Business analysis is used to identify, outline and articulate proposed changes in how organizations operate and how best they can facilitate business change. A Business Analyst is a conduit resource that is trusted to identify, define and present solutions that maximise the potential and value delivered by an organization to its stakeholders.
The aim of this piece is to provide the reader with a concise, yet rich summary of the fundamentals of business analysis within the development of software technologies, solutions and products.
This piece is aimed at those professionals who are seeking a career change, bosses who are looking to hire business analysts to join their team, and beginners who are unfamiliar with the concepts and methods of business analysis.
This piece focuses on Agile methodology, stakeholder management, business processes, requirements and business analysis in general. Although this piece is for beginners and people who are new to the world of business analysis, if you are an experienced Business Analyst you will be able to use this resource as a refresher and reference piece to keep your skills up to date.
This piece will touch on the history of the profession, the growing importance of having Business Analysts as part of any technology team, the unique mind and skill set a competent Business Analyst provides and much more.
Business Analysis: Defined
Over the last thirty years, this specific aspect of software development management continues to grow in importance. The profession has offered organizations sizeable benefit by making sure there is constant alignment between business needs and software development.
The rapid rate of technological advancements means even the most traditional and once conservative businesses are now undergoing techno-logical transformation, huge scale migration projects and rapid business change; the bridge between business needs and software development is closing all the time. Older legacy software and infrastructure is being ditched for more contemporary solutions as a result.
This means more people in the business require a robust understanding of business needs and the impact of business change and Developers need to ensure they are building the correct solution so both sides can optimize their resources and produce quality, valuable work. There is traditionally a gap between the business and technology and a Business Analyst (BA) is a conduit to this conundrum.
A Business Analyst is:
“An advisory role which has the responsibility for investigating and analyzing business situations, identifying and evaluating options for improving business systems, elaborating and defining requirements and ensuring the effective implementation and use of information systems in line with the needs of the business.”
Paul et al (2014)
Usually, the BA is deployed in a technology team to act as a facilitator of constant collaboration between business and technology. A BA will elicit business requirements for Developers and a BA will flag developmental anomalies back to the business.
The Role and responsibilities of a Business Analyst
Some of the main roles and responsibilities of a BA include:
• Investigating business systems
• Evaluate actions
• Document and convey business requirements
• Elaborate requirements
• Strategy implementation
• Business case production
• Specify IT requirements
Agile Systems Development
In terms of growth, Agile systems/software development and the business analysis profession are closely related. A BA can of course work in Waterfall or V-Model or other software methodologies.
However, the growing importance of Agile over the last twenty years has coincided with the growth of business analysis as a profession. A detailed understanding of Agile itself is required in order to understand how to optimize BA resource best.
Agile is a development approach which emerged in the late 1990s. Agile is summarized by smaller chunks of functionality, simpler code and frequent testing; Agile projects are judged on working software. Because of this change in mentality from the more traditional and widely adopted Water-fall methodology, a BA is expected to be constantly moving and maintaining consistent, meaningful value with the necessary stakeholders within the product/project team.
Agile
In software development Agile practices approach eliciting requirements and creating solutions through the collaborative effort of cross-function-al, self-organizing teams with feedback from customers/users integrated into the development of the solution.
1. Responsive
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Change
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
3. Frequency
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Team Rapport
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5. High Morale
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done
6. Transparency
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation
7. Software
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8. Sustainable
Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Technique
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simple
Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
11. Self-Sufficient
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12. Efficiency
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Agile principals include:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
Now we have a basic understanding of Agile it is important to know that software solutions and products, prior to the development of Agile were previously ratified by business and technology, specifically developers without Business Analysts.
Due to the constant miscommunication, be-tween the two sides, developers would often produce solutions that businesses were not happy with. Broadly speaking, this lack of transparency prompted the creation of Agile.
It could even be argued that the BA profession itself is the personification of Agile within a profession/role. As mentioned, a BA can be highly effective within a different software development framework, but most employers in today’s technological landscape require a solid understanding of Agile.
With cloud computing solutions, mass migration initiatives, the rapid rise of new technologies and so on, it is imperative to discuss Agile and where a BA fits in to this framework.
