Improving
Business Analysis Proficiency
Enterprise Agility (“EA”) is an ideal partner to
assist organizations in their efforts to improve their requirements
management and engineering capabilities. Several key areas where
EA’s capabilities are beneficial for this type of effort
are:
- Establishing Metrics
- Designing a Successful Approach
- Governance and Measurement
- Adoption, On-Boarding and Stewardship
- Knowledge Asset Development
Establishing Metrics
The ability to identify metrics is a key for not only measuring
the effect of a change initiative, but also to ensure the continual
improvement of the new practices. EA has extensive experience
helping organizations establish baselines and metrics for business
analysis and requirements management activities. Our efforts focus
on:
- Creating baselines surrounding existing work practices for
measurements against new practices. The identification of both
quantitative and qualitative metrics.
- Identifying the appropriate level of rigor, granularity and
categorization of information for metrics capture and measurement.
- Ensuring that metrics are inclusive in their nature by linking
events throughout the business change and software development
lifecycle.
Design Successful Approach
EA delivers a comprehensive business analysis framework that
is both concise and practical. The business analysis framework
is implemented using an incremental progression strategy. The
primary goals of this strategy are to help improve requirements
management and increase business engineering maturity.
Because of EA’s past experience and the time-tested concepts
we bring to engagements, the potential flaws in approach, pitfalls
and challenges are easily identified and avoided when designing
processes, methods, techniques, artifacts and configuring performing
tools. The result is an effort that is right-sized to balance
the organization’s capacity with its objectives.
Our advice and assistance can focus on the following aspects:
- Performing a Gap Analysis - Assisting with
a Gap Analysis of inventory of existing work practices. Perspectives
of the gap analysis include: Activity-based Analysis, Role-based
Analysis and Document-centric Analysis. The analysis focuses
on identifying two key kinds of targeted areas of improvement:
Variation Points and Areas of Concern. Variation Points are
places in the work process where work practices differ between
projects and/or groups. Areas of Concern are techniques or methods
where the current work practices have significant weaknesses.
By identifying these areas of improvement in the context of
real-world projects, EA's Gap Analysis is able to identify a
tentative set of common Project Archetypes and identify specific
process and technique needs for each of these.
- Adopting Project Archetypes - These are
mechanisms for characterizing projects based on the needs of
the business and the constraints of the business organization,
the organization's business processes and workflows, the existing
IT platforms in place (if applicable), and architectural considerations.
Each Project Archetype is a lens or lifeline through the Business
Analysis Framework ensuring analysis and subsequent work products
are right-sized for the complexity and scope of the business
requirements, analysis and solution characteristics. The use
of Project Archetypes provide a rallying point for individuals
within organizations to collectively and consistently identify
and react to the practical variations that exist within the
business requirements, analysis and solution space.
- Designing Components of the Effort - Ensuring
requirements managements and engineering practices are tailored
to reflect various situations is a key to increasing competency
and effectiveness within the organization. Project Archetypes
along with a number of other key components need to be defined
and effectively communicated. EA partners with its clients to
address each of these components in the context of the effort:
- Techniques – The detailed steps, methods and guidelines
the Business Analyst follows to consistently produce analysis
artifacts.
- Artifacts – How information is packaged together
to specify some aspect of business requirements, analysis
or solution.
- Processes – The orchestration of activities performed
by the various collaborating roles in order to apply the techniques
and accomplish goals.
- Roles – The clear identification of roles and their
relationship to individuals and groups with the organization.
- Business Elements – The definition of the key business
elements that represent cohesive business requirements, analysis
and solution specifications along with how they relate to
one another.
- Requirements Characteristics and Relationships - The categorization,
traceability and attribution of requirements within the requirements
repository for effective requirements capture, analysis, management
and measurement.
Each of the above components should be considered for when identifying
the various touchpoints between requirements and the other phases
of the business and software change lifecycle, including ideation,
estimating, design, construction and testing and quality assurance.
- Re-Use and Preservation - The development
of practical approaches for reuse of requirements and preservation
of business-level specifications for increased business agility
and reduced rework within the SDLC and maintenance situations.
