Tag: Planning

Best of BATimes: Approaches for Being a Lead BA

Written by Aly Cassam on January 17, 2024. Posted in Articles.

You’ve worked your way up the BA ladder – started as a Junior BA, then a BA, then a Sr. BA, and now you’re a Lead BA on a project working with other BAs. What do you do? This article focuses on some of the Do’s and Don’ts of being a Lead BA. Some of it is science and some of it is art.

Requirements Governance:

1. Who do you take direction from your PM or your BA Manager:

The first place to start as a Lead BA is establishing your own personal Requirements Governance. Who do you provide status updates to and who do you take direction on requirements from – PM or your BA Manager? The scenarios I’ve encountered are:

You as the Lead BA take your BA requirements direction from the PM and provide status updates to your BA Manager.
You as the Lead BA take your BA requirements directly from your BA Manager and provide status updates to your PM.
The third and most often scenario is where both the PM and your BA Manager are of the opinion that you take requirements direction from them and provide status updates to the other.

Tip: Right at the beginning of the project start the conversation with your BA Manager and clearly establish the relationship you’ll have with him or her and with the PM (in my experience coaching BAs too many Lead BAs don’t have the conversation upfront and then find themselves in a bind when scenario C) above becomes an issue during the project itself). If the answer is taking your requirements direction from them, set up a short meeting with your BA Manager and the PM to establish this relationship as PMs generally don’t like that arrangement, and it’s best to get them to discuss it face to face. If the answer is taking your requirements direction from the PM, then simply follow-up the meeting with a confirmation email to your BA Manager and just let your PM know that you’re effectively going to report to them and take, where appropriate, BA approach direction from them.

2. Establish your role as Lead BA on the BA team:

Make sure it’s clear to the BAs you’ll be leading that you are the Lead BA, and they will work with you in that capacity. A couple of ways to communicate this:

Ensure you’re called out on the project governance as the Lead BA and ensure the BAs you’ll be leading review the project governance
Where you’re taking your Requirements direction from your BA Manager have them send out an email to the BAs you’ll be leading that you’re the lead and that you’ll be guiding the approach etc. to the Requirements deliverables

3. Start by learning about your BAs:

At the beginning you’ll need to establish how experienced the BAs are with eliciting, documenting, and analyzing requirements, how familiar they are with the project subject matter, etc./ by scheduling quick little chats with the BAs you’ll be working with

If you’re dealing with Sr. BAs with lots of experience, then your focus with them will be on making sure things are going smoothly and that they working to the timelines for their requirements work packages; You can give them fairly large and complex requirements work packages
If you’re dealing with more Jr. BAs then you will be in a more guidance/ mentoring mode – periodically reviewing their requirements and providing feedback, mentoring on approach to different types of requirements such as documenting process flows and business rules, etc.; Initially limiting the scope of their work packages to small well-defined pieces of requirements; have little chats with them about how things are going

4. Develop a view of the requirements work packages:

Typically, a group of BAs is assigned to a project because the project is complex and there are multiple “groups/ categories” of requirements that need to be created to deliver the scope of the project. At the outset understand the drivers and objectives of the project and establish a view of the requirements work packages. Some examples of this are:

a. Achieving compliance with regulations or another compliance-related purpose:

1. You may need to look at work packages focused on complying with different sections of the regulations
2. If the compliance covers multiple departments or Lines of Business (LOB) you may need to focus on requirements for each department/ LOB to comply with the regulations

b. Developing and implementing a large technology system or platform:

1. 1. You may need to look at requirements work packages focused around different groups of users with the system – for example if it’s a workflow system you likely have work packages for customer-facing components, back-office-facing components, etc.
  2. You may need to look at requirements work packages focused on different functional features. For example, a customer-facing platform for a direct investing platform may consist of trading-related features, viewing account holdings, researching different securities, etc.