Stakeholder Management
Dealing, managing and getting the most out of your stakeholders is your bread and butter as a BA. It is imperative that you understand this. The reason why it is so important is because you are the conduit between everyone on the project, the only other members of the project team that actively interacts with everyone else is usually the Product Owner.
As such, a BA is really the only other member of the team that actively deals with all the stakeholders on a project on a regular basis. Most of the other stakeholders are Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who, when not working on the project have day jobs and business-as-usual (BAU) to deal with. This results in their time being restricted and therefore valuable.
Consider Perspectives
Stakeholder management is central to an effective and quality BA. Without the soft skills to speak with people, establishing and maintaining a good rapport and being able to elicit accurate requirements you won’t last too long in the profession.
Considering perspectives is all about understanding your stakeholders. Speaking to one stakeholder may prompt one discussion and speaking to another may prompt something completely different; your job is to find a solution within the business context that satisfies both when necessary.
The Implementation of Business Change
Soft skills are the more personal skills cultivated and developed in the work environment, skills such as people management, listening, punctuality, communication and so on are skills that are essential to this role. When eliciting requirements and trying to ascertain the fundamentals of a process, there will be situations where stakeholders are reluctant to provide you with information.
Why you ask?
Because a BA goes into a situation, analyzes the process and highlights any subsequent inefficiencies within the process. Once these findings are reported back to the business, the business may decide to automate these processes and make the personnel redundant. Your work may involve situations like this and managing people’s emotions will be a firm part of your repertoire as an effective BA.
Business Processes
Business processes are the methods in which an organization conducts internal operations and delivers its products and services to its customers. This section will highlight the basics of modelling processes and why a BA must be familiar with this. Some reasons for creating business process models include:
• Understanding how the current processes work. A BA is usually brought into a situation that requires transformation. Conveying the current or “As-Is” process illustrates this.
• To establish consistency: if an organization has too many disparate processes alignment and consistency may be an aim.
• The ability to identify strengths and weaknesses within a current process allows a business to allocate sufficient resources accordingly; this stems from an accurate description/depiction of business processes.
Business Process Models
Being able to model processes allows the necessary information to be communicated diagrammatically, a picture speaks a thousand words for a reason. Once we see how something works it can help us understand the process quicker as opposed to writing the process down. A quality BA knows what tools and when to use them; being able to model and explain business processes is critical to any success you will have as a BA.
A typical business process consists of five key aspects:
1. Tasks that make up the process
2. Process Flows
3. Decision Points
4. Actors
5. Outcomes
Business Process: Call a Taxi
This process outlines the necessary steps for a customer to call a taxi. The Actors are represented via aspects we refer to as ‘swim-lanes.’ Each swim-lane represents an individual interest. There is one start point in which the process starts, various tasks or processes and a single end point.
A process can contain multiple end points based on the process, but there should only be one point of origin. Being able to convey business processes in such a manner provides stakeholders with a high-level view of the overall process.
This allows for discussion, analysis, scrutiny and improvement to take place. As a BA you should become familiar with presenting information in such a way as it is an essential tool in your analytical arsenal.
Software Development Lifecycle
This is your typical lifecycle of product development. Products/projects usually follow this trajectory:
• Requirements
• Analysis
• Design
• Development
• Testing
• Evaluation
Requirements
One of the most important aspects of business analysis as a profession is the elicitation, definition, documentation and presentation of business and system requirements. A project by its nature is the attempt to successfully and smoothly deliver necessary change.
Therefore, it is of critical importance to clearly and accurately define the business and system requirements accordingly. Business Analysts (BAs) are responsible for defining requirements accurately as the BA’s documentation will form the basis for the development of the new processes and system changes.
Types of Requirements
Accurate requirements are essential to product/project success. Knowing how to categorize your requirements is also critical. Requirements fall into the following buckets:
• Functional Requirements: describe how a product must, should or could behave; it’s features and functions are explicitly stated.
• Non-Functional Requirements: are concerned with how the solution will perform and operate. Aspects such as speed of performance, security, access levels and so on are grouped here.
Unclear requirements result in a poor and an unusable product/solution once implementation is complete. This can result in delays and severe budgeting issues. You do not want this as a BA as there are a plethora of tools at your disposal for the job to be completed.