- Progression Strategy and Roadmap - Aligning
and communicating a progression strategy that is supported by
industry recognized practices and future releases of the IIBA
Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BA BoK).
Governance and Measurement
Effective governance and measurement requires careful upfront
planning to ensure the right level of governance is implemented
and measurements are in place to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness
of the work practices. It is effective to ensure governance is
viewed as a light weight set of guidelines for the organizations
that is sensitive to the varying situations within the organization.
Additionally, measurement touchpoints should be integrated into
work practices and tooling in a non-obtrusive manner that collects
timely information that can be an input for analysis and future
practice optimization.
EA can assist in several ways in designing effective approaches
for governance and measurements. These include:
- Root Cause Analysis - Defining an approach
for performing root cause analysis to correlate causes of defects
as they relate to the analysis and requirements definition phases
of initiatives with the organization.
- Adopting Completion Criteria - Defining
an approach that moves the organization towards defining objective
measures of quality including the introduction of completion
criteria for requirement specifications.
- Instituting Value-added Governance - Creating
a governance approach that is appropriate and perceived as value-added
for the organization and ensuring practitioner empowerment and
accountability for work practices.
Adoption, On-boarding and Stewardship
With any business change, the creation of new work practices
has to be carefully choreographed with an effective business change
plan. The impact on roles, processes, infrastructure and skills
needs to be carefully considered along with a plan for continued
stewardship and the ability to onboard new personnel. Ensuring
personnel are empowered with an understanding of how their work
directly impacts the organizations success and strategic goals
along with having the know-how to work differently. As instructional
designers and business change specialists, EA develops key communication
and skill building assets for these types of complex business
change initiatives.
Areas we assist our clients with related to adoption, onboarding
and stewardship are:
- Awareness Building and Onboarding –
Adoption is, most often, supported through a blend of awareness
building, introductory training and skill building. EA can assist
in formulating an integrated cohesive approach to communicating
and delivering the necessary knowledge to personnel within the
organization.
- Self-Serve Training Development - Mentioned
as a key differentiator, EA has a highly effective self-serve
training delivery capability engineered to deliver custom, internally
branded, job-relevant training. The training delivers consistent,
role-sensitive interactions that tie intent, skill building
and tooling topics together into a cohesive learning experience.
These high impact assets foster credibility within the organization
while ensuring maximum relevance, effectiveness and sustainability
related to the business change effort.
- Job Aid Development – Interactive
procedural guides and desktop references can be developed with
the topics optimized for ensuring maximum job relevancy. This
includes providing visual references to assist personnel in
understanding how tactical information relates to the broader
context of the business.
- Stewardship – Communication and stewardship
surrounding a business change effort is a critical success factor.
EA brings a number of perspectives and approaches that can be
leveraged for success in maintaining positive momentum for the
effort.
Knowedge Asset Development
EA brings to bear an extensive collection of business analysis
knowledge assets designed to be integrated into an organization’s
methods and approaches to implement business and software change.
This includes internal branding to achieve maximum effectiveness
and sustainable value related to communications, stewardship,
governance and skill building.
- Training and Job Aides - EA has workshop,
technique guide and desktop reference materials that focus on
requirements management and engineering techniques that directly
supports practitioners. These training, workshop material and
references can be integrated into an organization’s internal
training assets.
- Business Engineering Framework – A
comprehensive definition of 53 solution specification elements
that are organized within a meta-model to show dependencies,
linkages with other elements and how each view of the meta-model
(there are eight) helps the BA elaborate a different aspect
of the automation solution to be built, all tracing back to
the business vision (stakeholder requests).
- The Business Change Eco-system and the Business Analysis
Maturity Model – An easy-to-understand, objective
definition of BA maturity that documents five levels of achievement
using three affinities: Knowledge Assets; People and Organization;
and, Techniques and Tools.
Mentoring Framework – A repeatable plan
and process for how to initiate execute and transition a BA
mentoring program. Framework defines mentoring process, action
plans, proficiency definitions, "mentoring events,"
and an objective set of measurement criteria used for the 15
techniques under mentorship.
