Tag: Strategic

Best of BATimes: 10 Best Business Analysis Books For Beginners

Written by Theresa Cofield on May 18, 2023. Posted in Articles.

Corporate analysis is a discipline in which business requirements are defined, and solutions are identified for business issues.

For an organization to thrive and function successfully, some things need to be placed during its foundation. Here are some books that can be of assistance.

1. Writing Effective Use Cases (Agile Software Development Series) by Alistair Cockburn

Business analysts profit from case studies where they talk about how people use a system. This helps in planning projects and use cases is a crucial feature of business and software systems. The problem is that it is not so easy to write straightforward and succinct cases. Author Alistair Cockburn utilizes modern methods to write case stories in this novel.

You can learn about advanced principles that are useful, whether you are an experienced analyst or a novice. Cockburn presents strong and bad case examples to help you quickly and rapidly understand the difference. The main aspects of situations, like stakeholders, scenarios, etc. Design, moment tips, pre-built templates can be utilized.

2. Business Analysis Techniques: 72 Essential Tools for Success by James Cadle

Every analyst needs the necessary resources to accomplish the job. The work involves solving problems and exploring ideas. You need to know how to solve various types of problems, like identifying project specifications or handling changes.

This book describes these strategies carefully in order to help the reader deliver reliable results in business work. Think about it as a market analyst, a manager, or a student who is learning the trade, as a cheat sheet you can talk about.

3. Project Management Absolute Beginner’s Guide (3rd Edition) by Greg Horine

You have just started working as a project manager? In this book, you can easily and rapidly grasp key concepts by disrupting vital project management activities. You can learn how to organize and manage budgeting, planning, team management, and more. Each phase is outlined so that you can start right away.

The guidelines are simple and convenient. You will discover that the project managers make daily errors to avoid taking the same route. You can also understand what heading projects entail instead of merely overseeing them. If you do not know how to begin your job or your career, take this book to learn what you need quickly.

4. Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling by Harold Kerzner

This is referred to as the Project Management Bible” since it offers practical insight into all facets of becoming a project manager. At all levels of a project, you can learn the techniques and methods to use. But it’s more than tips in this book. This text covers market changes, failure, agile project development, evolving industry topics, and project measurements.

There are just a few components that can limit performance in project management. This book is not a guide to project management, which is easy. There are plenty out there. When you want to know information about project management, quality assurance, and customer cooperation, this is the book you need to collect.

5. Business Analysis for Dummies by Kate McGoey, Kupe Kupersmith, and Paul Mulvey

Business Analysis (BA) is a group of activities that ensures that the company has the best solutions to achieve its strategic objectives. In order to carry out this workforce, it is important first to define the actual objectives and evaluate and propose solutions for a solution that needs to be addressed.

Provide guidelines as to how the market analysis will influence your company. Shows the tools and strategies to be a competent analyst. Provides many examples of how to market evaluations can be carried out irrespective of your position.

6. Adaptive BABoK Study Guide by the Adaptive US

BABOK® summary graphically represented to enable simple, engaging learning of concepts and practices of business analysis. However, a visual presentation and a summary of this information are effective for you to learn. BABOK® guide includes a large amount of structured text information.

7. 3D Business Analyst by Mohamed Elgendy

Three distinct fields of 3D Market Analysis – business analyzes, project management (PM), and lean 6 sigma – with historically different skills and career paths. When, however, the components of these skill sets are analyzed and understood, a simple overlap is generated. When used together, they provide the BA with the required concepts, theories, and ends so that it can interact more effectively with stakeholders in its own language.

8. Agile and Business Analysis: Practical Guidance for IT Professionals by Debra Paul and Lynda Girvan

Agile is an iterative approach to software development that has quickly become the most common replacement for conventional project management in the IT industry. The use of an agile approach will revolutionize work practices for business analysts. It allows for a clearer vision and definition of performance steps, greater participation of stakeholders, and a better understanding of consumers.

This book offers an extensive introduction and discusses Agile methodologies in the sense of market analysis—ideal for companies wishing to learn and understand Agile Practices in an Agile Environment.

9. Business Analysis: Best Practices for Success by Steven Blais

A full overview of the business analysis method in addressing business issues is given by this book. This guide is also full of real-world stores from the author’s more than 30 years of experience working as a market analyst, full of tips, tricks, methods, and guerrilla tactics that allow the entire process to face often daunting political or social obstacles.

It offers strategies and advice to conduct a business analyst’s challenging tasks at times.
Authored by a professional in the sector with 30 years of experience.