5. Managing the requirements work packages:

a. Establish a view of the project timelines with respect to the requirements work packages based on their complexity etc. I prefer a matrix like this to do so (using the direct investing platform as an example) based on the requirements lifecycle – plan, elicit, analyze, document, get sign-off (note do this in Excel or Project to track progress, etc.)

	Plan	Elicit	Analyze	Document	Sign-Off
Trading requirements	01/01/22 to 10/01/22	10/01/22 to 25/01/22	25/01/22 to 02/02/22	02/02/22 to 16/02/22	16/02/22 to 28/02/22
Security Research requirements	01/01/22 to 10/01/22	10/01/22 to 25/01/22	25/01/22 to 02/02/22	02/02/22 to 16/02/22	16/02/22 to 28/02/22
View account holdings requirements	01/01/22 to 10/01/22	10/01/22 to 25/01/22	25/01/22 to 02/02/22	02/02/22 to 16/02/22	16/02/22 to 28/02/22

b. Based on what you learned about the BAs you’re leading assign them to different work packages – and monitor their progress on their work packages against the. I’ve found the best way to keep track of this is using a matrix like this that I update on a weekly basis:

Legend:

P – Plan, E- Elicit, A- Analyze, D- Document, S- Signoff

	BA1	BA2	BA3
Trading requirements	P – Jan. 1/22
Security Research requirements		P – Jan. 1/22
View account holdings requirements			P – Jan. 1/22

With these 2 matrices, you can keep track of who’s doing what and how they are doing against the target dates so you can provide status reports to the project team as required.

6. Monitoring progress and connecting the BAs as a team:

The most effective approach that I’ve found to monitor the progress of my BAs is to hold weekly meetings – with a twist. Most people just do a status check-in during their weekly meetings – how are you progressing against your timelines. I believe that weekly meetings are a good chance for the BAs to inform and help one another. I encourage them to talk about challenges they are having – someone else in the team may have encountered this and have a solution/ approach to tackling it. I encourage them to talk about effective approaches that they’ve found to doing things that may be helpful to other members of the team. Finally, I ask each BA to give a brief overview of the requirements they are working on. As most projects with a BA team have a common goal – by talking about requirements it will quite often identify synergies or conflicts between requirements/ work packages that will help move the project forward more efficiently.

Conclusion:

Hopefully, these approaches will help you become a more effective BA Lead. There are lots more approaches and in future articles, I may expand on them.

Published on: 2022/01/27

5 Effective Strategies to Address Employee Burnout in an Organization

Written by Mahendra Gupta on September 27, 2023. Posted in Articles.

Gallup’s survey reveals that 76% of employees experience workplace burnout at least sometimes, with 28% reporting feeling burnt out “very often” or “always.”

The statistics mentioned above indicate that numerous employees constantly experience burnout-related issues. This is mainly due to unrealistic deadlines, unclear job expectations, long work hours, etc. It can result in lowered productivity, high turnover, prolonged absenteeism, etc.

However, organizations can implement specific measures that can help minimize or prevent burnout and create a positive work environment. This, in turn, helps improve team performance and the firm’s bottom line.

This blog discusses the signs of employee burnout and how SAVIOM’s resource management solutions can help combat it.

Let’s begin.

Signs of Employee Burnout in an Organization

According to the World Health Organization, employee burnout is a phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Furthermore, it can be characterized by feelings of depletion, exhaustion, negativity, and lowered professional efficacy.

When employees feel burnout, it hampers their performance, affects work quality, and tends to make more mistakes. Therefore, organizations must observe the symptoms and take corrective actions before it becomes a severe issue.

Here are 5 essential signs of employee burnout to watch out for:

Increased absenteeism

Employee absenteeism is a common sign of burnout. When resources experience exhaustion, fatigue, etc., they might take more unplanned leaves to alleviate their work stress and cope with burnout. Additionally, they may try to avoid the work environment due to a lack of motivation to perform their respective tasks.

