Tag: Assessment

The Kaizen Business Analyst

Written by Jarett Hailes on March 5, 2012. Posted in Articles.

As Business Analysts, we are often focused on helping our stakeholders improve their processes and operations. We have worked to understand their current state, identify requirements, and engage others to help deliver innovative solutions that set up our customers for success. Most Business Analysts I’ve met get a great deal of satisfaction in finding ways to help people or companies do their jobs more effectively. Sometimes we become so outwardly focused that it can be easy to forget that it is important to take the time to work on improving our own processes. By finding ways to make our own practices better, we can increase the value we deliver to our organizations and stakeholders.

When looking to improve ourselves professionally, we can identify and try to implement changes big and small. Big, sweeping changes are often the most difficult to achieve, regardless of whether you are a 10,000-person organization or a single individual. Big changes are met with fear, doubt, inertia, laziness, and many other barriers. Our initial enthusiasm can dwindle if we don’t start to see immediate results, and in the end we consciously or unconsciously decide to abandon the change. This is why so many of us fail our New Year’s resolutions; often they are big visionary statements that involve a large amount of change.

Instead of trying to make big changes, we can focus on implementing a personal development process that allows us to improve our services continually with small but meaningful changes. The Japanese term Kaizen means ‘continuous improvement,’ and methodologies have been developed to implement Kaizen in small, incremental, and purposeful steps to yield dramatic changes over time. Kaizen has been used in lean manufacturing methods at companies such as Toyota, Intel, and Lockheed Martin. While this methodology has been used mainly in manufacturing, it is focused on helping individuals and small teams become as efficient and effective as possible at the job they do.

Some of the main principles of a Kaizen approach to continuous improvement are:

Think of ways to make something happen, as opposed to reasons why something can’t be done.
Do not seek perfection; start change right away and build on that change over time.
When something doesn’t work as expected, take the time to understand the root causes of why things went wrong.
When faced with hardship, take the wisdom gained and look to apply it to your next task.
Measure your successes and failures so you can actually tell if you are improving.

This approach not only works for teams, but also for individuals. We can use the principles of Kaizen to ensure that we are always finding ways to make our work better, which in turn improves the lives of our customers. Here are some steps to becoming a Kaizen Business Analyst:

Develop your mindset: when you first arrive at work, take 30 seconds to remind yourself that today is an opportunity to find ways to do your work better. Review what you will be doing today and your plan to get things done.
Document your performance: while you are working, take the time to quickly jot down how long things take you to get done. For tasks that are part of a bigger multi-day goal (for example, having requirements reviewed), build a very simple spreadsheet or leverage your organization’s timesheet to track your total time on an activity. Aside from time spent on a task, find other relevant measures given the type of work you do; for example, how many rounds of review are required prior to requirements being signed off? Think of the relevant performance measures for your analysis activities and track them over time.
Reflect on your activities: at the end of the day, take a quick review of the work you did and reflect on what went well and what didn’t go as ideal. Make some quick notes and associate them with the relevant tasks they belong to. For areas that didn’t go as well, write down one to two things that could have been done differently that would have improved the outcome. Take a look at your tasks for the next day, and with your history of ideas for improvement in hand, identify what you will try differently tomorrow. If you have identified ways that you could improve but need outside assistance to make them happen, plan who you will connect with to help get the ball rolling on implementing those changes.
Experiment with new ideas: find interesting things that you think will help improve the quality or efficiency of your work and try them out. Whether it’s a new elicitation technique, a new conflict resolution approach for those two stakeholders who don’t get along, or a simplified model for your complicated business processes that you can share with executives, find an opportunity to test out your ideas. Make sure you record the results and compare them, both in terms of time spent and whether the desired outcome occurred.
Share with others: this gives you a chance to contribute to the development of other Business Analysts while learning new ways to improve yourself. If you have a Community of Practice or a Centre of Excellence at your organization, there are usually opportunities for such collaboration. If your organization does not have such groups, start meeting with your peers informally; I’ve found BAs often like to talk shop and swap ideas over lunch every week or two. If you are the lone Business Analyst at your organization, find a local IIBA chapter or other Business Analyst community in your area to meet with colleagues. Various online Business Analyst communities have active forums that give you a chance to learn and share as well.

