Points Make Problems
Points Make Problems (Rather Than Prizes) – Or why Story Points might not be the best way of estimating effort.
Tag: Planning
A Checklist for Business Analysis Planning
Use the Universal Business Analysis Planning Checklist as You Plan Your Business Analysis Approach.
Every project is a unique, temporary endeavor.
The business process management, regulatory compliance and digital transformation projects that business analysts may play a role in all come with different goals, scopes, teams, timelines, budgets dependencies and risks. Though many projects follow similar methodologies they are all tailored for project scope constraints and to take advantage of available resources, opportunities and lessons learned from prior work.
Each business analyst also comes with a unique set of skills and experiences. Almost all business analysts have great communications skills and at least some experience-based business domain knowledge. That’s why they became business analysts in the first place. Every business analyst has uniquely acquired knowledge of business analysis techniques and business domains through personal study, practice and experience. Many have also been trained in elicitation, requirements management, modeling, measurement, analysis and documentation techniques. An ever-growing number have received professional certifications, such as the IIBA Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) or the PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PMI-PBA).
What is Business Analysis Planning?
The most skilled business analysts are not only competent in many business analysis techniques but also consciously tailor their business analysis approach for each project that they engage in. They have learned to consider key project dynamics along with their own competencies and to tailor their planned business activities and deliverables to suit each project’s unique dynamics. Regardless of your own level of business analysis experience, maturity, and whether you are formally trained, certified or not, you can still consciously assess each project’s dynamics and tailor your forthcoming business analysis work to get the most productivity and value out of your business analysis efforts in each project.
The most significant project dynamics include:
- The methodology, or sequence of stages or major milestones, and the business analysis products or outcomes that are expected by the end of each stage/milestone (and before starting the next).
- The budget and schedule, not only to meet them, but to take advantage of contingency or schedule slack opportunities, to increase the value, quality or to learn.
- The key project stakeholders and relationships that are new and changed and forming, to take a proactive role in fostering and building relationships with and among that team.
- The types and combinations of elicitation techniques that will be best suited for producing or validating business analysis deliverables.
- The business domain knowledge and experiences of the diverse key project stakeholders, including your own unique set of business analysis competencies.
The Universal Business Analysis Planning Checklist
You can be more effective in planning your business analysis approach if you follow a consistent, clear agenda that considers the common project dynamics.
The Universal Business Analysis Approach Planning Checklist covers the most common project dynamics. You can use this as an agenda to elicit and discover a comprehensive view of a project’s key dynamics, its opportunities and use what you discover to adapt/tailor your business analysis approach.
As an exercise, think of a project that you have recently worked on, you are currently working on, or will soon be working on. Answer questions in the following checklist for yourself.
Project Life Cycle
- What are the planned stages of this project?
- What stage are we currently in?
- What is the business analysis deliverable (or set of deliverables) that I am responsible for producing in this stage?
- What is the intended use of my business analysis deliverable(s) and who will use it?
Schedule and Effort Budget
- How much effort can I spend and by what target date am I expected to produce my business analysis deliverable(s)?
- Is that about what I also estimate it will take?
- Is either my effort or date estimate higher than the effort budget or target date? If so, how might I adapt my effort, scope, activities or configuration of my deliverable(s)?
Project Stakeholders and Relationships
- What are the key roles is on the project team and who is in them?
- Does this project have an executive sponsor, project owner or product owner, project manager, specialists and business subject matter experts?
- What are the names and titles the persons in these project roles?
- Are significantly new relationships being are created in this project?
- Who’s new to each other on this team?
- Are there local and who’s remote team members?
- What are peoples’ responsibilities?
- Who is responsible for producing, accepting or needs to be consulted or informed of each of the project’s key deliverables, particularly the business analysis deliverable(s)?
Advertisement
Elicitation Techniques
- Which elicitation techniques are available to me use?
- Documentation Reviews – What documentation or prior work products are available to review?
- Interviews and Workshops – Who can I interview or include in a workshop, and what questions would I need to ask?
- Observations – Where and what kinds of observations may be needed and how could I arrange for them?
- System reviews – What system(s) are available to review and for what information?
- Surveys – Who could I engage in a survey and using what types of questions?
- What are my own business analysis competencies?
- Considering this project’s stakeholders and relationships, the elicitation techniques available to me, and my own core competencies, which elicitation techniques are best suited gather and validate my business analysis information?
Organizational Assets
- What specialized tools for elicitation, documentation and modeling are available to me?
- Collaboration tools, facilities, survey tools?
- Diagramming or modeling software?
