Tag: Strategic

Business Intelligence Is About More Than Just Reporting

Written by Silvia Bressan on April 25, 2017. Posted in Articles.

Solving business problems using insight is nothing new. Data shapes the way we see the world and using it to make effective and efficient business decisions is only logical.

However, many people are still under the misguided perception that business intelligence is just a fancy way of talking about analytics reporting.

Business intelligence and business analytics professionals have been arguing their case now for a long time. While some people still associate them only with numbers and spreadsheets – at the end of the day, they need to be able to turn information into something actionable.

That said, we’ve got nothing against the powerful spreadsheet.

It’s about creating good processes

No matter how pretty your dashboard of data looks, it’s meaningless if it’s not actionable. One of the most important facets of business intelligence is creating meaningful, actionable insights for businesses to use.

Some common uses for business intelligence include accelerating and improving business decision making, increasing efficiency and optimizing internal processes. By including business intelligence as part of a company’s internal processes, decisions are better informed. More than just reporting on how productive teams are or where cash flow is coming from, it’s about understanding how a business is run and providing actionable insights on how to run it better.

It’s about driving new opportunities

Business intelligence data comes in all forms. It can be real-time or historical. Ultimately, it’s there to answer any questions your team may have to drive a business forwards. This could include identifying new revenue streams, identifying market trends as they happen, or using past insights to decide the best way to move forward.

Talented business information professionals recognize the vast amounts of data they possess as having untold potential. By understanding business goals, they’re able to make clever, informed and innovative decisions for the future.

It’s about solving problems

One way to look at business intelligence is the nervous system of an organization. It senses everything and reports back. By delving deep into the insights provided by business intelligence data, it’s possible to spot business problems that need to be addressed quickly. Plus, business intelligence can even provide the intelligent insights necessarily to create an action plan for addressing any problems – current or future.

In today’s world, we always should always plan ahead. Business intelligence gives us the insights we need to both predict the future, and plan for it. Whether that’s managing the impacts of tomorrow’s weather, overseas markets, climate change or seasonal trends.

It’s about better communication

One of the most important components of business intelligence is being able to communicate findings in a way that’s effective and actionable. Business intelligence programs have been designed to clearly communicate data in a way that’s meaningful to people – not just a spreadsheet of numbers.

Yes, reporting is an important part of business intelligence. But it’s not all cut and dried. Business intelligence helps provide actionable and agile solutions to business problems. That requires collecting and interpreting a lot of information – more than most people know what to do with. That’s why finding clever, innovative and accessible ways of communicating the right information at the right time is so integral to business intelligence.

It’s about good ethics

Paying attention to ethics is good business especially in the era of the social enterprise and conscientious consumer. Not only can business intelligence provide insights for unexplored ethical avenues, but it also helps businesses find proactive ways to improve their conduct as an organization. This could be anything from improving supply chain and logistics management to finding new and improved processes for managing human resources.

Plus, in today’s rapidly growing and changing world, business intelligence is at the forefront of modern ethics exploration. Some current ethical concerns facing business intelligence specialists include data security, integrity, and privacy. Business intelligence analytics even has the potential to detect negligence and fraud. It’s an exciting new frontier for modern ethics exploration and something to keep your eye on.

It’s about people

When push comes to shove, people are what matter. Business intelligence can give you insights into how to better manage your team and provide a better, more stable working environment. From reducing employee churn to making employees’ lives easier and more productive, data should ultimately be used to benefit the people. People are the most valuable resources most businesses have and knowing how to treat them better is crucial.

Embedded BI Changes the Strategic Role of the Business Analyst

Written by Marcus Hodges on April 13, 2017. Posted in Articles.

The world of business intelligence (BI) and data analytics has existed for decades; what started as simple Business Analysis reporting in the late 1980s has evolved to today’s near real-time querying.

Departments rely on BI to make daily decisions, and at the highest-level organizations turn to BI and data analytics to make strategic business decisions that can dramatically affect a company’s bottom line and future direction.