Lack of engagement

When employees lose interest in work, struggle to complete their tasks on time, or make frequent mistakes, it becomes a symptom of burnout. Due to the high-stress levels and exhaustion, they can become disengaged from daily tasks or find work monotonous and meaningless.

Lowered productivity and performance

When organizations face performance and productivity issues with employees, it shows that resources are experiencing burnout constantly. When they cannot cope with current deadlines, are overwhelmed with work, or feel a loss of purpose, it reflects on their overall work efficiency.

Decreased personal health

Employees undergoing persistent work pressure are likely to experience deterioration in physical health. It manifests in symptoms like panic attacks, migraines, chest pain, loss of appetite, etc.

Increased workplace conflicts

Symptoms like irritability and sensitivity in employees are a clear indication of burnout. Feeling overwhelmed and exhausted can cause high emotional sensitivity and lead to conflicts between coworkers.

Knowing some of the main symptoms of employee burnout, let’s understand the ways to tackle it in an organization.

Five Ways to Prevent Employee Burnout

If left unaddressed, employee burnout can adversely impact organizational growth and financial stability. Therefore, companies must implement effective strategies to minimize burnout and improve employee engagement.

Listed below are the ways to eliminate burnout.

1. Set realistic deadlines considering employees’ leaves

Before initiating a project, managers must prepare a work breakdown structure (WBS) that includes tasks and sub-tasks. It will enable them to assess the skills, timelines, and number of resources required to complete the project’s activities. This will help managers establish realistic deadlines and deploy resources based on the criticality of tasks.

Additionally, managers must review the resource schedules and consider their leaves before allocating them to ongoing or future projects. This will ensure the projects are happening smoothly and help employees take time off to rejuvenate themselves, thereby minimizing burnout.

2. Allocate resources based on skills & availability

Before allocating resources to projects, managers must assess their attributes like skills, capacity, availability, competencies, experience, etc. This will ensure competent resource allocation, preventing under/over-skilled employees from being assigned to specific project tasks.

Moreover, when resources are deployed to projects based on their available capacity, it will prevent under/overallocation and maintain a balanced workload. This will reduce employees’ stress levels and enhance engagement, thereby reducing the risk of burnout and ensuring successful project delivery.

3. Monitor resource utilization levels regularly

Managers must constantly track employees’ utilization levels to prevent workload imbalances. When resources are persistently overutilized, it will lead to burnout. This will directly result in productivity and performance issues, reduced deliverable quality, and unplanned attrition.

Identifying over/underutilization in advance will enable managers to take corrective measures to optimize the workloads. Additionally, it will help managers mobilize resources working on non-billable tasks to billable/ strategic activities. This way, organizations can prevent burnout and improve billable utilization rates.

4. Apply appropriate optimization techniques

When resources are allocated to projects or tasks beyond their capacity, it increases stress levels and leads to burnout. Therefore, managers must implement appropriate optimization techniques such as resource leveling and smoothing to ensure that the employees are neither under/overloaded with work.

Managers can implement resource leveling for projects with flexible timelines where they can adjust start and end dates per the employee’s availability and schedule. Contrarily, they can apply resource smoothing for time-sensitive projects through which the work of overloaded resources can be redistributed, or additional employees can be added. This will ensure uniform workload distribution and lower the risk of burnout.

5. Build the right mix of contingent & permanent staff

Most organizations struggle to complete projects with the available resources during demand peaks. Hence, they over-allocate their existing employees to meet the project deadlines. However, constantly overloading the staff will affect their productivity, thereby leading to burnout.

Therefore, organizations can hire contingent workforce or outsource the work to global employees to reduce unwanted stress and enable employees to focus better on high-value tasks or projects. Thus, organizations can minimize project resource costs, maintain the workflow, and prevent burnout.

These are some of the best techniques to prevent burnout in an organization. Let’s learn how a resource management tool can help address burnout.

How Does Advanced Resource Management Software Help Overcome Employee Burnout?