- What prior business analysis work (e.g., documents, models) that I can draw from?
- Does my organization offer training in the subject business domain?
Competencies and Knowledge
- Who on the project team has what expert business domain knowledge?
- What is my own business domain knowledge?
- What are my strongest core business analysis competencies?
- Where can you take advantage the team’s diversity of knowledge and competencies?
- Who are the best stakeholders in this project to engage in elicitation of content or validation of business analysis deliverables and what is or are the best elicitation techniques to use?
On reflection, are you able to answer these questions for yourself? When you go into your project workplace, who will you include in this conversation?
Conclusion:
Business analysis planning is a recognized business analysis activity. The IIBA Body of Knowledge (BoK) includes the Plan Business Analysis Approach activity within its Business Analysis Planning and Management process. The BoK also lays out the scope of what should be covered by a Business Analysis Approach as “The set of processes, templates, and activities that will be used to perform business analysis in a specific context.”
The time and formality that you apply to business analysis planning is up to you. At the financial institution where I work as a project and program manager, our business analysts typically tailor and document a business analysis plan for each new project to which they are assigned.
I think of business analysis planning as a form of insurance. Spend a little time upfront to assure that the bulk of the rest of your business analysis efforts will be as well spent and effective as possible. Expect the benefits of tailoring a business analysis plan for every project to be that:
- It will help you to align your own core business analysis competencies to each project, and
- You and the project will gain the most value from your business analysis efforts.
That’s a value-adding proposition.
You are welcome to contribute comments about project dynamics that impact business analysis plans or about the checklist presented through the Contact Us page at www.ProcessModelingAdvisor.com.
How to optimise resources in matrix organizations?
Matrix organizations have prevailed for decades, predominantly in multi-project environments.
Gallup states that 84% of organizations are matrixed to some extent. A resource pool allocated to cross-departmental projects is typical in a matrixed organization, which means employees have dual or multiple reporting managers.
Matrix organizations have proven beneficial in terms of breaking traditional silos within the organization, enhancing collaboration, and helping in better decision making.
However, critics have adjudged that managerial conflicts and challenges in monitoring and controlling resources limit such organizations’ effectiveness. Moreover, in matrix organizations, several projects across departments and locations are on the boil. So, shifting priorities that skew resource utilization is quite common.
Optimizing resources against their availability and competencies is easier said than done.
To meet dynamic resource demands, resource managers end up over or under allocating resources, unintentionally.
So the question is: How can matrix organizations optimize their resources amid the changing demands of multiple projects?
Many project-intensive businesses are still relying on clunky spreadsheets and homegrown solutions to manage their resources. These legacy systems are cumbersome and fail to mitigate the resource optimization challenges within the modern business ecosystem. To optimally tap your resource pool, you need enterprise-level resource planning and scheduling software.
The following tips will ensure effective resource optimization in a matrix organization:
1) Enterprise-wide visibility: Matrix organizations have multiple dimensions, so enterprise visibility is a prerequisite for effective resource optimization. Matrix organizations can benefit from resource management software that provides 360-degree visibility of all your resources and work demands.
Also, complete visibility helps keep track of tasks, resource availability changes, and impact on project health and workforce capacity. Hence, appropriate resourcing treatments are applied to optimize resources in a multi-project environment.
Advertisement
2) Set clear expectations: According to Gallup, matrixed employees are more engaged than their non-matrixed counterparts. But they lack clarity on expectations at work. Therefore, maintaining open communication, including actionable performance feedback, is necessary for role clarity. It helps keep employees and managers on the same page, but it also drives outcome-driven alliances and informed decision-making.
Mc Kinsey’s research on Organizational Health Index (OHI) reveals that role clarity improves accountability, a critical component of OHI. Role ambiguity is highly pervasive for matrix organizations. So, leaders must ensure setting clear expectations aligned with business objectives is a continuous process. So, instead of annual performance reviews, regular feedback on employee progress can improve overall engagement.
3) Prioritize projects before allocating resources: In a matrix organization, it is common to have multiple active projects demanding a common skilled worker. Ideally, the allocation of highly skilled members should be prioritized for high priority projects. However, the distribution of skilled workers across all the projects is essential, otherwise, one project will get all the focus.
The organization should also have an out rotation strategy to kick start new projects by pulling out the niche resource from ongoing projects. Accordingly, backfills can be trained and allocated to fill in the vacancies. This way, the current projects can continue their course, while new projects get off the ground on time.