10. Seven Steps to Mastering Business Analysis by Barbara A. Carkenord

Business analyzes are now the fastest growing sector in business and both strategically and tactically the position of the business analyses. Seven steps to mastering business analysis illustrate how all these variables, along with many others, are the secret to success.

This book offers insight into the ideal skills and features of good market analysts and is the basis for the learning process. This guide also allows you to prepare for enterprise analysis certification by describing the tasks and fields of expertise in the Knowledge Body.

Conclusion

Businesses form an important part of a state. Encouraging young people to venture into business only increases employment opportunities. Through business books, this becomes an attainable goal as they offset with their best foot forward.

Published on December 3, 2020.

Do Your Organization’s Transformation Initiatives Align?

Written by Nicola Myers on May 4, 2023. Posted in Articles.

Organizations are increasingly looking to improve their processes and additionally embrace digital transformation to leverage their capabilities. Two frameworks that have gained traction in this regard are the Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM) by the Object Management Group (OMG) and the Digital Transformation Framework (DTF) used by Laserfiche. While both frameworks aim to enhance efficiency and effectiveness, they differ in their approach. In this blog post, we will explore what these frameworks are and how they align (or not) so that you will be able to be wiser when choosing transformation frameworks.

The Business Process Maturity Model (BPMM) is a framework that assists organizations in assessing their business processes against five levels of maturity. It assists in identifying areas for improvement and developing a roadmap for process improvement. It also provides a common language for process redesign and some government organizations require a certain level to consider an organization’s tender submission.

The BPMM consists of five levels of process maturity, which are as follows:

Initial: This level represents an ad hoc approach to process management, where processes are informal. The success of the work depends on the employee who just gets the job done and this results in inconsistent outcomes.

Managed: At this level, basic processes are documented, and some level of standardization and consistency is achieved but this is sporadic and will depend on the management of that unit. The benefits of process improvement begin to seep in, for example reducing rework.

Standardized: This level represents a structured approach to process management, where end-to-end processes are well-defined and documented, thus removing the silo effect. This includes process measures and using best practices to define processes.

Predictable: At this level, process performance is measured and monitored. The processes are automated and stable with predictable results. Knowledge is gained when quantitatively managing processes, for example, optimally achieving capacity.

Innovating: This level represents a proactive organization with a strong culture of process change while implementing and planning continuous improvement. This results in finding new and better ways to provide value to the client.

The other focus organizations have, is to achieve their digital transformation goals and drive innovation in the digital age. This has a larger scope than just processes. “Laserfiche is the leading global provider of intelligent content management and business process automation. The Laserfiche® platform enables organizations in more than 80 countries to transform into digital businesses”. Their Digital Transformation Model (DTM) provides a structured framework for content digitization and process automation through to data-driven innovation.

The Digital Transformation Model consists of five levels, which are as follows:

Digitize Documents: Converting paper documents to electronic documents. This leads to cost savings and less chance of lost data, but there is no central repository and so the information is fragmented, especially between silos.

Organize Content: Categorizing and organizing documents into a central repository to increase accessibility and improve security. For example, invoices are filed under the accounts payable folder. This organizing of documents assists in streamlining the work being done and supports compliance. It should be noted that at this point the document storage is standardized but the work being done is not yet standardized.

Automate Processes: Eliminating inefficient processes such as paper forms and replacing them with standardized electronic forms. Automation leads to improved productivity, accountability, and capacity but still lacks visibility because the automation is sporadic, and the end-to-end processes have limited visibility.

Streamline Processes: Automating common processes (not just forms) to increase visibility and gain business insights, for example, to optimize staffing levels. At the end of this phase, the company will be able to implement streamlined processes easily, have access to complete and consistent data, measure progress using tools like dashboards and visualizations, and involve customers in the process.

Transform Processes: Align processes with business needs, make plans for the future, and become more proactive. Data-driven innovation can be done by leveraging analytics and the organization will be more agile in changing markets.

The frameworks align by focusing on enhancing process efficiency and effectiveness. There is a strong emphasis on the role of technology (such as a central repository) as well as process management concepts (such as end-to-end processes and standardized processes). They both have five levels to compare.

However, there is a major concern with implementing these transformation frameworks and that is when to automate processes and when to standardize them. In the process maturity model framework above, the standardization starts at level 2 and is completed at level 3, while process automation takes place at level 4. In Laserfiche’s digital transformation framework, automation takes place at level 3 and processes are only improved and standardized at level 4. This means by following both transformation initiatives at the same time, the organization is working at cross-purposes, and it is likely that both projects will fail, resulting in a very costly mistake for the organization.