Business intelligence is going through a transition. Its evolution combined with new capabilities provided by embedded BI empowers Business Analysts to serve a more direct, visible and strategic role in delivering analytics to organizations. As technology evolves to meet new market demands, departmental, and organizational needs, the functionality offered by BI and data analytics is dramatically evolving. This extends to change who manages BI and data analytics.

As organizations mature and become more sophisticated, business leaders realize that mining the data that already exists within the organization affords them opportunities to influence more effective strategic decision making.

With BI innovations, including new features, functions, and end-user capabilities, Business Analysts can also drive efficiencies with more timely data analysis.

BI Use Comes from Disciplines, Departments Across the Organization

Traditionally the information technology (IT) department was responsible for deploying and managing the BI solution, as well as fulfilling requests to produce reports and delivering them to end users, departmental level managers, and the executives who needed them. Once IT deployed the BI solution, the Business Analyst became the intermediary for end users and IT to develop reports and dashboards that met business objectives. Unfortunately, the process to meet user requests for new reports could take weeks.

Beyond serving as the IT and end user-intermediary, the Business Analyst historically had the pivotal role of dictating the processes and developing business systems, so the organization achieved its business goals. The role of the Business Analyst included:

defining business needs through detailed functional requirements
evaluating potential solutions to business problems
analyzing and evaluating business systems and user needs

Evolving Business Analyst Solutions Changing Roles

While the Business Analyst always worked with end users to understand and prioritize business goals and information needs, that role has now evolved to include understanding the analytics methodology for their organization. The Business Analyst translates critical objectives into the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics.

In many organizations, IT teams are resource constrained – having to do too much with too little, especially time. The evolution of BI hands more responsibilities to end users, who require greater and immediate access to real-time data.

With this shift, the Business Analyst has moved from the role of facilitator or gatekeeper working with the IT department and end users to a more strategic role. Business Analysts can now directly influence how business applications and their outputs are used by organizations to meet specific needs. In our fast-paced world, end users expect much quicker response times, and now the Business Analyst has become responsible for getting them analytics they need in real time.

Today’s Business Analyst is responsible for the following roles:

administrating the analytics experience for all users
managing data sources and access rights
creating and distributing reports, dashboards and data visualizations
performing complex analysis and implement change to improve organizational performance.

The Power of BI Today in Form and Function

Solution providers sensing this shift have responded by offering capabilities that make BI more than just a stand-alone platform. They are embedding BI capabilities in their applications to allow for self-service analytics. Available purpose-built embedded BI capabilities are becoming intuitive functions that end users access as part of their daily workflow.

An administrative graphical user interface (GUI) allows the Business Analyst to customize the BI and data analytics functions, enabling them to set up user roles and permissions. Through the GUI, the Business Analyst tailors the user’s analytics for departments and individual users.

The Business Analyst can also define data sources and blend data from multiple sources, other tasks previously handled by IT. Rather than relying on a database administrator (DBA), the GUI allows the Business Analyst to alias data fields as business-friendly terms – making analytics more approachable to the business user, thereby increasing adoption.

A powerful GUI and embedded BI functionality equips end-users with self-service capabilities to produce the reports, visualizations, and dashboards, which previously required engagement from the IT team and Business Analyst. The evolution of BI and organizational changes shift report writing and dashboard creation from the IT team to the end user.

Self-service BI empowers end-users and enables the Business Analyst to work as a true analyst, freeing them to create reports and dashboards to ensure the company follows its business model and makes effective strategic business decisions based on real-time data analysis. The Business Analyst can take learnings gleaned from analytics to better forecast and plan for the effects specific actions might have on the business. This makes the Business Analyst’s role more powerful, helping them play a pivotal role in strategic decision-making.

