Tag: Business Analysis

Best of BATimes: Business Analyst Role in COTS Projects

Written by Maksym Lysikov on September 13, 2023. Posted in Articles.

Many tech companies offer commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products.

Such products allow to meet their clients’ business needs relatively fast, comparing to the development of the new IT solutions from scratch. However, a COTS product for a complex solution such as ERP, CRM, laboratory or hospital information systems requires considerable time and effort to be invested into the configuration. Hence organizations usually involve a separate implementation team of professionals familiar with the COTS product to adapt it for the company’s needs.

COTS vendors normally provide the implementation service to their clients. This can vary from company to company, but oftentimes it includes discovery phase, configuration or customization of the system according to the business needs, user training and making sure the project goes live.

This article describes the BA role in the implementation of the COTS projects and cooperation between a COTS product team and BA from an implementation team.

BA in Implementation Project

One might say that COTS projects do not require business analysis since there seem to be no significant development activities. However, COTS projects could vary from completely out-of-the-box to complex solutions with lots of configuration and additional customization (codding) involved. In the latter case we can and shall involve the standard business analysis activities:

Plan your business analysis work. Ask yourself what is your business analysis approach (adaptive vs predictive)? Who are your stakeholders? Do you have a requirements governance process in place?
Requirements elicitation and analysis. This covers discovering the current and desirable states, conducting workshops and interviews, document analysis, etc. Don’t forget to elicit and document any gaps if a COTS solution is not capable to meet some of the business needs.
Requirements modeling. COTS projects normally do not require the complete functional specification since the solution is predefined already. However, there are many other requirement views which can be useful for the configuration project. We will discuss that in the section that follows.
Solution evaluation. Define your KPI and measure if they improved compared to the legacy solution.
Configuration. System configuration is normally out of business analysis scope, but some companies tend to involve business analysts in such activities. In any case, the BA should know how the system works and understand the solution limitations.

Requirements Modeling

As mentioned before, it might not be required to document all the functional requirements for the already predefined solution like COTS product. However, not documenting requirements at all could result in certain drawbacks:

Apparently, external stakeholders, like end users, and internal stakeholders, like testing or support teams, will need at least some documentation that describes how the system behaves.
Without modeled requirements, there is no way to validate the requirements before they are actually implemented and the system is demoed for users. What if you only validate your assumptions by demoing already configured piece of functionality? That is right, you will most likely need to reconfigure the system again once you receive the feedback, and then again and again. Nevertheless, you still can present out-of-the-box functionality which doesn’t require any configuration efforts and use it as a starting point to collect the initial feedback from your users.
The change management process can suffer. Imagine that you documented the requirements for the billing module in the bunch of meeting notes, and now 4 weeks after the requirements were implemented the clients insists that some of the billing transactions are not calculated correctly. Would it be easier to refer to the SRS part where all business rules are documented, or try to find the relevant emails?

To address the above issues, the BA can use a variety of the business analysis techniques which will be applicable for the project and audience. For example:

Roles and Permission Matrix: most of the COTS solutions allow roles configuration and assigning permissions. Start with defining and documenting user roles and their permissions. The organization chart can come in handy to define the roles.
Process Modeling: you can elicit and model the current processes using either the standard notations such as BPMN, UML or come up with a simple drawing which doesn’t follow any notation standard but clear for the audience. The next step will be to review the models with stakeholders, define if anything should be changed in the process and update the model. Once done, you can supplement the model with the additional requirements view, e.g. use cases.
Gap Analysis: as the BA on the implementation project you need to identify the areas in your client’s business which are not covered by the COTS package and address it to the product team. Bear in mind that it is always a good idea to think about the potential workarounds you can offer to the client, before escalating the gap to the product team. That way the client can access the desired functionality earlier, the product backlog will not be overloaded and there will be no need to overengineer the product with the functionality potentially used by only 1 client. So at first always assess if it is possible to configure the system in an alternative way or if the client can agree to do certain steps manually.
User Stories: this is a simple and popular way of specifying the requirements, especially if you follow the agile approach and need to deploy the COTS solution incrementally. It is also quite convenient to prioritize the requirements using the user story form.
Use Case and Scenarios: you can document each separate business flow in the use case. Use cases can easily be converted into the test scripts and serve for validation purposes.
Business Rules Analysis: it is always a good idea to elicit and document business rules. Make sure you have a process in place to update business rules due to external or internal changes.
Interface Analysis: your COTS product will most likely not be used as a standalone solution and will communicate with other components. Define and document interfaces specific to your client.
Data requirements: usually a COTS solution replaces an outdated legacy solution and you need to take care of the historical data. And it is better to define data requirements upfront before you realize you cannot import 256 characters long text into the address column for one of the top customer’s client. Ask yourself the following questions: do you need to import the historical data into your brand new COTS solution? will the legacy data fit the new system? how will you handle the cases when the data doesn’t fit the new COTS product?

