value delivered by an organization to its stakeholder So if you are like me and just beginning to adopt a business analysis strategy in your work center, you should look at some well-defined processes. One such model is the:
8-Step Business Analysis Process:
- Get well oriented with your project
As a new analyst, you need to outline & clarify your role; determine who the main stakeholders are and create a clear understanding of the project and its history. As well, it’s important to understand the existing system and current processes in place.
- Identify the primary objectives of the customer
It’s important to define the scope of the project as well as the business needs. That will require you to understand the stakeholders’ expectations as well as our own and merge them to create a shared understanding of the objectives. You will also need to ensure that the objectives are clearly defined and attainable & fall within the scope of the project.
- Clearly define the scope
Defining the scope of a project means that you must be able to articulate a clear & complete statement of the objectives. The scope will be the main concept and will help the team understand what the business need is. The scope is NOT a plan of implementation, but instead, is a guide detailing the steps of the analytical process.
- Create a plan
A solid business plan will assist with providing clarity to the overall analytical process and should define some key items:
- Selecting appropriate deliverables based on feedback from the customer and your internal processes
- Define what deliverables are required based on the scope of the project and who your key stakeholders (viewing audience) are
- Define specific timelines for delivery of the deliverables and which medium to deliver them on (Paper, Email, Confluence etc…)
- Define & detail the requirements
It is important to have clear and actionable requirements that can be realistically met. Requirements gathering will assist the development team with proposing good solutions that best meet the requirements. In this phase, you will collect all of the information that you can, analyze the information and create a draft problem statement. Then you will review and validate the requirements with the customer in a deliverable and through collaboration, fill any gaps to questions that are introduced during this critical process.
- Develop & support the technical proposal/implementation
Build & customize a notional deployment of the project goal based on the defined requirements. It is in this step that you and your team will work up a final proposal/solution to the problem statement, update the deliverables to answer the problem and any outlying questions, work with additional teams like the Cybersecurity team for baseline changes that need to be reflected in an Security Impact Assessment (SIA), the Program Management Office (PMO) to gain buy in and acceptance of your proposal, the users to ensure that the proposal meets their operational needs, and the Change Review Board (CRB) to codify that the change as valid.
- Implement the solution
Ensure that the solution meets Product Increment & Sprint timelines for installation and that the release meets the definition of “done”. You will analyze and be intimately familiar with all supporting documentation of the changes that are being made and will provide any necessary training to the user community to ensure that they understand any new processes or procedures. This will be a close relationship between you and your stakeholders, so it is imperative to work as closely as possible during all phases of this process.
- Assess the business value created by your solution
It is crucial that you stop and assess how the implementation of your changes, no matter how insignificant it might seem, affected your stakeholders. Try to capture the value created by the solution by evaluating the actual progress; metric data is always a good quantifiable measure of value. You also want to inform your stakeholders, users, developers and associates of the results and finally, ensure that you are conducting regular follow-ups to capture continued progress or identify features that are potentially no longer of value to the customer as well as what can be improved upon.
Additional Tools:
There are a wide variety of tools available to assist you with conducting a thorough business analysis. Not every tool will fit your exact need though, so it may take some time to find your niche. Here are some common tools & techniques used:
- M O S T – Short for Mission, Objectives, and Strategies, allows a business analyst to perform thorough internal analysis. This analysis focuses on what the organization aims to achieve and how to tackle it.
- S W O T – Short for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, SWOT helps you identify areas of strength and weakness and allows for the allocation of resources.
- M O S C O W – Sort for ‘Must or Should, Could or Would’, this technique allows you to prioritize the requirements by presenting a framework in which every requirement is evaluated relative to others.
- 5 WHYs – This technique consists of leading questions that allow analysts to single out the root cause of any issue by asking why the situation has occurred.
By understanding the structure of your organization and that of your customer, you can find effective solutions to most any problem by using an analytic approach. There are a wide variety of tools & techniques available and no one tool is the de-facto standard, so you must find what works for you and your organizational needs.
Good Luck!!