A next-gen resource management solution like Saviom, with its advanced capabilities, will help employees work more productively. It enables organizations to optimize their resources and tackle burnout effectively.

The tool’s 360-degree visibility into resource attributes like availability, skills, capacity, etc., helps managers identify and allocate competent resources to projects at the right time and cost. This will help prevent under/over-allocation of skilled resources to projects/tasks.

Moreover, the forecasting and capacity planning features enable managers to foresee and plan for pipeline project demand. Based on that, they can create the right mix of permanent and on-demand resources to meet seasonal fluctuations effectively.

In addition, the system offers real-time reports like forecast vs. actuals, utilization heat maps, availability, etc. These enable managers to forecast and track availability, monitor utilization levels, compare them against actuals, identify variances, and take remedial measures in case of over/underutilization.

Furthermore, the software’s open-seat feature allows employees to choose projects of their interest. Working on projects aligning with their skills will motivate employees, improve engagement, and prevent burnout.

Lastly, the tool’s timesheet feature helps managers to monitor the employee’s leaves and their time spent on various tasks. Based on this, managers can set realistic deadlines to complete the project activities.

Thus, robust resource management software can address employee burnout and boost overall productivity.

Conclusion

Resources are the driving force for the success of an organization. Hence, it’s crucial for firms to take care of their employees’ well-being and recognize their efforts. This will motivate them to work harder and achieve better results. Implementing effective strategies and advanced resource management software will enable organizations to prevent burnout and improve the resource health index.

Before You Get Into The Complexity of AI

Written by Timothy Figueroa on September 20, 2023. Posted in Articles.

Before you get into the complexity of AI you should dial in your approach to developing and prioritizing AI use cases. Align AI strategy to the corporate strategy and priority so AI use cases make sense to that organization.

The full value of AI implementations, for an organization, are not realized unless the manager responsible for AI in the organization aligns AI strategy and use cases to the corporate strategy and priority.

There are many examples today of AI implementations that bring value but are not linked to the Corporate Strategy and Priority of that organization. The result is difficulty understanding and measuring the value of the AI use case to that of the organizations goals and priorities.

This may come about where a leader hears about a cool AI technology like “Generative AI” and they want that implemented in some fashion in their line of business and then they accomplish this objective.

The lack of AI strategy alignment to corporate strategy and priority misaligns the AI use case resulting in AI implementations whose values are hard to assess in the context of the overall organizations KPI’s, its customers, lines of business and more.

Where AI use cases are carefully aligned and planned with the Corporate Strategy and Priority in mind it is easier to assess the value pre-implementation, in the short term and the in the long term. Aligned AI Use Cases may then, in time, become a jumping point for new products and services as the organization gains confidence in the AI space.

An alignment example might be, where the top corporate goal is to “better serve customers”. Drilling into this may mean, to the organization, where the customer interacts with the current corporate website and the portal does not support natural language queries for targeted information retrieval in a self-serve way and customers today bypass the portal and phone customer service instead, asking for the information wanted.

The impact of this portal deficit to the organization is that they maintain a larger customer service staff, support training, and maintain infrastructure; who are tasked with processing customer information query requests manually.

The possible AI use case that proposes to solve this deficit may be to enhance the current website by implementing an AI powered information retrieval feature that is easy to use and is self-serve. The AI solutions may be varied but the AI Use Case would be aligned to the corporate priority, would make sense to the organization garnering broad support and would solve a known problem. The AI user case would be measurable in terms of the current KPI’s used to measure performance.

Where the AI Strategy is linked to the Corporate Strategy, management at all levels can assess value and priority prior to any AI use case approval. As well, management would be able to articulate AI use case deliverable expectations, and how these expectations may enhance the existing environment, talk to impacts to the customer or organization, the market, possible effects to product and service offering and, in some cases, impacts to their industry.

