Skip to main content

Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles.

There is a popular adage often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, the father of time management, “Failing to plan is planning to fail,” The quote may sound like music to your ears but planning for business analysis work is a key area which tries to zero in on the importance of planning in a software development project. Sadly, it is a step that is often overlooked.

The absence of proper planning can detrimentally affect timely meeting of the on-going project deliverables. To avoid such a failure it is vital that a project manager ensure that the requirement planning activity is given due importance, so that everything is under complete control.

So, how can a project manager ensure that a business analyst (BA) is given the power of execution to get the things delivered with the required level of quality and within the defined time frames. Let’s examine some of the key pointers essential to effective business analysis planning.

The Planning Stage

The planning stage gives a high level understanding of the intended software product. It gives the project team a pulse of the current systems and processes, while evaluating the existing deficiencies and identifying the key objectives that need to be addressed in the proposed software development activity.

The planning stage also helps the stakeholders identify the risks that may be associated with the project. Over time, the business requirements keep growing in an attempt to enhance the existing functionality. The objective of the planning stage is to make it absolutely clear – working in partnership with the client and the development teams – what full range of functions and content will be addressed.

The Kick-off Meeting

The kick-off meeting is the opening play of the project. It is an ideal occasion for the project team and the client to introduce them selves and set the project expectations and milestones. The meeting should identify the team roles across the entire spectrum of project related activities, in order to ensure that these activities get completed smoothly.

Requirements Tools and Templates

The business analyst analyses, documents, manages and presents the project requirements for review and approval to the client in a comprehensible manner. As part of the planning process, and early in the project, the BA should communicate to the customer the standard templates and requirement management tools they will adhere to, in order to document the requirements specifications.

For projects large in size and complexity, it is important to make use of requirements management tools to manage version change, track requirement status, communicate with stakeholders and reuse the requirements wherever possible.

Define Points of Contact and Escalation Hierarchy

Should there be any queries or concerns regarding any aspect of the planned project activity, it is important to define a clear process to identify the key points of contact in the project engagement with proper escalation mechanism.

The steering committee is responsible for advice on strategic direction, overseeing planning and implementation, resolving open issues, achieving the project deliverables and milestones, and for preparing a weekly project status report giving updated and accurate information as the project progresses.

The Requirements Sign-off: A Project Milestone

It is imperative that every project participant understand what the Requirements Sign-off means, and its associated impact on the project. Clients should not dismiss sign-off as meaningless, but rather consider it as an important project milestone.

Requirements sign-off means a formal agreement with the project stakeholders, stating that the contents of the requirements document, as drafted, are complete to the final projections and that there are no open issues left to be addressed.

Obtaining a requirements sign-off is typically the final task within the framework of Requirements Communication, which is an expression of the output of requirements gathering to all those concerned with the project.

Conclusion

A holistic approach is absolutely essential and indispensable for the success of the project. It takes effort to leverage and climb the ladder of success. The journey is indeed rewarding and also a voyage of discovery.

Nilesh A. Raje is a Sr.Consultant (Functional) with SYSTIME Computer Systems Ltd. SYSTIME (www.SYSTIME.net) is a leading global business provider delivering reliable, high-quality, cost-effective IT solutions and services. Nilesh has extensive experience in Business Analysis. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering and is also pursuing his Master’s in Business Administration. He has also been published earlier with International Institute of Business Analysis, a leading association in the world of business analysis, as well as in a previous issue of Project Times. In 2007, Nilesh represented his country as “The Youth Icon of India” in Brussels at the First CCS World Youth Forum in the European Parliament. Nilesh can be reached at [email protected].

Getting Back To Basics

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles.

First Fundamental: Understanding Overall Business Goals

I have noticed themes emerge during each of the last few years, which I believe embodied overall trends during the year.  For 2008, I believe “getting back to basics” is a theme that deserves great attention and consideration.  With the tremendous growth in both the acknowledgment and the embrace of the profession of business analysis, it’s hard not to imagine BAs being simply overwhelmed by the vastness of information that exists. Returning to the foundational principles of business analysis will make the vastness more navigable.