Having big goals can be an incredible motivator to help us achieve our potential and become successful. Sometimes it can be so easy to visualize what we want to accomplish that we attempt to make huge changes in order to reach our goal as fast as possible. However, as an old Chinese proverb reminds us, “It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward.” Having a Kaizen approach to becoming a better Business Analyst gives us an opportunity to make small but purposeful changes each day that will make us key to our organization’s success and future.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below.

Jarett Hailes is President of Larimar Consulting Inc. and a Certified Business Analysis Professional. Over the past ten years, Jarett has worked in a wide variety of industries as a Management Consultant, Business Analyst and Project Manager. Jarett’s passion is to help organizations realize the potential of their staff through efficient processes and an open culture that encourages and rewards innovation at all levels.

BLOG of a Different Color – Solution Assessment and Validation

Written by Marcos Ferrer on January 17, 2012. Posted in Articles.

The collectible series ends with this final installment – Solution Assessment and Validation.. Errata pointed out by gentle readers will be reported as found (if found!).

You can get a legend to help read these diagrams by grabbing the first issue of this series (and the rest, if you haven’t already), at http://www.batimes.com/marcos-ferrer/.

Here we go!

Click on the images for an enhanced view!

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Be Promotable; How to Increase the Value of Your Business Analyst Qualifications

Written by Laura Brandenburg on May 25, 2010. Posted in Articles.

How do you think about your professional development? When you hear the term, does your mind shift to training courses, webinars and reading books? How about the project work you do and the “extra” tasks you take on?

Whether you are looking for a job, seeking a promotion, or just want to make sure that your investments in professional development are keeping you up with your business analyst peers, it’s important not to focus just on training, certifications, or specific experiences. Managers in a position to hire or promote you want to know that you can perform at the level expected for the position you are seeking. They want to know that you’ll be an effective contributor. They are looking for an indicator of successful future performance.

One way to frame yourself as a successful future performer is to focus on what I consider marketable qualifications. Consider the following formula.

Think about what this means. A marketable qualification is formed by knowledge of how to do something and the experience gained from actually doing it. If I’m a manager and I’m considering you for an open position or a promotion, I’m not going to be so concerned about what you know. I’m going to be most concerned about your experience. The flip side of this equation is that you may have lots of valuable experience, but little or no formal knowledge. This often happens when you use your instincts to deliver successfully. If you have the experience but not the knowledge, you might overlook marketable qualifications because you simply don’t know the value of the experience you have. This is why marketable qualifications are created by both knowledge and experience.

As you think about your professional development, it pays to consider both parts of the marketable qualification equation. Look for opportunities to build your knowledge base and your experience and seek to keep these two aspects in sync for the best indicators of top performance.

What follows are some general rules of thumb for using the concept of a marketable qualification in thinking through your professional development strategy.

1. Focus on knowledge acquisition where you’ll also have the opportunity to build relevant experience.

I meet a lot of potential business analysts that have invested countless hours and lots of money in formal training programs and educational certificates. Oftentimes these individuals have spent a scant amount of time in the workplace and have little experience facilitating meetings, defining project scope, or analyzing and specifying requirements. They have a lot of book knowledge about business analyst techniques but no experience applying them in a real-world setting. No experience, no marketable qualifications.

The same holds true for mid- and senior-level business analysts within an organization. If you’ve read lots of books on agile but never used agile practices, your book smart not street smart. The first time you find yourself on an agile project or create the opportunity to apply an agile practice to a more traditional project, you’ll really learn what it takes to be an agile business analyst.

As you look at training options, even employer-sponsored ones, really focus on where you can learn and then apply your learning the day or the week you learn it. What chapter of a book could you read tonight and apply tomorrow? What archived webinar could you attend over your lunch break and use this afternoon? Immediate application of newly acquired knowledge means you are more likely to build valuable marketable qualifications. If you don’t apply what you learned, that learning will not really sink in. You might develop a slightly broader perspective on how you might use the skill, but without practice you don’t know if you can actually use the skill. If you are talking to a hiring manager, they are going to want to hear about your experience exercising your skills, not what you learned from a book or a training class.

2. Don’t overlook your project experience as opportunities to expand your marketable competencies.

One common challenge business analysts face, especially in our current economic environment, is that there is little funding for “professional development”. And by professional development here we typically mean training opportunities, conferences, and other high-cost learning opportunities. If we are employed or able to volunteer our time, there are typically ample opportunities to develop professionally through the work we do day-to-day. But to take advantage of these opportunities requires some forethought.