Ensuring that the requirements are intrinsically linked to the business needs and objectives is central to your job; any deviation away from this will not be pleasant!
The Problems with Requirements
According to Business Analysis (Paul, Cadle, & Yeates, 2014) over 80 per cent of errors with a product/project are due to poor elicitation of requirements. Fewer than 10 per cent of faults are introduced during the development stage – meaning developers are programming correctly, but what they actually build is incorrect – due to the requirements they receive.
• Most project/product development time is allocated to the build of the solution and not the gathering and analysis of requirements
• Insufficient detail in requirements documentation can lead to ambiguous, vague and inaccurate specifications
• Poor alignment between developed system and business strategy objectives
There are more reasons than the ones stated here but the list provided is designed to give you a preview of what can take place during the build of a product/project that can lead to an incorrect solution being delivered. Incorrect solutions lead to a loss of revenue, time, effort and confidence from the business.
The cost of correcting requirements increases dramatically the further along the development lifecycle the product build is on. Requirements analysis is usually the most error prone part of the build, therefore giving yourself the best chance of success is necessary and this is rectified by knowing how to group requirements, documenting them in an accurate way and ensuring the business take ownership of them.
Strategic Approach to Business Analysis
Being strategic in your approach, whether in relation to dealing with stakeholders or modelling a certain process or gathering requirements is very important as a BA. The correct approach has the potential to make a substantial difference in the goal you are trying to achieve, resulting in a more efficient workflow and better practices as a result. This section outlines some models worth knowing.
Strategic Approach
Fundamentally, one must ascertain the knowhow and judgement of what tool to use and when. You may be asking some of the following questions:
• How do I start to develop a strategy?
• Where does strategy development emerge from?
• How do I know what kinds of strategy to develop?
• How do I get the best results required in the timeframe I’ve been given?
A company founder may dictate strategy. If a business is already established and there is a loss of confidence a new CEO may be brought in order to change the strategic approach. Much like when Microsoft changed CEO from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella in 2014.
Sometimes, especially in smaller firms, strategy may derive from the actual customers on the ground in what is known as a Spotify approach. Spotify is where the innovations developed are discussed and ratified by the customers.
If 100 customers require a new feature to be developed but 1000 require another feature, then the firm will develop the feature that is backed and supported by the 1000 users. This responsive strategy allows a transparent approach between client and customer respectively.
A company may look internally for strategy, i.e., a group of managers may meet regularly in order to review trends in the market and tweak their own business processes accordingly. They may go on to plan new actions due to this. Strategy develops in an incremental, sequential way as a result. As a BA, you should be receptive to the wider business approach as it can help you in your day-to-day work.
External Strategic Tools
Now that we have established the importance of approach and some of the different styles of strategy, we need to understand some effective tools.
PESTLE
Political, Economic, Socio-Cultural, Technological, Legal & Environmental analysis is an effective tool as it can probably be deployed at the beginning of a project. You mainly want to adopt a PESTLE analysis when assessing the external environment.
As a BA when you engage with your stakeholders, stimulating and provoking useful dialogue is an essential part of your job, a PESTLE analysis workshop session can drive this. Here is a brief breakdown of PESTLE:
Political
• Government stability, tolerance or political situation
• Specific government policies
• Regulation and Tariffs
Economic
• Money supply
• Interest Rates
• Inflation
• Unemployment
• Taxation
Socio-cultural
• Demographics
• Social mobility
• Lifestyle changes/choices
Technological
• Technology advancements
• Government spending on technology
• Focus on technology
• Pace of change
Legal
• Legislation about trade practices and competition
• Compliance
• Financial regulation
• Employment Law
Environment
• Climate change considerations
• Animal welfare
• Plastic policy and waste management
As you can see, there is a host of factors and considerations that are taken into account whilst deploying a PESTLE analysis. Every project is different and the approach should be tweaked to your real-life situation and circumstances; this is just a broad guide and overview.
What the PESTLE approach is useful for is the fact it acts like a checklist. This means that on a basic level at least, you have covered important, macro areas of a project. If you leave some of these areas such as regulation, legal or taxation without addressing it, you may not be able to launch your product, project or initiative.
The paperwork must be done so getting it out in the open early will make your stakeholders aware and engaged and that it central to being an effective BA. As a BA you may use PESTLE analysis tools when working on a project where a new product is trying to service a new international market.