In a Google search of business analysis, the results weighed in with an impressive 73,300,000 hits. With all that information out there, where does one begin trying to understand how he or she might be successful in practicing even reasonably good business analysis techniques?  Returning to the fundamentals will enable you to utilize a kind of Occam’s Razor, or law of economy, in your technique.  Occam’s Razor is a principle originated in medieval times, and still used today, which states that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.  In other words; the simpler the better. 

There are five key fundamentals that will enable you to wield your own Occam’s Razor and derive great requirements: 

  1. Understand the overall business goals and the desire to build a solution that meets them
  2. Create a common understanding of “vocabulary” to be shared by all
  3. Identify the sources from which you will extract your requirements
  4. Understand which elicitation technique is most appropriate, considering your resources
  5. Understand – with absolute clarity –  what modeling techniques are most appropriate, given the solution(s) to be designed

This article will focus on the first fundamental. Successive articles will expand on the remaining four areas that must be practiced time and again on any BA development and management opportunity.

Be Clear On The Vision

So very often I have had the opportunity to parachute into a project where the requirements development process is well underway or about to get underway. Sadly, in the majority of cases, when I ask team members what the overall vision is for what they are doing, they are unable to answer this fundamental question. Without a common understanding of your destination, how can you and the rest of your team members be clear or confident on what directions you are to take in identifying stakeholders and defining, developing and even managing the requirements process?  No matter how large, how small or how urgently the client “has to have this,” creating a vision statement provides a map, and the BA is the compass that guides the organization in following the map. 

It isn’t my recommendation to write a lengthy vision statement; quality rules, not quantity.  In order to accurately define a vision statement for the project that you are about to begin or are currently adrift in, a simple question may prove to be the guiding light: “Is what we are doing adding value to the organization in that it supports the organization’s overall business goals, values, vision or mission?”

If you or any of your team members cannot answer this question in a short and concise manner, your project is at risk.

Some basic steps can be taken to correct the navigation instrument that will guide you to your destination.  Simply stated, the vision answers the who, what, why, when, where and how of what you are about to embark upon.  Consider this: if you were to get in an elevator at the lobby level and the executive sponsor were with you, could you accurately describe to him or her in one minute or less what it is that you are working on?  That’s right-a vision statement is your “elevator” speech, but from a business point of view.

There is no question that this will often evolve into a project charter or form the basis from which you will continue to refine your business case.  This is the starting point and will continue to provide input into other areas of your project, so above all, be clear on what you will include in your vision statement.  Here are some guidelines that I recommend:

  1. Clearly articulate the reason(s) that stakeholders are seeking to develop a solution
  2. Identify who the consumers of this solution will be
  3. Determine if the solution supports the overall business goals and objectives

Facilitating Consensus Among Stakeholders

If you are clear about the above process, then a facilitated session with key stakeholders and the executive sponsor with the intent of verifying these guiding statements should prove to be a relatively easy task.  Have the group identify the following:

  1. Why is there a need for a particular project?  Are we solving a problem?  Taking advantage of an opportunity?
  2. Who are the consumers of the end result (external customers, internal users, etc.)?
  3. What benefits will the organization realize and the consumer of the solution realize? Can we quantify those benefits?
  4. What is the nature of the solution?  Is it an improvement to an existing system or process? Are we in the hunt for a new product or service? Are we taking on the implementation of a complex system?
  5. If it is a service we are going to offer, will it be competitive or allow our organization to remain competitive in the marketplace?  Will it be a unique offering or service that consumers will actually want or use?