The easiest place to start is to look at each project assignment for opportunities to increase your qualifications. Is there a pain point that needs to be addressed? Is there an especially challenging stakeholder to deal with? Are there non-technical subject matter experts? Project anomalies of any kind provide opportunities for you to experiment with a new technique. Anything that is different this time around or in which your team struggled the last time around, are ripe opportunities for you to try something new to achieve results.

By framing these new career experiences within the pain points of your project team or organization, you are also ensuring that your efforts better align with your manager’s expectations. It’s very difficult for a manager to condemn you for doing something “outside-the-box” when you are trying to address a new problem or fix an old one. It’s much more difficult for your manager to support you if you apply a technique simply for “the experience”. Projects provide opportunities to build qualifications. Find them and take them. (And revisit point 1 to seek out relevant learning opportunities as you find them.)

3. Back-up your prior experience with the formal learning

For many senior business analysts our experience supersedes our knowledge. This also often happens to experienced professionals who find the business analyst profession after having worked for several years in a variety of related roles. Having the experience without the knowledge base will make it difficult for you to appropriately frame that experience as a marketable job qualification.

As a senior business analyst we might have experience performing very senior-level tasks, such as developing a business case to secure approval for a project, but never had any formal education about what should be in a business case and how it should be used. In this situation, some formal knowledge acquisition, coupled with previous work experience, can develop a marketable qualification. Education provides you with the confidence to use the right terminology and explain experiences you’ve already had in the formal terms used within the profession or your industry. Many business analysts I have interviewed report that CBAP study groups or reading the BABOK help them solidify their prior experience.

As you look back through your career history and your key projects, what have you naturally done well? What resources could you leverage to solidify that experience into a formal marketable qualification? How do other professionals talk about that kind of experience? What qualifications in job postings require that experience?

Finding and validating our marketable qualifications is no simple task. It requires introspection, honesty, objectivity, and a healthy dose of realism. The path to accumulate new qualifications is often no easier as we set out to balance our knowledge acquisition with our new experiences. But on the other side of this journey lies the ability to build career experiences in ways that line you up for career advancement, new jobs, promotions, and leadership positions. Is it worth it to you?

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Laura Brandenburg hosts Bridging the Gap and is the author How to Start a Business Analyst Career and of the forthcoming eBook The Promotable Business Analyst, a guide book for crafting a fulfilling and successful career as a business analyst. To receive a special offer when The Promotable Business Analyst is available, sign-up for our early bird list.

The Sadness of the Silo’d BA

Written by Kupe Kupersmith on December 22, 2009. Posted in Articles.

Many organizations need to shift how they staff their internal BA resources. These organizations primarily staff one BA to a project. The BAs are out on an island working through the joys and challenges of a BA’s life. On smaller initiatives this is very appropriate, similar to having someone play the PM/BA role on smaller initiatives. For larger initiatives, (multiple stakeholders, larger business areas, etc.) BAs should be paired on projects.

The concept of pairing is discussed and debated in the programmer world, so I thought I would get that debate going in the BA space! I talk to people all the time about the need to come together as a community and support each other, especially when their organization structure has them out on islands. Coming together provides the opportunity to help each other and share stories of success and lessons learned. That is a great first start for learning and growing from each other. Now it is time to make the next step so organizations get the best from their BAs. Here are three key factors why BA pairing is critical.

Skill Set Development

The range of skills required by a business analyst is very wide. Even the best analysts may not have all the skills necessary for every situation. For the purposes of this discussion let’s distill the skills down to four key areas. The BA needs to elicit the business needs, analyze what they elicit, document what is necessary, and communicate what they elicited to ensure they understood the true need, and give the solution team what they need to build the right solution.

How many organizations have business analysts that can do all of these things at a high level, on every project? I think it would be safe to say, zero. So why do these companies staff one BA to every project? There is a huge risk in assigning less than qualified people to projects on their own. It is critical to evaluate the BA staff and identify everyone’s strengths and areas for improvement. Begin to pair BAs on projects to utilize the strength of each BA.

The pairing also becomes built-in training. By working closely with another BA you learn by being part of a real-life example. This is also a great way to help each BA try out new techniques with the help of a mentor.