Provide Feedback to your Product Team

A good way to improve the product is to listen to your user’s feedback. And when it comes to COTS project who is the best candidate to elicit, analyze and document all the client’s concerns and frustrations? Yes, you’ve got it right! It is the implementation BA or anyone else who fulfills this role in an organization. And thus the BA is the one who should establish a process to communicate all business concerns and client gaps to COTS product team.

For example, the BA can create a separate Wiki page per a client where they can list all gaps discovered during the project and communicate them to the product team. The product team can then collect the feedback from all clients, prioritize the gaps for the future releases and share the roadmap with the implementation team.

Conclusion

COTS implementation projects can be a challenge for the BA as they differ from the traditional IT development projects. However, with the right attitude and a bit of creative thinking, we can adopt the BA techniques and establish the process which will bring value to the implementation projects and help improve the COTS product.

Published: 2019/08/08

Best of BATimes: 5 Characteristics of Effective Business Analysts

Written by Giorgos Sioutzos on September 6, 2023. Posted in Articles.

“Business Analyst” is not just a title. Is not a job. It is a mindset, a concept and a structured process executed by people in different positions inside an organization. It’s more like, an approach of making the things happen from the realization of business need towards the final implementation.

It’s easy to call yourself business analyst but difficult to be a good and effective business analyst. The field can be great fun, and very rewarding, but you need to be prepared. People who take on business analysis roles typically believe they need three things: skills and experience, a bit of marketing, and an interest in working in a variety of environments. However successful business analysts know they need much more than a technical expertise and specific skills. They need a mindset and a specific attitude in order to serve with the best possible and feasibly way their clients business needs.

What is expected from business analysts can vary widely. And what they actually need you to do can be completely different from what they expect. Business analysis is an exciting, dynamic form of work. You can have a positive impact on your clients and be well paid for your effort. But you have to be appropriately equipped.

To be an effective and successful business analysis you need to continuously develop some specific characteristics.

The first is technical depth. It’s critical that you have the technical background to satisfy your clients’ needs. This means you have experience in a variety of environments. The more breadth of experience you have in your technical area, the easier it will be to apply your skill as a business analyst.

Second, effective business analysts need to understand quickly and accurately what’s happening in their client’s environment. Your power of observation needs to be well tuned. Being able to listen carefully and patiently, observe the behavior of your clients, and make sense of what is happening is very important.

Third, effective business analyst care about the welfare of their client’s business and the clients themselves. You need to be able to put yourself in your client’s shoes and appreciate the difficulties they may be facing or have faced. While what you do may seem routine to you, it probably isn’t routine for your client. You need to appreciate that fact and behave accordingly.

Another important characteristic is emotional intelligence. Often clients will engage you because they’ve had substantial difficulties. They may have a skill shortage, or they may not be sure how to manage what you’ve been asked to deliver. All these conditions create stress. On top of that, you’ll be striving to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can, so you’ll be under stress as well. Dealing with all that requires personal emotional maturity and the ability to assess and deal with the emotional state of your client.

Also, you have to develop the observation and effective listening as a personal characteristic, make recommendations based on sound business judgment, and be patient. As trust builds, the direction your client provides will likely become more reasonable. Work out your contract. Understand your client’s needs and desires, and establish a good relationship with your contract manager, and you could put on your superhero costume to celebrate your success. Observation helps towards a really robust problem definition statement. So as you look at your problem-solving, and you’re getting ready to start pursuing that initial set of ideas, you need to go through that prioritization and pick the highest value one that’s going to have the biggest impact on your overall solution.

Business analysis is performed on a variety of initiatives within an enterprise. Initiatives may be strategic, tactical, or operational. Business analysis may be performed within the boundaries of a project or throughout enterprise evolution and continuous improvement. No matter their job title or organizational role business analysts are responsible for discovering, synthesizing, and analyzing information in order the best solutions to be derived and the clients’ needs to be accommodated in the best possible way.