All of these questions can be answered using a variety of facilitation techniques, including

  • Brainstorming, or the nominal group technique
  • Requirements identification
  • Requirements prioritization
  • Consensus building
  • Workshops
  • Gap analysis

Prioritize the results if necessary but, above everything else, be certain that all the stakeholders come to a consensus on the vision statement and that it aligns with the overall business objectives and goals.  Using the steps outlined, one should be able to derive a vision statement. The following example is a vision statement for the development of a travel and expense management solution:

Any individual or business unit  that incurs expenses will immediately realize that automating such things as credit card downloads, approval chains, assigning GL codes, and converting foreign currencies will improve the speed and efficiency with which reports can be written and approved. Unlike the conventional and cumbersome means of filling in a spreadsheet, a Web-based product will not only provide the convenience of accessibility, but will also prove to be a great tool for auditing and evaluating types of expenses incurred, and negotiating travel expenditures with respective vendors.

The Three Ls of Business Analysis

I’m sure you’ve heard the three Ls of real estate:  location, location, location.  It’s the overriding, fundamental principal that every realtor knows.  For BAs, the word (and function) “quantify” is our equivalent mantra.  Here’s the best part about quantifying your findings: it’s empowering. 

Too often BAs abdicate their true role and become order takers.  Quantifying your findings will restore your true role as an objective advisor.  It takes the burden from you of being the bearer of bad news, since the numbers-the expected ROI or Internal Rate of Return (IRR), the amount and value of resources required, the deliverables-speak for themselves.  Quantifying the potential outcome will make the case for either assuredly moving forward or knowing that a project or program is not feasible. 

Take, for example, a retailer whose mission is to be number one in sales in their market.  Does it mean they are going to source the merchandise they sell or manufacture their own as well?  The BA’s role is to provide quantification to demonstrate outcomes for both sourcing and manufacturing options. Eliciting proper requirements is critical at this stage to determine, among other needs, what the target market should be, who the customers are, who is responsible for implementation and product development in its entirety.  

The Fundamental Edge

In a favorite quote of mine by John F. Kennedy, he said, “There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”  Heady stuff, but it certainly applies when the success or failure of a business or organization is at stake. 

Time and time again I have witnessed client/customer pressures to produce quality services, and the effects that these pressures have had on a project team and BAs due to “cutting corners” in order to meet these demands.  Failure to get back to basics will result in increased risk, decreased quality and budgets that amount to, or exceed, the number of hits that Google produces when you perform a search for business analysis!

These are just a few of the risks BAs face as they perform their jobs.  However, deploying the fundamentals will ensure that you provide your best counsel for the organization’s success.

This is the first in a five part series of articles by Glenn Brûlé.

Glenn R. Brûlé has more than 18 years experience in many facets of business, including project management, business analysis, software design and facilitation. At ESI (www.esi-intl.com), he is responsible for supporting a global team of business consultants working with Fortune 1000 organizations. As the Director at Large for the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), Brûlé’s primary responsibility is to form local chapters of the IIBA around the world by working with volunteers from organizations across various industries, including financial services, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, insurance and automotive, as well as government agencies.

Managing Requirements: Can ITIL help?

Written by Terry Longo on . Posted in Articles.

Over the last six months I have presented to numerous audiences on the topic of how Business Analysis and IT Service Management (based on ITIL) can work together, indeed must work together, to drive the level of quality and cost-effectiveness we are all seeking within the IT solutions space.

Interestingly, there has been a notable difference in the nature of the feedback

  • PM/BA audiences (such as those at the Project Summit / BA World events) have provided fairly positive feedback (and in fact the trend is upward over time)
  • ITIL knowledgeable/experienced audience feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, to the point where they are asking to have the presentation brought to their own organizations!

I am predicting that over time, as BAs look for additional ways to strengthen the rigor of their business cases, they will increasingly rely on the IT organization’s use of ITIL as a basis for defining and driving fundamental BA/IT interactions, including change management and financial characterization of solution development, deployment, and operation.