Before you get into the complexity of AI, consider your AI strategy and use case approach. Think about linking your AI strategy and use case development to the Corporate Strategy and Priorities of that organization, this will assure alignment, measurable value, and organizational support. I believe this to be the first step to AI success.

Process Redesign: Problem Prevention or Detection

Written by Adrian Reed on July 12, 2023. Posted in Articles.

I recently changed phone networks, and wanted to keep the same phone number. I’ve done this before in the past, and it’s always been a relatively simple process. Usually, a changeover date is agreed, and on that date there’s an hour or so where the phone number is inactive, and then everything works again as usual.

Unfortunately, this time was different. Something went wrong with the ‘porting’ of my number, and days later I was left in a situation where I couldn’t reliably receive calls or texts. Pretty annoying for someone who relies on a phone for work. It was doubly annoying that I kept getting told “wait another 24 hours to see if it magically corrects itself” and it was only when I made a formal complaint that things got resolved…

Now I’ve no idea how number porting works on UK mobile (cell) phones, but from what I read online it’s more complex than a consumer might imagine, involving lots of interfaces and interactions between the old and new companies, and sometimes problems occur. This got me thinking about how some processes preempt problems, and others leave the customer high-and-dry…

Predictable Problems: Prevent or Detect

When designing processes, there will be some potential problems that can be predicted. If you were designing the payment processes for an online shop, you can predict that at some point in the future someone will try and use a stolen card to make a transaction. You can try to prevent that by restricting the shipping address to be the same as the cardholder address, and by processing the card transaction prior to shipping the goods.

Prevention involves use of sensible validation and “guard rails” to ensure that things go as smoothly as possible. Yet there will be some predictable problems that you can’t prevent, but you can still detect as soon as they occur. Once detected, the process can notify relevant people or systems, so that action is taken to rectify the situation.

An example: “Your bags didn’t make the flight”

A few years ago, I was flying from the USA to the UK, with a flight connection at Dallas Fort Worth. Unfortunately, my initial flight was delayed and I landed at the airport really late. So late that even though I ran as fast as I could, the gate for my transatlantic flight had closed. However, luckily the plane hadn’t left and the gate staff explained they were holding the flight for passengers like me who were transferring. Phew! I boarded the plane, relaxed, and tried to sleep for the flight.

When I landed in London and turned on my phone, I got a notification. It read:

“We’re sorry, but your baggage (1 of 1) for record locator <<Reference number>> is arriving on a later flight. For help, go to the <<Airline Company Name’s>> baggage office”

It also had contact details, and a link to track my bags. Now, the fact my bags didn’t make it onto the flight wasn’t really a surprise to me… I nearly didn’t make it onto the flight! But this preemptive message meant I didn’t have to waste time at the baggage carousel. I went straight to the baggage counter, they explained it was on a flight about 12 hours later and they’d courier it to my home address.

A Process Design Pattern: Detect, Inform and Solve

A key point here is the process the airline had set up meant that the problem (a delayed bag) was detected by them, they provided relevant information to me and provided a practical solution. I suspect most customers accept that problems will occur. But when the customer notices the problem first, surely that indicates an opportunity to improve the process?

This highlights the importance of building in problem detection into manual and automated processes. Going back to my earlier example of a phone number transfer that went wrong, surely there must be some way for the phone company to detect that the process failed? Wouldn’t it be far better for them to ‘notice’ this before the customer does, and either fix it straight away or at least inform the customer so the customer doesn’t have to raise a query?

This might sound like it will add processing cost. Yet, it might actually be cost saving or cost-neutral. When things go wrong, customers often spend an inordinate amount of time navigating helpdesks and eventually making complaints. This is really a type of ‘failure demand’—work that is best avoided. By creating a situation where customers don’t have to raise the query in the first place, it reduces these incoming queries and will also likely increase customer satisfaction. In many cases, this will be a clear win/win!

This pattern of prevent or detect, inform and solve is one well worth remembering for us as BAs. I hope that you find it useful in your process analysis and definition!