Published on: Dec 2, 2021

Don’t Deliver a Donkey instead of a Horse

Written by Nurani Easwaran on August 30, 2023. Posted in Articles.

All of us at some point in our life have heard of the children’s game called Telephone Game or Broken Telephone. In this game, Players form a line or circle, and the first player comes up with a message and whispers it to the ear of the second person in the line. The second player repeats the message to the third player, and so on. When the last player is reached, they announce the message they just heard, to the entire group. Very often, the message that comes out at the end is quite different from what the first player had whispered, and this creates a lot of amusement.

Now imagine that same game being played when a project is initiated. In this case, the project sponsor or sponsors may request for a given deliverables at the onset of the project based on business needs. However, after the message gets filtered through many teams, the outcome may not match what was asked for in this first place resulting in a number of unhappy customers or stakeholders. This can be considered as delivering a Donkey when asked for a Horse. The moral of this story is that if there was proper end to end communication, the result would have been much closer to what the sponsor asked for in the first place. Effective Communication is considered as one of the most important aspects of both personal and work life.

Business analysts need to effectively gather and convey information between stakeholders, team members, and other parties involved in a project. Clear and concise communication ensures that requirements are accurately understood, objectives are aligned, and expectations are managed. Effective communication fosters collaboration helps in resolving conflicts and ensures that the project stays on track. Some of the key techniques or aspects of communication within the business analysis domain are discussed below. All of them are equally important and need to be considered during any engagement and can be improved through training and constant practise.

Active Listening.

Active listening plays a crucial role in business analysis. It involves fully engaging with stakeholders, understanding their needs, concerns, and requirements. This helps the BA to gather accurate and detailed requirement related information, which is essential for making informed decisions and developing effective solutions. Active listening improves collaboration, builds rapport, and ensures that project goals align with stakeholders’ expectations.

Interpersonal Communication

Interpersonal communication skills are vital in business analysis because they involve interactions with various stakeholders, each with their own perspectives and needs. Along with the Active Listening mentioned above, building rapport, and empathising with the viewpoint of the stakeholders are crucial for establishing trust and understanding. These skills help business analysts navigate conversations, gather requirements, and address concerns effectively. Related techniques such as Collaborative problem-solving, negotiation, and conflict resolution also rely heavily on strong interpersonal communication. By fostering positive relationships and adapting their communication style, business analysts can facilitate smoother interactions and achieve better outcomes throughout the project lifecycle.

Stakeholder Management

Stakeholder management is a critical aspect of business analysis that involves identifying, engaging, and effectively communicating with all parties impacted by a project. Business analysts need to understand stakeholders’ interests, expectations, and concerns. By building relationships and maintaining a clearly defined two-way lines of communication, the Business Analyst can ensure that stakeholder needs are considered throughout the project lifecycle. Effective stakeholder management involves involving the right people, keeping them informed, addressing their feedback, and managing conflicts when they arise. Successful stakeholder management contributes to project success by aligning goals, managing expectations, and fostering collaboration

Within stakeholder management, a crucial element to consider is Communication strategy. This has a number of components of its own including identifying the audience for each message, understanding the environment or business situation under which the given project has been initiated, getting a clear understanding of the sponsor vision or objectives , being able to define what needs to be said to whom and when, and knowing what are the various ways in which the message can be delivered and feedback received.

Facilitation

Facilitation is an important technique in business analysis that involves guiding discussions and workshops to achieve productive outcomes. By facilitating meetings, workshops, and brainstorming sessions as per the needs of the project, business analysts can encourage participation, manage conflicts, and ensure viewpoints from all the stakeholders or impacted parties are heard. Facilitation helps in eliciting requirements, prioritizing features and functionality, and fostering collaboration among stakeholders. It also aids in reaching a collective understanding and agreement of the objectives and making informed decisions, leading to more successful project outcomes

Business Writing

Strong writing skills are crucial for business analysts as they are responsible for documenting and communicating various aspects of their work. Clear and concise writing is essential for creating requirements documents, project plans, reports, and other forms of documentation. Effective writing ensures that complex deliverables or impacts are accurately and clearly represented to stakeholders, team members, and decision-makers. It also helps in avoiding misunderstandings and serves as a reference for project progress and decisions. Well-written documentation contributes to effective communication, reduces ambiguity, and supports the overall success of business analysis efforts.