4) Identify and allocate competencies: One of the crucial steps for resource optimization is competent resource allocation. Most resource planning and scheduling tools help identify and assign the right resource to the right job. Based on criteria like skills, experience, qualification, location, and cost rate, resource managers can make optimal use of the resource pool.
Besides, these tools’ self-serving model enables users to update their skill and training information, which undergoes verification before approval. So, the resource competencies are up to date in real-time. Subsequently, seamless resource requesting in matrix organizations takes place.
5) Measure capacity vs. demand: Matrix organizations can vastly benefit from a resource capacity planning tool. It can forecast capacity vs. demand from multiple perspectives like role, department, skills, location, team, etc. The scientific forecasting model helps in identifying excesses or shortages ahead of time.
Accordingly, resources can be hired, reskilled or upskilled, or juggled around project timelines to attain resource optimization. Besides, predicting resource demand for future or pipeline projects buys you time to have an optimally balanced and skilled resource pool. Having a judicious blend of full-time, part-time, casual, and contractual staff prevents last-minute hiring and firing costs.
6) Minimize bench time: In large organizations, especially in IT firms, unplanned ramp down on current projects are common. Additionally, if pipeline projects are absent, the bench strength increases. This adversely affects the bottom line and narrows project margins. Foresight into future project vacancies helps identify resources on the bench due to under allocation of work.
Proper capacity planning will minimize bench time by mobilizing resources from non-billable to billable work. In case benched resources lack the skills needed for a task, upskilling and reskilling them eliminates the hasty hiring process.
The Takeaway:
Efficient and effective resource optimization within matrix organizations is achievable using modern resource management software. This tool breaks traditional silos within multi-project intensive organizations and facilitates quick reshuffling of resources across departments and locations. As mentioned above, these tips will resolve utilization issues and optimize your resource pool for enhanced profitability.
Taking responsibility for the outcome
As a Junior Business Analyst who’s about to go into a meeting to report on why our latest deployment into production had so many bugs –
it made me think about all the missed opportunities and potential questions I could have asked myself to catch them sooner.
As a business analyst, it’s my job to brief the team on the features that need to be developed, and ensure they get the designs and documentation to ensure a smooth, (hopefully) bug-free implementation that can be thoroughly tested before release. So why did we have four bugs then?
Assume responsibility
Asking yourself these questions may help to pinpoint where the issue originated:
1. How often are change requests initiated (not due to a change in business requirements), within the project – due to incomplete or incorrect requirements?
2. How often are bugs added to the backlog, as a result of unclear or misunderstood requirements?
Advertisement
How often are the designs or documentation being updated to re-clarify the requirements which have been misunderstood by the developers?
How often are the testers missing potential test scenarios due to lack of knowledge of the scope of the work being implemented?
How often are additional backlog items and stories created due to lack of completeness within the specifications?
How often does the client point of missing aspects of features or stories which have made their way into the staging environment or production due to a poorly fleshed out requirements spec?
(Less) Consistency is key.
I found myself answering ‘frequently’ to too many of the above questions, which not only impacts the overall deadline of the project, but it also costs our clients a fair penny in project costs.
Striving to be a better BA does not mean perfection from day 1, but rather small improvements over time – and that means starting with an honest reflection of where you may be falling short.
Don’t fall into the blame game of, “Oh, but the developer should have thought of this scenario”, or “Oh the testers should have picked it up”. You created the spec, you were there for the grooming, and the planning – and had the opportunity to glance over the test cases before development began. Take ownership of the outcome.
So where did I fall short this time? Even though my spec was well thought out AND I provided the testers with a list of test scenarios to consider, the one thing I didn’t do – was consider the scope of the system being impacted in the development -resulting in an entire segment of the system going untested.
Sometimes we’re so focused on the little details that we forget to take a step back and take in the bigger picture.
Why AI Drives Better Business Decision Making
Are you ready to trust AI to make decisions for your business?
If you’re unsure if AI is good enough for this task, you might be surprised by the time you’re done reading. No, I’m not going to convince you to dramatically change the way you make your decision making process, like, right away. That’s not the right way to go.
Instead, you’re going to see how AI is really used to make a difference for businesses. We’ll also talk about how entrepreneurs like you are benefitting by incorporating AI in the decision making process.
How to Incorporate AI in Decision Making the Right Way?
The hype around AI has generated a quite false impression that it’s a complete solution to decision-making. For many business leaders not ready to embrace the technology, this impression has played a final role in making the decision whether to try it.
In reality, things are a little bit different.
AI doesn’t make decision-making automatic. It gives you never-before-accessed insights to make the best possible decisions faster.
In other words, AI doesn’t take away your decision making privileges. It becomes your partner whose ability to generate useful business insights is superb.
