Business Analyst

Business Analysis is the process of understanding business change needs, assessing the impact of those changes, capturing, analysing and documenting requirements and then supporting the communication and delivery of those requirements with relevant parties.

Who is a Business Analyst?
"Today's Business Analyst may reside within any part of an organisation and this has a direct effect on the way they work and the deliverables they produce"

"Business Analysis is the process of understanding business change needs, assessing the impact of those changes, capturing, analysing and documenting requirements and then supporting the communication and delivery of those requirements with relevant parties."

A Bit of History: Requiring straightforward automation of repetitive administrative tasks and conversion from paper to electronic data storage, IT projects of the seventies and early eighties could not fail to be successful and reap financial rewards.

Systems Analysts took responsibility for documenting existing manual paper based processes, identifying problems and new business requirements, and then automating these processes through computerised systems. This provided significant savings in staff as well as improvements to customer service through access to electronic information in fractions of a second.

Throughout the late 1980's and 1990's, companies started to evolve their IT systems to take advantage of new technology as they attempted to make further savings or improvements in service. However, IT projects in this era continually failed. They either failed to deliver at all, or were delivered without providing any significant business benefits.

The reasons for failure were that projects became unfocussed, receiving (sometimes conflicting) demands from different business departments. Systems were developed with unrealistic business cases, without clear objectives, with unmanaged expectations of performance or merely to follow the 'emperors new clothes syndrome' of jumping on the latest technology bandwagon.
Business users became increasingly frustrated with the barriers that limit their ability to implement change promptly and effectively. As PC and server technology evolved, business users became wise to IT and started to purchase and build their own localised systems. This has left many companies in a position where as well as their existing 'legacy' systems, they have hundreds of different systems which often link in an uncontrolled fashion with no real documentation to explain the links.

The Business Analyst has Evolved:
Throughout this period, the role of the Systems Analyst evolved into the Business Analyst. This role encompasses more than the ability to document processes and apply technological expertise.

While the Systems Analyst belonged to the IT department, Business Analysts can now be found within a number of places in organisation structures:
1: Within the IT department acting as a conduit to and from the business
2: Within individual business units with responsibility for identifying business needs
3: Within a change management department coordinating and managing change across the whole business.

But wherever they sit, Business Analysts must be great communicators, tactful diplomats, problem solvers, thinkers and analysers - with the ability to understand and respond to user needs in rapidly changing business environments.

We define the purpose of the role of the Business Analyst as being ultimately responsible for ensuring that organisations get the most from their limited IT and change management resource.

Business Analysts are responsible for identifying change needs, assessing the impact of the change, capturing and documenting requirements and then ensuring that those requirements are delivered by IT whilst supporting the business through the implementation process. Business Analysts should not just write specifications and then leave them to be delivered. The development lifecycle is an iterative one and the Business Analyst must be involved from initial concept through to final implementation.

Business Analysts are likely to be the key change facilitators within your organisation. They must deliver effective solutions which provide tangible business benefits usually within short timescales.

Business Analysis

Business analysis helps an organization to improve how it conducts its functions and activities in order to reduce overall costs, provide more efficient use of resources, and better support customers. It introduces the notion of process orientation, of concentrating on and rethinking end-to-end activities that create value for customers, while removing unnecessary, non-value added work. The person who carries out this task is called a business analyst or BA.
Those BAs who work solely on developing software systems may be called IT Business Analysts or Technical Business Analysts.

Business analysis sub-disciplines:

Business analysis, as a discipline, has a heavy overlap with requirements analysis, but focuses on identifying requirements in the context of helping organizations to achieve strategic goals through internal changes to organizational capabilities, including changes to:

policies, processes, and information systems.

Some professional business analysts believe that business analysis can be broken down into six major knowledge areas:
Enterprise Analysis: focuses on understanding the needs of the business as a whole, its strategic direction, and identifying initiatives that will allow a business to meet those strategic goals.
Requirements Planning and Management: involves planning the requirements development process, determining which requirements are the highest priority for implementation, and managing change.
Requirements Elicitation: describes techniques for collecting requirements from stakeholders in a project.
Requirements Analysis: describes how to develop and specify requirements in enough detail to allow them to be successfully implemented by a project team.
Requirements Communication: describes techniques for ensuring that stakeholders have a shared understanding of the requirements and how they will be implemented.
Solution Assessment and Validation: describes how the business analyst can verify the correctness of a proposed solution, how to support the implementation of a solution, and how to assess possible shortcomings in the implementation.

Roles of Business Analysts:

As the scope of business analysis is very wide, there has been a tendency for business analysts to specialize in one of the three sets of activities which constitute the scope of business analysis.

1. Strategist: Organizations need to focus on strategic matters on a more or less continuous basis in the modern business world. Business analysts, serving this need, are well-versed in analyzing the strategic profile of the organization and its environment, advising senior management on suitable policies, and the effects of policy decisions.
2. Architect: Organizations may need to introduce change to solve business problems which may have been identified by the strategic analysis, referred to above. Business analysts contribute by analyzing objectives, processes and resources, and suggesting ways by which re-design (BPR), or improvements (BPI) could be made. Particular skills of this type of analyst are "soft skills", such as knowledge of the business, requirements engineering, stakeholder analysis, and some "hard skills", such as business process modeling. Although the role requires an awareness of technology and its uses, it is not an IT-focused role.
Three elements are essential to this aspect of the business analysis effort: the redesign of core business processes; the application of enabling technologies to support the new core processes; and the management of organizational change. This aspect of business analysis is also called "business process improvement" (BPI), or "reengineering".