BI’s Evolution Makes These Skills Important for the Business Analyst

As the amount of analyzable data continues to grow, current and future Business Analysts may want to consider strengthening or adding to their skillset. There is certainly no shortage in the growth of data creation, capture, management, and analysis that will require such skills as:

Business Acumen – Understanding the industry and its KPIs to create value for the organization
Application Proficiency – Mastering the organization’s business application and its BI solution
UX/UI Design – Knowing where users need to utilize analytics within the business application
Report and Dashboard Design – Understanding what data and reports are relevant to the end user and utilize their eye for storytelling and knowledge of charting to identify the most appropriate visualizations, tables, and charts to help users find insight
Methodology and Business Process – Understanding the processes of the organization to identify opportunities to redesign for improvement and apply analytics to improve operational performance
Automate Decision-Making – Analyzing and determining which reports and alerts can be scheduled and automated to move users toward additional data discovery and insight

Embedded BI Aids BUSINESS ANALYST’s Strategic Role

The demand for interactive data has helped BI to evolve from a rigid technology managed by IT to a business requirement. Today’s Business Analyst deals with BI as a business function, not an enabling technology. The continued growth of solutions that empower the end user allows the Business Analyst to further cement their role as a strategic asset for the company. Where the Business Analyst once took on the role of a project manager, embedded self-service BI empowers the Business Analyst to shift that role Business Analyst to strategic analysis.

Keeping Risks at Bay & the Astute Business Analyst

Written by J.A. Oliver, CBAP, CISSP, MBA on April 7, 2017. Posted in Articles.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain

Ah, yes, the wit and wisdom of Mark Twain; still rings true over a century later, in the business analyst’s world. More recently, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had famously talked about “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” While Rumsfeld never talked specifically about “unknown knowns,” I believe that Mark Twain effectively filled that gap.

So, what can YOU do about all the risks lurking in the shadows, as the semi-omnipotent (like digging half a hole) business analyst?

I’m sure you all know about the “probability times impact” formula, which tends to be qualitative (i.e. scale of Low to High) in our world, then you propose mitigation responses; but as the BA the pressing question should be how you can share the daunting task of risk analysis and management with the project manager (PM). I see this as a joint effort in that the PM is chiefly entrusted with managing risks affecting time and cost, the BA and PM together manage risks relating to project scope, and the BA is primarily tasked with assessing risks relating to project quality. This stands to reason since the BA is concerned with product scope, whereas the PM is preoccupied with project scope.

So let’s get our hands dirty and dive into some salient aspects of risk. Are you ready?

1. Prioritizing Your Requirements Based on Risk Factors

What if the solution your organization wants to deploy is cutting-edge and entails a certain “leap of faith”? If something has no known precedent or proof of concept, there is an inherent risk to its quality on deployment – chalk that one up under “known unknowns.” (And try not to fret about the “unknown unknowns” while you’re at because let’s face it: you’ve got enough on your plate as it is.) As the BABOKv3 says in Section 5.3 on page 98, “If there is a risk that the solution is not technically feasible, the requirement that is most difficult to implement may be prioritized to the top of the list in order to minimize the resources effort before those resources learn that a proposed solution cannot be delivered.” Sage advice: if you can’t meet the quality threshold, you don’t want to encourage the PM to over-commit resources in vain.

2. The Personnel Dimension of Risk

This is where it gets tricky and sticky. Tricky because people have to be convinced; sticky because they don’t want to budge. It helps to know your organization’s appetite for risk, too.

In doing stakeholder analysis, you have to make sure that the right players – such as SMEs or regulatory stakeholders – can commit themselves to the team effort. If they are only sporadically available, or they are in “fire-fighting” mode all the time, then you might have to take a risk proceeding with certain assumptions until they can be validated. If they find fault with the conceptual solution and your initial requirements, then you’ll want to ensure their continued availability, as their approval is paramount. These are all factors that are known as engagement risk.

3. Assumptions, Constraints, and Dependencies

Typically, risks are documented along with assumptions, constraints, and dependencies for a good reason. It is because from these categories that risks are implied or inferred. As the BA, it may help to maintain a traceability matrix so you can convey potential flaws of assumptions, or whether dependencies have been fulfilled or are likely to be fulfilled – again, you’re more concerned with impacts on product quality, whereas project (and program) management is more concerned about duplication of effort (and costs). Once again, you need to consider the risk appetite of sponsors; that could very well be the impetus for a given constraint!