Two Heads are Better than One

My current assignment has me analyzing business processes for a large business area for four sister companies. The goal is to determine the feasibility of implementing an enterprise technical solution to support all companies. I initially started off this endeavor as the only analyst on the team. I realized quickly that I needed another head to bounce ideas off of and validate my understanding of all the information I was trying to analyze. By pairing in this situation, key points were not missed and healthy debates allowed us to provide clear benefits and cautions for moving forward with an enterprise-wide technical solution. You can not deny that two view points provide a better chance for success than one.

I know many organizations do a great job implementing peer reviews. That only helps resolve a piece of the puzzle. The one doing the peer review does not have enough knowledge of the business area to help with the analysis. They review the end product after analysis was completed.

Increased Knowledge Sharing

The more people that have a deep understanding of a business area reduces the risk of that knowledge walking out the door. The down turn of the economy has slowed down the number of retirees and the amount of attrition due to people switching jobs. Once the economy begins to rebound, both retirement and attrition will start back up. This is the time to pair those BAs and keep some consistent knowledge within the team.

Many customers find it frustrating when the BA gets moved around and new BAs are assigned to each project. They feel they have dedicated a lot of time to getting an analyst up to speed on their business and then have to start over. Pairing helps resolve this by having multiple people with knowledge of the business. New BAs can be brought up to speed without having to take a lot of the business customer’s time.

This is a shift in how many organizations operate. Give it a try; I think everyone will be pleased with the results!

Happy Holidays everyone,

Kupe

Don’t forget to leave your comments below

Jonathan “Kupe” Kupersmith is Director of Client Solutions, B2T Training and has over 12 years of business analysis experience. He has served as the lead Business Analyst and Project Manager on projects in various industries. He serves as a mentor for business analysis professionals and is a Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) through the IIBA and is BA Certified through B2T Training. Kupe is a connector and has a goal in life to meet everyone! Contact Kupe at [email protected]

Is the Business Analyst’s Work Ever Done?

Written by Jill Liles on June 9, 2009. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Is the Business Analyst’s Work Ever Done?

Solution Assessment and Validation

The business analyst’s work is not finished when the requirements document is signed off. Although other experts are responsible for the project activities, the BA remains involved to ensure that decisions made have no adverse impact on the business stakeholders. As the project moves forward, the BA should collaborate with the solution team (for example, development, procurement) to ensure that the final solution will satisfy the requirements.

After the solution has been built, the BA collaborates with many people on activities such as testing, conversion, cutover, and training. Depending on the roles defined in an organization and the project, the BA may collaborate with the people who are responsible for these activities, or the BA may be the responsible person. In either case, the BA ensures that all of the right things happen.

Monitor Solution Design and Planning

As the technical team derives the solution design, the BA must learn enough about the implications of that design to ensure that it supports the requirements well. For example, the BA might:

Review user classes to ensure that all of the solution functions, uses, and end users have been accounted for.
Review the developers’ functions and feature list for completeness.
Map the documented requirements (both functional and Quality of Service) onto the elements of the system design to ensure complete coverage.

When the technical team defines its phasing plan (which identifies the order in which requirements will be addressed and functionalities designed and built) for incremental development, the BA must ensure that the plan supports the stakeholders’ needs. If the plan calls for features to be delivered in a certain order, the BA should ensure that the planned order and delivery dates would be useful to the business stakeholders. The BA should also ensure that the phasing plan provides opportunities for any needed prototyping or validation during the project.

Tracing the requirements to the design is a good way to ensure complete coverage, and it lays the foundation for maintaining traceability throughout the project. The traceability information must be captured and recorded as the designs are being done, as trying to derive the traceability after the fact is difficult, if not impossible.

Finally, as the solution is being designed and built, the BA may identify business process improvements that are unrelated to the solution but that would be beneficial. This is especially likely where those processes will be affected when the solution is implemented.

Validate the Final Solution

As each deliverable of the project becomes available, the BA must ensure that appropriate validations take place to ensure that those deliverables satisfy the requirements and can be used by the intended end users.

System testing looks at the final system to determine if the requirements have been satisfied. System integration testing refers to testing the final solution to ensure that it can coexist and integrate with existing systems and databases. Many organizations have an independent testing group whose main responsibility is to prepare for and perform these tests. When that is the case, the BA will usually review the test plans and the test results, and at times, the BA may help with the testing. However, in organizations that don’t have testing groups the entire responsibility falls to the BA.
Operations testing involves testing the final solution to ensure that it can be installed and run without an adverse effect on the other existing systems. If the computer operations group takes responsibility for this testing, then the BA will usually review the test plans and the test results. But if this testing is necessary and no one takes responsibility for it, then the entire responsibility for this testing falls to the BA.
Acceptance testing ensures that the business need and user’s needs have been fully satisfied. If the customer takes responsibility for this testing, then the BA will usually review the test plans and the test results. Otherwise, the entire responsibility for this testing falls to the BA.