3. Systems Analyst: There is the need to align IT Development with the systems actually running in production for the Business. A long-standing problem in business is how to get the best return from IT investments, which are generally very expensive and of critical, often strategic, importance. IT departments, aware of the problem, often create a business analyst role to better understand, and define the requirements for their IT systems. Although there may be some overlap with the developer and testing roles, the focus is always on the IT part of the change process, and generally, this type of business analyst gets involved, only when a case for change has already been made and decided upon.

In any case, the term "analyst" is lately considered somewhat misleading, insofar as analysts (i.e. problem investigators) also do design work (solution definers).

Business process improvement:

A business process improvement (BPI) typically involves six steps:
1. Selection of process teams and leader: Process teams comprising 2-4 employees from various departments that are involved in the particular process, are set up. Each team selects a process team leader, typically the person who is responsible for running the respective process.
2. Process analysis Training: The selected process team members are trained in process analysis and documentation techniques.
3. Process analysis Interview: The members of the process teams conduct several interviews with people working along the processes. During the interview, they gather information about process structure, as well as process performance data.
4. Process documentation: The interview results are used to draw a first process map. Previously existing process descriptions are reviewed and integrated, wherever possible. Possible process improvements, discussed during the interview, are integrated into the process maps.
5. Review Cycle: The draft documentation is then reviewed by the employees working in the process. Additional review cycles may be necessary in order to achieve a common view (mental image) of the process with all concerned employees. This stage is an iterative process.
6. Problem Analysis: A thorough analysis of process problems can then be conducted, based on the process map, and information gathered about the process. At this time of the project, process goal information from the strategy audit is available as well, and is used to derive measures for process improvement.

Goal of business analysts:
Ultimately, business analysts want to achieve the following outcomes:
1: Reduce waste
2: Create solutions
3: Complete projects on time
4: Improve efficiency
5: Document the right requirements

One way to assess these goals is to measure the return on investment (ROI) for all projects. Keeping score is part of human nature as we are always comparing ourselves or our performance to others, no matter what we are doing. According to Forrester Research, more than $100 billion is spent annually in the U.S. on custom and internally developed software projects. For all of these software development projects, keeping score is also important and business leaders are constantly asking for the return or ROI on a proposed project or at the conclusion of an active project. However, asking for the ROI without really understanding the underpinnings of where value is created or destroyed is putting the cart before the horse.

Pre Sales - How Does It Work ?

Clients or companies that need software services and project implementations generally call for proposals from a pool of preferred vendors. Although it is hard to generalize on the nature of or the contents of such proposals, most documents follow a structured framework: detailing the project, asking vendors for suggestions or solutions or proposals along with cost estimates regarding the work to be done.

RFP responses would generally involve two components:
I: The Technical Solution: A typical response to an RFP or proposal will include a substantial technical component. People responding to RFPs at service firms generally follow a well-defined operating process involving plugging the response documents with common templates about the company and its capabilities. The customization process kicks in when it comes to project and client specific responses; and here is where someone with a technical background is really valuable. Technical subject matter experts are needed to analyze the client's problem, think through a framework to create a solution based upon their knowledge and experience. Such skills can be especially useful while preparing a proof of concept or technical demo.

The focus areas include:
1: Demonstrate to the client that you Get their problem and showcase how you will approach the solution: During Pre-sales phase, technical solutions could include a mockup of the end-state technical view, reference architecture, approach or framework to solve the client's specific problem.

2: Demonstrating organizational capabilities: Organizations typically demonstrate their capabilities by referencing past successes (Case studies, whitepapers etc), and may also develop proof-of-concept (POC), demonstrations or mockups.

II : Commercials and Administrative Aspects: Commercial and administrative aspects include a whole gamut of activities involved in responding to clients with specific reference to the processes involved in executing the engagement / project. Cost is definitely a key criteria organizations use while evaluating a proposal though depending on the nature of problem being sourced, the credentials of the vendor and the solution may take a higher priority. The administrative aspects include a high-level estimate of the effort involved in terms of duration (time), effort (people/resources) and additional resources including infrastructure etc required to successfully provide the required solution. Estimating the level-of-work involved may include formal estimation techniques based on expertise from past projects or could be a very heuristic process, especially for newer technologies without adequate benchmarks.

The focus areas may include:
1: Cost, budget and financials: What is the total cost to the client, how often will they be invoiced and the mode of payment etc? This may include defining the billing model: Time and Material (T&M), Fixed Price (FP) or other blended models.
2: Staffing plan, resource management: Responses to proposals typically include staffing plans (how many people, skills they bring to the table, roles etc) and may also include other resources needed including specific systems, hardware, software etc.
3: Credentials, testimonials and references from past clients: There are instances where clients may ask for specific testimonials from existing/past clients of service firms. Staff engaged in pre-sales activities should be able to arrange for such references.