4. The Big Picture

Many organizations today use ERM or Enterprise Risk Management. These are high-level risk categories that need to be addressed in order to meet strategic imperatives. When you document high-level requirements (HLRs), consider how they may contribute to reducing these risk factors – thus resulting in residual risk. You could show a risk mitigation rating for each block of HLRs (i.e. a scale of Low-High); however, it may be difficult to do a risk rating attribute for each individual requirement. Your HLRs are expected to produce synergies to meet organizational objectives. Consider a formula that factors in priority values, too.

When thinking of the bigger picture, think about sources of risk; they could be more internally induced like culture or restructuring; or more commonly, they could be externally induced such as technology or market factors.

5. Value Realization and Risk

The moment of truth: you need to know if your undertaking has met certain quality thresholds. Has the solution realized its intended value? This is typically measured by metrics or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). However, risks can ultimately derail your intended benefits; this, I believe, is where the framework of “(un)known (un)knowns” comes into play.

Achieving a reduced risk as an outcome, incidentally, is a benefit unto itself; albeit one that is not easily measured, as say compared to KPIs of increased efficiency, or reduced defects or downtime or complaints. (Section 7 of the BABOK speaks very well to this, by the way.) In this ever-expanding world of business intelligence (BI) and predictive analytics, one can run a “what-if” analysis to experiment with a range of outcomes, which could be based on risks manifesting.

6. Security Requirements

Lastly, some thoughts on security and risk; traditionally, security requirements have been in NFRs (non-functional requirements), or a logical roles matrix – since if anything threatens the CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) of your solution (which could be electronic or physical), then you effectively have a risk.

This is where an experienced technical SME, such as a senior designer, can be indispensable in sealing up the cracks in the armor as it were. You may need to introduce requirements that prevent certain malicious behaviors as per their advice.

4 Roadblocks That Prevent You from Delivering Value to Customers

Written by Angela Wick on March 29, 2017. Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on 4 Roadblocks That Prevent You from Delivering Value to Customers

Business analysts get cast in many roles on project teams, but one of their most important roles is a customer advocate.

Great Business Analysts understand customer needs and provide the voice of the customer to inform priorities and decisions. When the customer is the focal point of project work, teams deliver solutions that delight the customer.

Most Business Analysts would agree with this in theory, but in practice, customer needs get buried under the day to day quicksand of details, deadlines, politics, and fire-fighting. There are so many things that distract us from our customers. Here are the top 4 roadblocks on our path to customer value:

Roadblock #1: Limiting Our Definition of Customer.

Who is your customer? If you think it’s just an internal customer, think again. Think beyond the silo of your internal customer:

How does the internal customer serve the organization’s external customers?
Who does the internal customer serve in other parts of the organization?
How does the internal customer serve the organization’s external partners?

Even when the project scope appears to be internal, it has an impact on the operation of the organization, which eventually impacts additional end users. Even a tiny database change to an internal system could prevent an internal call center employee from having the data they need to answer a customer’s question.

Avoid this roadblock by identifying your customer chain from start to finish. Understand how their needs connect and help your team keep relevant needs top of mind throughout the project lifecycle.

Roadblock #2: Ignoring the Fact That Our Customers Are Changing

Markets change every day. A new product or announcement from your competitor can significantly change your company’s priorities and objectives. Even customer expectations are changing, rapidly! This means their definition of value is changing rapidly too. If you don’t keep up, lackluster solutions that erode your customer base get delivered.

Think about how quickly our lives are changing—none of us grew up with smartphones and social media, family road trips required an atlas instead of google maps, we couldn’t find good places to eat “near me now,” and breaking news came from the TV instead of Twitter.

Every change brings new demands from customers. In fast-paced, competitive industries, your requirements might be outdated before you get them prioritized!