If you are a BA, do you work within or with an ITIL-based IT organization?  If so, can you identify specific benefits that have emerged from the IT organization taking the ITIL path?

Terry Longo has more than 25 years of IT experience, including software development, system and network administration, and instructing, as well as being responsible for the requirements, project management, and delivery aspects of complex training solutions. He currently holds the IT Service Manager ITIL and is responsible for HP Education’s ITIL, Project Management and Business Analysis curriculums in the US. Terry can be reached through http://www.hp.com/education/sections/pm_bus_analy.html or at [email protected]

Let the Celebration Begin!

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Let the Celebration Begin!

Thank-you! Thank-you! Thank-you!

We are officially one year old today! Without your involvement, it would have never happened. When we launched BA Times a year ago, we had two simple strategies to achieve our goal of serving the global Business Analysis community:

1. Provide current educational content and information
2. Create a forum for BAs to exchange ideas and information

Our internal goal was to have 2,000 subscribers by the end of the year! Well, I’m happy to say that we’ve successfully accomplished that goal and then some…

I’d like to recognize a few people who helped us along in our first year:

First 10 official BA Times Subscribers thanks for taking a chance on us:

  • Janette McGrath
  • Paul Thiara
  • Samuel McGrath
  • Paulina Corpuz
  • Kathy Vezina
  • Jenny Jones
  • Steve Willingham
  • Kate Edwards-Davis
  • Charmaine Jacskon
  • Sherri Marx
 First Content Contributors thanks for trusting us:

  • Kathleen (Kitty) Hass
  • Glenn R. Brûlé
  • Janette McGrath
  • Marcos Ferrer – our first Blogger
Internal team – without their support and dedication, there would be no BA Times:

  • Mike Morton
  • Sean Butt
  • Ollan Delany
  • Jimmy Manuel

BA Times has emerged as the industry’s leading BA portal and eNewsletter. We’ve grown to 5,726 subscribers worldwide! Here is the breakdown:

Subscribers Come from 86 Different Countries – Highest Subscriber % from:

  • United States – 50%
  • Canada – 20%
  • India – 8%
  • Australia – 5%
  • South Africa – 4%
  • United Kingdom – 1.5%
  • New Zealand – 1%

We’ve continued to refine the site and offerings over the past year and will not stop improving. Thanks to all your feedback and suggestions, we’re building more features!

Changes You’ll See Starting Today:

  • New site template with a cleaner look and drop down menus from the main menu
  • New event calendar, including the ability of subscribers to post events
  • Custom images for each subscriber and contributor

Here’s what’s coming this year:

  • Content Categories – we’ll be placing all our content into categories to help you better navigate both new and archived content
  • BA Times Sub-Communities – you’ll have the ability to create virtual private sub-communities within BA Times. Great for IIBA Chapter communication, dedicated country communication and networking, or any other reason you can think of
  • Elibrary – where users can submit book titles and comments for reference
  • Online Stats – where you can see stats of subscribers online and connect directly to build your professional network and opportunities

It’s been quite a year! We truly appreciate your support of BA Times and would love to see it continue to grow to support the needs of the Global BA Community. Our initial objectives have not wavered:

  • Provide current educational content and information
  • Create a forum for BAs to exchange ideas and information

We will continue to ask for feedback and improve the site based on your needs! I ask only one thing of each of you: If you like our content and online experience, then tell a friend in the industry about BA Times. Either forward them a current eNewsletter or our URL. We’ve grown over the past year solely by word of mouth and intend to do the same this year. All our resources go back into improving the website, not marketing for new subscribers. We are constantly striving to improve what we offer our current subscriber needs, not hunting for new subscribers. So spread the word!!

Thanks again for a great first year! We appreciate all of you!

Best Regards,

Adam R. Kahn
Publisher, Business Analyst Times
[email protected]

Why I Love Being the Vendor

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles.