Virginie Grandhaye, the offering manager for IBM Decision Optimization, has recently given a great interview where she explained how the process of AI decision making really works.
According to Grandhaye, the primary role of AI is to enable the business to use data “to both analyze and formalize the decision-making process.”
There are five success factors involved in making AI work, says Grandhaye.
|
AI Decision Making Process Success Ingredients by Grandhaye |
|
As you can see, AI experts and decision-makers need to work together to make the best out of the technology. The outcome of the cooperation will be the so-called “ intelligence decision.”
The biggest benefit of an intelligence decision, according to Grandhaye, is the ability to help businesses focus on a business need instead of having them dealing with algorithms and numbers.
Here’s how AI decision making does that.
How AI Improves Business Decision Making
1. AI Eliminates Cognitive Bias
Human analysis is inherently prone to cognitive bias, which has them focusing intently on irrelevant or wrong factors. It’s a really big problem just because of the sheer amount of them. Science says there are over 180 cognitive biases that could potentially affect your business decisions and steer you in the wrong direction.
A human decision maker is susceptible to all of them, especially when he or she is stressed, poorly trained, tired, or multitasking.
Advertisement
“Cognitive biases are bad for business,” writes Dr. Jim Taylor, an expert on the psychology of performance. [They’re] “most problematic because they cause business people to make bad decisions.”
AI, on the other hand, doesn’t have this problem. Its algorithms search for all connections and relationships in data, not just the ones that people want or need to see there.
2. AI Helps with Better Content Personalization
Content personalization is a must for online businesses to generate more traffic, leads, and sales. Deloitte says that 47 percent of online shoppers are ready to switch to a different brand after having impersonal experiences with a business.
A business can personalize content well on a small scale, but doing so for thousands of customers might become a challenge. For one, analyzing their browsing behavior to create relevant content becomes incredibly time-consuming.
That’s where AI intelligence decision comes in.
An algorithm can:
- Personalize content based on a user’s browsing history, purchases, subscriptions, or other characteristics
- Help content creators by supplying them with insights into customer behavior
- Create more relevant brand experiences for customers by managing content in real time (content sequencing).
AI decision making can significantly improve digital marketing campaigns.
A company relying on content marketing to attract leads, for example, can use the insights generated by AI to write more engaging and targeted blog articles.
Content marketing platforms like OneSpot use sophisticated algorithms to deliver content sequencing, i.e. showing relevant content at specific points in the customer journey. This approach helps to increase the ability of the content to engage customers.
3. AI Makes it Easier to Understand Customer Journey
The existing AI-powered tools can dramatically advance understanding of customer experience with a brand.
Here are some ways in which businesses are using them already:
- AI-powered chatbots automate lead generation and improve customer service by making your business available 24/7 and gathering lots of customer data
- Chatbots share content based on a customer’s interactions with a brand automatically through Facebook
- Algorithms detect customers’ emotions in social media posts and analyze the brand perception
- AI systems conduct up-selling and cross-selling in eCommerce to help to sell more
- AI face recognition systems make online payments easier and faster
- AI identifies and prevents eCommerce fraud by identifying subtle behavioral patterns in transactions.
The results are already pretty amazing. Amazon’s AI-based product recommendation engine, for example, generates 35 percent of the company’s total revenues.
4. AI Helps to Create Better Emails
Email marketing, the best-performing digital marketing channel, has just got an update thanks to AI. Today, businesses use mostly traditional email marketing tools to send automated messages and get more customers.
With AI, a lot more becomes available:
- Write more relevant subject lines. The algorithm can generate personalized email subject lines to increase open rates. It evaluates the performance of previous campaigns and suggests specific line options based on best-performing ones
- Automate distribution. AI takes email distribution one step further by allowing to send automatic emails based on the stage a customer is in their journey
- Generate emails. AI is good at creating emails that look like they were designed by humans. Already many AI-powered email marketing tools can both automatically generate emails and suggest the most relevant content ideas for specific recipients.
Together, these benefits allow businesses to deliver personalized emails at any scale. Since online customers appreciate personalization so much, chances are good that businesses will see their email campaigns paying off nicely.
AI Decision Making: Faster and More Effective Processes
So, how do you feel about AI decision making now? The technology can clearly benefit your business by giving access to previously unavailable data insights and patterns. By the end of the day, you’re still in charge plus your decision can be much better informed.
Businesses across different industries are already making better decisions thanks to AI. It’s up to you whether your company should join them, but don’t take long to make your mind. Your competitors are exploring AI, too, you know.