Presentation Skills

Visual and presentation skills are essential for effective communication in business analysis. They help convey complex ideas, data, and information to stakeholders in a clear and understandable manner. Business analysts often use visual aids like diagrams, charts, and models to represent processes, workflows, and requirements visually. Strong presentation skills enable them to deliver findings, recommendations, and project updates to diverse audiences, ensuring engagement and comprehension. These skills enhance collaboration, facilitate decision-making, and contribute to the overall success of projects.

Nonverbal communication

It is often mentioned that over 70 percent of face-to-face communication is Non-Verbal. Nonverbal behavior, such as body language, facial expressions, and gestures, plays a significant role in business analysis. It helps convey emotions, attitudes, and intentions that words alone might not capture. Observing nonverbal cues during meetings and interactions with stakeholders can provide valuable insights into their reactions, level of engagement, and concerns. Being attuned to nonverbal behavior allows business analysts to adapt their communication style, build rapport, and ensure effective collaboration. It also helps in detecting potential misunderstandings and addressing them promptly.

By considering and effectively executing all the above techniques, the Business Analyst is certain to have a much higher success rate in delivering and meeting the needs of the stakeholders

Communication Strategy

This can be considered as the overarching technique or approach that is used and includes elements or all the above techniques.

Best of BATimes: What Problem Are You Trying To Solve?

Written by Larry Blankenship on August 24, 2023. Posted in Articles.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned to ask during my BA career is “What problem are you trying to solve?” It’s not as straightforward as it might appear.

Often, business partners come with all sorts of preconceptions, which they present as the actual problem. Sometimes they try to be helpful. It’s the BAs job to ask more questions to determine if that’s the real problem.

For example, I had a business partner who told me that the data in an email we were sending to one of our customers was “encrypted”. It would have been easy to waste hours trying to chase that down. I started down that road, until I caught myself and asked “What’s the problem I’m trying to solve?” I asked the business partner to see a copy of the email. It was then that I realized that what she was referring to as being encrypted was actually just raw XML being presented straight to the page. The problem wasn’t that the email was encrypted, it was that it wasn’t easily readable by a human. One parameter change later, and the problem was fixed.

Donald Gause and Gerald Weinberg wrote a seminal work on discovering the real problem called “Are Your Lights On?” I reread it at least once a year, to remind myself how to ask the questions needed to determine the real problem, because sometimes what appears to be the problem at first glance isn’t the real cause.

A recent real-life example was encountered by the Dutch bike manufacturer Van Moof, who found that over 25% of their bicycles were being damaged en route to the customer, especially when being shipped to the US. The company could have invested money in improving their packaging or looking for a new shipping company. Instead, they spent time identifying what the real problem was: the people doing the shipping weren’t being careful with the product, perhaps because they perceived a bicycle as being sturdy enough to withstand rough handling. Or perhaps they didn’t perceive bicycles as being as valuable, so they didn’t feel the need to take extra care when handling them. What was the solution?

In the end, the bicycle company put a picture of a large screen TV behind the picture of the bike. They didn’t indicate that there was a TV in the box. The shippers, who apparently don’t have time to read carefully, treated the updated boxes like there was an actual big screen TV inside them. As a result, damages in transit dropped by 80%.

1. Asking the business or customer what the problem is that they are trying to solve isn’t the end of the process, it’s only the beginning. Here are some ways you can get to the real problem:
Ask what things would look like if the problem was solved. Often, this will let you identify the real problem based on what the business sees as the desirable result. An example given in the book was a building whose tenants complained about the elevator being too slow. The desired solution wasn’t that the elevators be made faster, it was that the tenant’s stopped complaining. In the end, a mirror placed on each side of the elevator offered enough distraction that the perception of the elevator’s speed was no longer an issue.

2. Don’t accept a solution as the problem. Often in my career, the customer brings a solution that they want rather than a problem to be solved. Asking what the problem is that’s trying to be solved often allows for simpler resolutions. For example, one department is complaining that another department’s data entry isn’t accurate. The solution they presented was to add a high number of edits and validity check to the system where the data was entered. This would have required a large quantity of analysis and development time to ensure that the validations were correct and didn’t create additional follow on effects. Instead, time was spent bringing the two departments together to discuss the issues and looking for ways to improve accuracy at the front end. In the end, development wasn’t required, and the problem was solved via process improvement.