Beware Proxy Measures

Written by Adrian Reed on June 22, 2023. Posted in Articles.

Organizations are usually pretty good at measuring and counting things. Whether it’s positive customer reviews, staff engagement, average call handling time or something else… chances are that someone in the organization is tracking it. They might even be creating reports or dashboards so that executives can see how different elements of the organization are performing.

From time-to-time a metric will drift and there will be a desire to get it back on track. Perhaps the staff engagement survey shows that people aren’t happy. Or perhaps there’s a contact center where the average call handling time has drifted from 3 minutes to 5 minutes. Either way, it’s easy to imagine that a concerned manager would want to investigate and initiate changes.

Yet here a danger awaits the unprepared. It would be very easy to make knee-jerk reactions when referring to the data alone, without considering its context. It would be even more dangerous to make decisions based on ‘proxy measures’. By ‘proxy measure’ I mean some kind of indicator or metric which approximates how well something is going, but doesn’t directly measure it.

That might sound abstract, so here’s an example. Like many people, I wear a smartwatch that counts my steps. Doing this has definitely changed my behavior, and I strive to get 10,000 steps each day. Yet if my overall goal is to “stay healthy by staying active” then the step counter is at best a proxy measure. Sure, it’ll indicate if I’ve suddenly slumped into a sedentary lifestyle… but it would be very easy to ‘cheat’ the system. Ten thousand slow steps around the house are probably not anywhere near as beneficial as fast-paced walking (or jogging)… and that’s before we even consider the fact that it’s possible to wave your arms around to get a few extra steps. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has done that to get an extra few ‘steps’ in before midnight…

The Danger Of Unfair Comparisons

The point here is that it would be easy to equate ‘number of steps’ with ‘how active and healthy’ a person is. But that would be a dangerous equivalence to make. Ultimately, the smart watch is (I guess) “measuring the number of arm movements which are likely to indicate steps”. That is the real metric… it can be used to approximate many other things, but that is just an approximation. You certainly wouldn’t want to rely on it for decision making.

A similar pattern exists within organizations where unfair comparisons are made. Let’s imagine a call center manager is measuring the ‘average length of call’, and wants each agent to achieve an average of 3 minutes or less. The manager is probably equating “effectiveness of operator” with “length of call”. But is this truly the case?

Extending this example, perhaps there are two different agents: One (Agent A) has an average call handling length of 5 minutes, the other (Agent B) of 2.5 minutes. Agent A is put on a performance management program, while Agent B is given a bonus. Is this fair? Or could it be that Agent A is thoroughly investigating the customers’ needs, solving root causes so they don’t have to call back again, whereas Agent B is just doing the quickest thing. Perhaps Agent B even cuts an occasional customer off to hit their target…The point here is that without further investigation it would be impossible to know.

A Key Question: “Why?”

As with so many situations, a key question to ask is “why?”. In this case it’s important to ask why particular measurements are being taken. It can be a difficult question for stakeholders to answer, and different stakeholders might have different perspectives on the rationale for measuring and reporting on a particular metric. That’s useful to know too.

Asking this question can help us to determine potential gaps in the way that situations are being assessed. For example, imagine we asked two stakeholders why call handling time was measured. Perhaps they say:

“To measure efficiency of the call center agents”

“To ensure good customer service”

Arguably, the measure on its own doesn’t achieve either of these. It might be that other metrics are necessary alongside this to give a better picture. Customer feedback, customer satisfaction scores and so on might also need to be considered to give a better picture. In some cases it might be useful to stop measuring or reporting on something entirely, as the very act of reporting just acts as a distraction. All of this depends entirely on the context, so further investigation of the situation is likely to be needed.

Questioning The Norm

As with any situation, this is an area where BAs can add value by acting with curiosity. Working backwards to understand why things are measured will help ensure that possible options for improvement are generated. It will often involve questioning the norm, but most BAs are used to that!