Assess Other Solution Options

The BA should collaborate with a variety of people on the project as the solution is being put together. In all cases, expect the experts in each area to be making good choices. The BA’s role in the collaboration is merely to serve as the business stakeholders’ advocate and assure that their needs will ultimately be met.

Although the technical team takes the lead in evaluating and deciding on the technologies that could be employed to build the solution, the BA should remain involved. This is because every technical choice has the potential to cause limitations in the final solution that will be noticeable to the users. So, the BA must learn enough about the effects of the team’s technical choices to ensure that they actually do support satisfying the requirements, and ultimately, the business needs.

When the plan involves purchasing or leasing (as opposed to internally developing) a solution, the BA may take the lead in choosing the solution. But even if someone else has primary responsibility for this, the BA will still remain closely involved. The BA ensures that any RFP (request for proposal) or RFQ (request for quote) accurately translates the requirements. The BA should also verify that the proposals received will fully meet the business need. And, when the solution is finally received, the BA ensures that it is adequately tested to be sure that is actually satisfies the requirements.

Support Implementation of the Solution

In some organizations, an operations team takes the lead in implementation, but often the BA is responsible. In either case, the BA must remain involved to ensure that implementation and any necessary conversion meets the needs of the users.

The BA ensures that any necessary installation planning is done, and that the appropriate technical experts review that plan for correctness. This could be as simple as ensuring there is enough disk space for the new software, or as complex as replacing entire computer systems with new ones.

Conversion is almost always an issue. Since the solution is most likely changing some attribute of the business process, there will probably be data conversion; there may also be other kinds of conversions to be done. Planning for these includes identifying the rules for handling the inevitable problems that will be found.

Finally, the plan to the final cutover to the solution must be well thought out. When should it happen? Will there be downtime involved? If so, how much is acceptable? An important, but often overlooked item is the “backout” plan. If the cutover fails, what must be done so the business can resume working with the old system? If there is significant data conversion or other changes, this can be a difficult problem.

Communicate the Solution Impacts

The responsibility of communicating the impact of the final solutions is assigned to different people in different organizations. In any case, the BA must still remain involved. Before the new solution is implemented, the BA should work with the business stakeholders to ensure that they are ready for it by:

Ensuring that everyone who needs to know about the implementation has the information they need, when they need it, before implementation
Setting the expectations of users and other stakeholders about how the change will affect them and the business process
Making sure that any needed training and help is available to the users in a timely manner

After the implementation is complete, the BA collaborates with the appropriate people to report on the implementation. This reporting provides pertinent information to all the parties who need to know that the implementation took place, and if there were problems. A key item is the business impact that the change had. Since the project was undertaken to improve a business process, the actual impact on the business process is of major concern.

Perform Post-Implementation Review and Assessment

The final validation occurs after rollout of the solution is complete. This activity, also known as “Lessons Learned,” is designed to help the organization learn from each project, supporting continuous process improvement.

You need to capture these successes, identify why they happened on this project, and determine what can be done on future projects to make them routine. The parts of this project that worked particularly well represent opportunities for future projects.

By the same token, if there were things on this project that were problematic, they also represent opportunities for improvement. You need to capture these issues, identify why they happened on this project, and determine what can be done on future projects to avoid them.

The Lessons Learned review is one of the most potent mechanisms for organizational learning and continuous improvement, as long as you actually use what you learned in future projects.

In Summary

Solution assessment includes all the activities that the BA collaborates in to ensure that the technical and other decisions being made by the development team result in meeting the needs of the business and users. These activities include design decisions, phasing for incremental development, maintaining the traceability matrix, choosing technologies, procuring solutions, and ensuring usability.

Jill Liles is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Global Knowledge http://www.globalknowledge, where she primarily focuses on marketing activities for Cisco training courses. She also coordinates all marketing for Canada. In her spare time she volunteers with her local Susan G. Komen Foundation affiliate and crafts jewelry. This article draws from Global Knowledge’s Requirements Development and Management course.