There are two sides to the business analysis community:  The internal business analyst and the external consulting companies or contractors … “Vendors”.  Being the internal BA just isn’t much fun sometimes and often, the internal policies and practices can work against your success.  Sometimes it’s the company itself that has created a requirements analysis gap and the individuals – however strong they might be – just can’t be successful.  Entrenched, hierarchical, corporate cultures will always work against the internal BA unless a company has made the leap to reset the value and position of BAs within this hierarchy.  In spite of all these challenges, I’ve also seen internal organizations transform themselves from being order-takers, to being considered highly valued business drivers.  So often the difference in mindset for those that succeed is they’ve started to think like vendors.

As a vendor, I get to dictate the process or our company does not do the engagement.  This is a strong position – we’ll only do engagements we know will be successful, or we (subtly) take a pass on working together.  Vendors work from a position of strength and build up our “referenceability.”  If I can say “we’ve done over 1,000 of these” and give specific examples, people generally listen when you tell them “this is the way it gets done if you want success.”  Sure, the vendor has to tune the process around the edges to improve the fit with existing internal processes and issues, but the essence of how the work will get done stays the same on every engagement.  By negotiating the process of requirements discovery up-front, by identifying precisely where additional costs might exist, or how to tune their process to meet their specific business objectives, a vendor walks into an engagement with a higher level of commitment to the process than you would see on most internal projects.  A good vendor pre-loads the deck for success by setting out process, roles, and the minimum involvement needed from stakeholders before they take the engagement.  A vendor’s project intake process is far more structured – even where we’re outsourcing and doing 20 large projects for the same client in a quarter.  A vendor can’t deviate from working this front-end because we know that eventually, if we don’t scrutinize it closely, we’re risking failure on an engagement.

Vendors have done their homework on the value they bring.  We also dedicate about 25% of our corporate resources to ensuring that people understand our value in communications and direct sales cost.  Since a decent vendor has done the research, they can prove to management what will happen in time and cost if their process is not followed.  For example, I can show someone hard data from live projects on the reductions in requirements change we bring, the timetable improvements we achieve, and how our process brings value to larger, more strategic projects.  Because a successful vendor has thought long and hard about what it does, they can be more concise and quantified about the value we intend to bring to a specific situation.  We also separate organizational value management (sales role) from value delivery (consulting function) to more deliberately manage client expectations and satisfaction.  For the vendor, high satisfaction is only achieved by a specific path, that starts with setting the right expectations on the value we bring, and ends with help people both see and showcase that they were successful in achieving their objectives.  The thinking is different: Internal analysts tend to focus on task achievement; good vendors think about value management.

A successful vendor’s delivery team has conviction.  Conviction is that deep-seated belief that a process is going to be successful IF an engagement is conducted a certain way.  You can have business analyst training until you are blue in the face, but unless there is the absolute belief that the new techniques will be successful, these techniques will not used.  Vendors make people document the success stories and show these to the new consultants.  At our organization, we make sure that people know that the process has worked over 1,000 times successfully, and we take the cost hit to put our new people on airplanes to observe an engagement done by an experienced team, so that they can success for themselves.  We also get them to co-pilot an engagement with a successful user of the methods before we ever let them go solo.  All this effort is part of building both competence and conviction.  At the end of the day, a vendor can only be successful if every person on the delivery team is able to do the methodology in EXACTLY the same way and get a consistent result.  In our world, there really isn’t a second chance – we do exceptionally well, or we get fired.  Analysts follow the process a vendor dictates not simply because they understand it, but because they absolutely believe that they will be more successful if they follow it.  The path to developing skills is fairly straightforward.  The path to getting consistent execution is much more complex and relies on first building conviction.