In order to understand the international demographic and market a PESTLE analysis may enable the Product Owner and/or Project Sponsor to weigh up the costs and benefits. Keep this analytical tool close as it is a measurable and successful strategic tool to use when necessary.
Porter’s Five Forces Model
Named after Michael Porter in his 1980 work (Porter, 2004), the Five Forces Model is used when an evaluation of an industries profitability needs to be assessed. This strategic model is centered around analyzing competition.
Without understanding the market in which your intended product will penetrate, you could lose a substantial amount of time and money, just like Wal-Mart in Germany. A good BA will bring these themes to the attention of all stakeholders, especially the Product Owner and the Project Manager. This will allow the project to be placed in competitive context.
The diagram shows five boxes. The middle shows the competitive landscape where all rivals meet and compete and where competitive strategies are developed. It is critical for organizations to understand their landscape. Also, you’ll be in a stronger position as a result of analyzing the competition. A BA should bring this information to stakeholder’s attention as soon as they can.
Internal Strategic Tools
Looking outside the immediate environment of a project or the firm you are working for is essential, but for effective strategy an introspective look is just as important.
MOST
MOST is an acronym for Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics
• Mission: Usually a short statement declaring or describing the market the business operates in and what the current goals are;
• Objectives: The specific, tangible goals that the company/project will be measured by;
• Strategy: The medium to long term approach that will be adopted by the organization in order to achieve the objectives and mission;
• Tactics: The details of the strategy that will be executed.
As a BA one of the first tasks is usually to read the Project Charter or to go through the MOST statement and ascertain whether it is clear or not. Analysis is your bread and butter and making insightful recommendations is why you’re on the team. It is important to remember the following:
Are the goals Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time Framed? (SMART) You’ll need to be weary of “scope creep,” a term used in the industry to describe where newer requirements are being worked on within a project that are not directly linked to the project aims/objectives. It is your job to watch out for scope creep and ensure it does not affect your goals.
Has the MOST been communicated with the managers and senior stakeholders? Engaging with SMEs is vital but not enough, you need buy in on all levels of work, not just SMEs. Senior stakeholders and managers need to be kept in the loop and must agree on the specifics of the strategy.
SWOT
SWOT is Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. You’ll likely be using this to summarize the results of an external or internal environment/vendor/situation.
When writing a SWOT Matrix remember to be brief as only the necessary detail is required. A SWOT Matrix may be presented to senior stakeholders as they approach business from a higher level than an SME. Be succinct, but ready to elaborate if required to do so.
Here is an example:
Strengths: “Strong branding, customers know, like and trust brand and are loyal when the release new products/services as sales suggest a strong bond.”
Weaknesses: “poor cash flow within the business at the moment against industry benchmark. Last year’s results show this and Q1 this year has not stopped this trend.”
Opportunity: “Emerging markets are showing good signs that our products/services may be popular – we must execute a powerful marketing campaign to capitalize on this.”
Threat: “relatively low barriers to entry despite branding efforts mean new entrants can enter market with relative ease.”
Remember, internal and external analysis will be different but must be aligned for the SWOT analysis to be effective. What this means is even if an external threat may be perceived as great or minor, you’ll always need to take it with a pinch of salt because you simply don’t know the details.
It is important to have an awareness of competition, but you also don’t want to dance to their tune; differentiation is critical and a good BA has the ability to point this out as and when required.
There are many more tools available for strategic analysis but the basics have been covered in this text. As a BA, you need to adopt a conscientious approach when using a strategic tool or tools.
You are responsible for ensuring the stakeholders on the team have what they need in terms of in-formation as well as making sure everyone is constantly in alignment; this ensures the team rapport is strong and the project/product development is cohesive throughout the build.
Conclusion
This piece is an overview of the fundamentals of Business Analysis as a profession and some of the skills that a quality Business Analyst must have. There is plenty more in terms of knowledge, techniques, lessons and so on.
But these aspects will pick picked up in a later volume. In conclusion, a BA lends her or his unique skill set to a business by ensuring cohesion exists at all times between business and technology respectively. By reading this text you know have a basic and foundational understanding of some of the key aspects of the profession.
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