3. Spend time on root cause analysis. Sometimes the perceived problem is a symptom, not the actual malady. When I wrote software, a bug would frequently be caused by a change to a variable much removed in the stack from the code I was looking at. Doing root cause analysis will often help you identify what element is actually causing pain. This can also be a matter of overlooking something because “We’ve always done it that way.” The root cause may be the result of some process before or after the pain point that is creating the issue.

In the end, finding the real problem that needs to be solved, can be simple, complicated or somewhere in between. Taking the time to do the right level of investigation is an important part of the BA’s value in the development process.

Published: 2020/06/04

The Tyranny of the Algorithm

Written by Adrian Reed on August 16, 2023. Posted in Articles.

A while ago, I noticed that some people changed the way that they were writing LinkedIn posts. Rather than writing in sentences and paragraphs, everything would be written in this weird separated way with everything spaced out in a really unnatural way. Then certain other common patterns appeared (e.g. using PDFs documents with multiple pages, or ‘carousels’ as some people call them). Video was huge, then not huge, and so the trends fluctuated. Some of the formats seemed really good and useful… others… not so much (we’ve probably all clicked on the occasional ‘click bait’ LinkedIn post…).

I gather one of the reasons that people post in particular ways is to get maximum exposure, and to do this you have to pander to the algorithm. It is, after all, the algorithm that will decide how many people see your post… and not all posts are created equal. Those that get more ‘engagement’ will be seen by more people (and, very likely, get even more engagement). Yet the algorithm decides what counts as ‘engagement’.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. LinkedIn is a private enterprise, it can (I suppose) run its operations however it chooses. But take a step back for a moment, and let’s make a hypothesis here:

The algorithm has changed the way people write content and interact with others on LinkedIn

I’m making no moral judgment here, and the way that people write and engage with each other has adapted over the years. But let’s follow this to its logical conclusion: social media algorithms have the ability to influence the style and formats in which people communicate. It decides what content gets seen (and doesn’t get seen). Again, as users we might be OK with that. But I hope that there is someone within those companies asking a whole set of ethical questions…

Avoiding Biases and Unintended Consequences

In particular, it’s important to consider whether algorithms might lead to bias, and might inadvertently disadvantage or affect particular groups or stakeholders, or whether they might have other types of unintended consequences. For example, I’d imagine that the LinkedIn algorithm probably aims to keep people on the site for as long as possible, and serve them up relevant adverts. But when people learn its nuances, they start to ‘game’ the algorithm, meaning that some folks are more likely to get their content seen than others. Presumably, LinkedIn eventually learns about this too, and adapts the algorithm, and the process repeats.

Yet unintended consequences like this aren’t limited to IT or algorithms. Nor are biases (there are plenty of well-documented cognitive biases that affect people too). Crucially this is an area where BAs can help ask some of the difficult questions, and get beyond (or at least highlight) potential issues.

I have often thought it interesting that within most organizations, if you ask the question “who is responsible for regulatory compliance” you will get a clear cut answer. There is usually a legal or compliance team, and often a named individual who is responsible and accountable. Ask “who is responsible for the ethics of this product or project?” and (outside of some very specific domains) you’ll likely get a blank stare. Or, you’ll get a word-soup answer that boils down to “we’re all responsible”. And when everyone is responsible, too often nobody steps up to ask the hard questions.

The Ethical Imperative

This is a space where BAs can add significant value. As BAs we’ll be used to conducting stakeholder analysis, thinking in terms of the different stakeholders or personas who will be impacted by a particular proposal. We can extend this thinking by asking “who isn’t here around the table, who is missing from these conversations, and how can we ensure they are represented?”.

We can ask the difficult, but important ethical questions, and ensure that the projects and products that are progressed by the organization are in line not only with its strategy but also its values. If there’s a strategy-execution divide in many organizations, that’s nothing compared to the values-execution divide! (We’ve probably all had experiences with organizations that say they ‘put the customer at the heart of what they do’ that… definitely don’t actually do that!).

Often, as BAs, we are able to take a step and ask “what is the impact of this”, and “what does success look like for X stakeholder group?” and “how does that vary from what the Y stakeholder group thinks?”. By taking a holistic view, balancing different viewpoints and putting an ethical lens on things, we can hopefully reduce the risk of inadvertently introducing bias or unintended consequences.

This involves us having the courage to ask bold questions and keep ethics firmly in mind. If we don’t, there’s a real danger that the ethical dimension will get missed. A situation that I’m sure we’re all keen to avoid!