I like to relate success and momentum in general within organizations to a big, heavy, flywheel.  A big success gets the flywheel turning a little.  Get a bunch of successes… and the wheel turns a little faster.  The flywheel is an analogy for a cycle of positive change where small, incremental steps lead to momentous change.  If I go back 10 years, our company tended to do smaller engagements of one or two weeks and we really did not pursue large-scale engagements.  Today, it’s the inverse – our teams tend to be engaged on extremely large and complex projects, and the smaller one- or two- week engagements are a smaller proportion of our revenue.   Vendors must deliberately manage momentum.  With positive momentum, the strategic focus of the organization shifts over time.  An organization with no positive momentum offers basically the same value to the organization year-after-year.  A vendor can’t simply say “our strategy this year is to do more BA stuff”.  In the vendor world, clients can be a bit ruthless, so vendors must either show momentum and continuously strengthen the value proposition, or wane in importance as service providers.

A vendor as specialized as we are (we only do business requirements) lives or dies by how we scope and size an opportunity, and how we determine the optimal process, plan and strategy to recommend for a requirements engagement.  We simply cannot miss when doing estimation – ever.  In fact, in the last bunch of years, I can’t remember sliding over-budget on an assignment.  We have to closely manage the number of client days used on an assignment and commit in a statement of work that we are going to produce “X” deliverable in “Y” days.  Most analyst organizations really do not manage client expectations on the number of days required to do requirements.  In fact, a mere 25% of organizations we recently surveyed accurately estimated the amount of time needed from the stakeholders. The rest underestimated by an average of 192% (get the results from http://www.iag.biz/).   How do you expect to maintain stakeholder involvement over time if the team consistently overruns expectations by almost 200%?

Finally, vendors get access to all the neat toys.  It is perhaps one of the bi-products of working with so many clients that you see what is working and what’s not, but more importantly, a vendor has a deliberate R&D focus to continuously look at new methods or technologies and see what makes them tick.  It’s neat to get a freebie copy of the latest and greatest from a tools vendor like RavenFlow and fiddle with it on an engagement.  Having a substantial R&D budget for BA best practices and technologies development means the vendor is able to get ahead of changes in client demands and talk to them about how, for example, agile methods can be made to work well on very large scale engagements.  Having an R&D sandbox in which to play with new technologies and methods may be fun, but candidly, it’s the only way to determine the practical application of these technologies and methods, and help the organization develop the value it brings to clients.  In fact, internal business analysts and vendor organizations both have access to the toys, the question is, is there a managed process to turn that access into value?

Are these lessons from the vendors well implemented in internal business analyst organizations?  Take a little test:

  • Do your BAs take enough time negotiating the process of requirements discovery – especially on strategic projects – to ensure success? 
  • How good is your organization at selling your process internally?  Do you measure or manage the value delivered to the organization?
  • Do you have consistently high quality requirements from all BAs?  Do your people have conviction that they’ll be successful if they follow your internal process?
  • Do you have strong momentum?  Consistently enhancing value brought to the organization – and an expanding budget/mandate?
  • Can you accurately forecast (+/-10%) the number of days needed for conducting business analysis and in creating business requirements?
  • Do you have a practical, managed process for BA process and technology R&D? 

If any of the answers are “No”, ask yourself, “why not.”  Why not force your BAs to do better elicitation planning, or publish your success stories, or benchmark your team against best of breed performance to showcase their strength?  Maybe you already have strong momentum.  But, maybe, you’re looking for ways to build that momentum and acting more like an external vendor is the path to help get you there.

Keith Ellis is the Vice President, Marketing at IAG Consulting (http://www.iag.biz/) where he leads the marketing and strategic alliances efforts of this global leader in business requirements discovery and management. Keith is a veteran of the technology services business and founder of the business analysis company Digital Mosaic which was sold to IAG in 2007.  Keith’s former lives have included leading the consulting and services research efforts of the technology trend watcher International Data Corporation in Canada, and the market strategy of the global outsourcer CGI in the financial services sector.  Keith is the author of IAG’s Business Analysis Benchmark – the definitive source of data on the impact of business requirements on technology projects.