So, how do you bust through this roadblock? LISTEN to your customers. Be sure you have mechanisms in place to monitor their needs, wants and expectations in real-time and be sure to address roadblock #4. Keep your mind open to noticing subtle changes not only in your project but in other projects around you and even your organization’s marketplace.

Roadblock #3: Only Doing What Leaders Ask Us to Do

What leaders ask for is NOT what they actually want. Their intentions are good, but there’s always more to the story. If the story is incomplete, our customers will receive incomplete solutions.

As Business Analysts, it is our responsibility to help leaders understand the full story. Our leaders want us to challenge scope, approach, and design to discover the full value in their ideas. We avoid this roadblock by intelligently disobeying these requests to implement their intent, not the exact requirement they give.

So, what does it mean to go with their intent and intelligently disobey? It means Business Analysts elicit and analyze to align intent and value. They use engaging techniques to get the team thinking and talking about what is valuable to who. Then, BAs give recommendations and high-value options that align to the leader’s intent.

Dig deeper into expectations of your customers and sponsors. Dig into the data to find data points to support the business vision, goals and objectives more subjectively. Help your leaders and sponsors build robust and thoughtful business cases to support their vision, goals, objectives and expectations. Don’t gather requirements – elicit them. Requirements are not laying on the road around the office for you to pick them up off the floor. You need to ask questions, challenge to gain a deeper understanding and create objective validation of the requirements and link them to the expectations of your leadership and sponsors. Trace and align requirements to the vision, goals, objectives and expectations of your leadership and sponsors. If the requirement doesn’t align – it’s time to red line (or cut the requirement).

Roadblock #4: Using an ineffective and outdated requirements approach.

Old-school requirements include a single requirements phase where BAs write down what stakeholders say they want (roadblock #3) and then hand off requirements to the development team for distant delivery (roadblock #2).

To deliver high-value products that delight customers, requirements of today and the future require a new way of working. Value-packed requirements do not come from scribe BAs who just write down what they’re told. We need to dig deeper to find real customer value.

The products that delight customers are not full of features they asked for, and they are full of features that make them think “wow, that is cool, I wouldn’t have thought of that!”

Business Analysts need to help their team to avoid this old-school requirement roadblock by evolving requirements from “what is stated” to “what will delight.” This evolution requires insight, observation, data, empathy, high impact collaboration, human-centered design patterns, and experiments. This new way of working is paramount to a successful customer centered approach.

Do you deliver solutions that delight your end users? Please post a comment below to share your success story with other BA Times readers!

5 Competencies that help Business Analysts Connect the Dot

Written by Elizabeth Larson on March 28, 2017. Posted in Articles.

What do detectives, entrepreneurs/innovators, doctors, lawyers, and effective business analysts all have in common?

Among other things, they all have to connect the dots¹ to be successful. Like detectives sorting through objects at the scene of the crime, or doctors sorting through sometimes disjointed information provided by patients, business analysts need to sort through information—lots and lots of information—in order to identify problems and uncover requirements of the solution. This process requires the ability to connect the dots.

And although the phrase “connecting the dots” has been around for a long time, it has crept into our popular culture, thanks in part to Steve Jobs. He talked about it in August 2011 when he described what connecting the dots meant to him. He said, “You cannot connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that somehow the dots will connect in your future.” ²

Well, that sounds good. But what does it actually mean? How do we go about connecting the dots? Here are some prerequisites:

Experience. We cannot look backwards if we don’t have the background or experience to make sense of the new information we’re taking in. That does not mean we need to have specific industry or project experience. But it does mean that we need to have learned from similar situations. We need to apply appropriate business analysis skills to new situations, guided by what worked and what did not work in the past.
Understanding context. We need to understand the context of the current situation. “Context” is one of the core business analysis concepts in the BABOK® Guide 3.0, an important concept indeed. Understanding the context provides important information about such things as the culture of the organization and the stakeholders, values and beliefs of the organization and the stakeholders, processes followed, conditions that affect the situation like weather (think shoe prints in the snow, or clues washed away in the rain), terminology, and technology—just about anything that can affect identifying the problem and the creation of the solution.
Ability to recognize patterns. Recognizing patterns requires an ability to take in information from a variety of different sources, to synthesize lots of disparate information and make sense of it, to rearrange it, to understand what is important, to stay focused, and not get distracted by the irrelevant. The ability to recognize patterns is what allows us to understand which “clues” are relevant, because we’ve seen them, just in different situations. It’s about the ability to see a problem and say with confidence: his particular solution will work (and this one won’t and here’s why).
Using both the rational mind and intuition. BAs need to use both their rational minds and their intuition.³Several years ago there was a heated discussion on a social media group about which would serve the BA better—being “analytical” or being “intuitive.” Most discussion participants saw it as an either/or. Effective BAs were either more logical or more intuitive.
We do need to be analytical. We need to break down information into smaller pieces and determine which pieces are needed. We need to use our analysis to uncover the root causes of a problem which helps separate facts from hearsay, gossip, and opinion. But we also need to use our intuition if we have any hope of being able to think critically and conceptually, as well as to be able to synthesize a lot of information quickly and be able t make sense of it.⁴
Ability to thrive in ambiguous situations. We often hear about the need for BAs to tolerate ambiguity. I think that effective detectives and business analysts are those who not only tolerate but actually thrive in ambiguous situations. The ability to thrive in uncertain situations allows business analysts to create structure from chaos. When business analysts can synthesize all the information they have accumulated during elicitation activities, put it together in meaningful ways, and are able to create understanding and gain consensus—that’s a true thing of beauty.

Having these competencies does not necessarily mean a BA will be successful. But these skills are necessary to connect the dots and connecting the dots is necessary if we BAs are going to do our jobs of finding problems and recommending solutions that provide value to stakeholders (BABOK® Guide v.3).

About The Authors

Elizabeth Larson, PMP, CBAP, CSM, PMI-PBA is Co-Principal and CEO of Watermark Learning and has over 30 years of experience in project management and business analysis. Elizabeth’s speaking history includes repeat presentations for national and international conferences on five continents.

Elizabeth has co-authored five books on business analysis and certification preparation. She has also co-authored chapters published in four separate books. Elizabeth was a lead author on several standards including the PMBOK® Guide, BABOK® Guide, and PMI’s Business Analysis for Practitioners – A Practice Guide.

Richard Larson, PMP, CBAP, PMI-PBA, President and Founder of Watermark Learning, is a successful entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in business analysis, project management, training, and consulting. He has presented workshops and seminars on business analysis and project management topics to over 10,000 participants on five different continents.

Rich loves to combine industry best practices with a practical approach and has contributed to those practices through numerous speaking sessions around the world. He has also worked on the BA Body of Knowledge versions 1.6-3.0, the PMI BA Practice Guide, and the PM Body of Knowledge, 4th edition. He and his wife Elizabeth Larson have co-authored five books on business analysis and certification preparation.

References
1 “To draw a conclusion from disparate facts.” http://www.dictionary.com/browse/connect-the-dots?s=t
Originally a form or puzzle involving drawing lines between numbers to form a picture, as in “To draw connecting lines between a seemingly random arrangement of numbered dots so as to produce a picture or design.” http://www.thefreedictionary.com/

2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr07uR75Qk0 4:41 minutes in

3 The term “intuition” has a variety of meanings and is used differently in different contexts. Although there are different nuances, the term basically is “There are a variety of definitions of intuition. This is from http://www.dictionary.com/browse/intuition?s=t “direct perception of truth, fact, etc. independent of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension; a keen and quick insight.”

4 Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action from The Critical Thinking Community, http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766
Conceptual thinking “…make sense of large amounts of detailed and potentially disparate information.” Conceptual thinking is applied “to find ways to understand how that information fits into a larger picture and what details are important, and to connect seemingly abstract information..” BABOK® Guide 3.0, 9.1.6.