It should also be noted that with the digital transformation framework, there is no initial level where the company is purely paper based. It would make sense that before the digitalization level, there would be a level where the organization is haphazard about its use of technology. This may result in a six-level model and so not aligned with the levels of the process maturity model again.

In conclusion, there are many other business process maturity model frameworks (Robledo, Gartner, CMMI, and Rosemann) and other digital transformation frameworks (for example McKinsey, Forrester’s Playbook, and Capgemini). Whichever you choose, make sure your transformation frameworks align before sinking billions into organizational transformation projects that are heading in opposite directions.

An Introduction to Business Process Normalization

Written by Edmund Metera on December 22, 2022. Posted in Articles.

Business Process Normalization[1] is an analysis technique that leads to sound, modern business process and workflow structures.

Business analysts, process analysts, systems analysts, and process owners use Business Process Normalization to more effectively elicit, perceive, unequivocally define, and model sound, modern business process structures, and workflow configurations. Proficiency with this analysis technique benefits their process management, digital transformation, and regulatory compliance projects.

What is a Business Process Anyways?

For decades, business analysts, process analysts, and their projects’ stakeholders have tried to define business processes according to various characteristics. Business processes have been said to transform inputs into outputs. They can be decomposed into smaller parts. They start. They “flow”. They end. They have customers. They can cross organizational boundaries. They can be automated. They can be manual. They are measurable. While all those statements may be true, none of them are sufficient enough to elicit, perceive, and unequivocally define and produce high-quality business process structures.

There will be about as many points of view and opinions about what any business process is as there are stakeholders in that process, at least at the start of the process analysis. As always, business analysts and process analysts need to be able to consistently perceive processes and facilitate the journey of business process elicitation, definition, and modeling, with their stakeholders. However, the pace and the technologies of modern, digital transformation, low-code and no-code projects demand that business process and workflow elicitation, and definition be done in an efficient, competent way, instead of ad-hoc questioning and trial and error.

Times have changed

Traditional procedural notions and flowcharting notations have become archaic. They were invented in the days of procedural language programming – in the last millennium. Those notions don’t always work in today’s business and technical environments. Today’s distributed business structures (has anyone been working remotely recently?), technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge, mobility, and cloud computing services have radically modernized the business process landscape. Today, a high-quality business process structure is one that has been conceived, structured, and can be readily configured as a modern, collaborating network of event-driven, outcome-oriented services, not just as a sequential procedure.

The Universal Business Process Definition

Let’s look at housing. Any house, no matter its scale, degree of abstraction, location, building materials, and all its unique details, etc. must have a foundation, walls, and a roof to be a house. If it’s missing any of those, it is not acceptable as a house. And for obvious productivity and quality reasons, those basic structural elements are established first, before it is practical to invest time and money in a home’s other architectural, engineering or construction refinements.

The same is true for business processes and workflow structures. Any business process must have a sound, cohesive structure of basic elements to be considered a business process. Its basic structural elements should be elicited and consensus reached, before pursuing all of a process’s possible details and refinements. Even after all desired process refinements have been applied, the process will still have its defining structural elements. This holds true for any process structure or model at any degree of abstraction (i.e conceptual, logical, or configuration), a process’ scale, or the unique details about a business process or workflow.

So, what are the basic business process-defining elements? Paraphrasing the Universal Business Process Definition[2], any business process (i.e., business activity for that matter) is 1) a repeatable collection of work activities, 2) initiated in response to a business event that, 3) achieves an expected outcome, 4) for a customer of that process. These four common-sense rules define all processes, workflows, and activities regardless of a process’ or activity’s scale, the process model’s degree of abstraction, the overarching project methodology, the modeling participants, and the organizations and the technologies that will implement the process or workflow.

Uses of the Business Universal Business Process Definition

Business analysts and process analysts use the Universal Business Process Definition’s four common-sense rules throughout their business process modeling journey and they work out and arrive at high-quality, robust, predictable, and operational business process structures. They use it to guide their elicitation agendas with business stakeholders. They use it to frame their observations of business processes. They use it to normalize what they and their stakeholders have named as candidate processes. They use it to resolve ambiguity among stakeholders and to organize business activities into the optimal, modern business process and workflow structures. This is akin to understanding and applying the Business Normal Forms[3], long used by business analysts and systems analysts to work out and optimally organize data attributes into entities and to produce high-quality relational data structures.

The resulting business process structures are high-quality structures because they have been elicited, perceived, and defined by asking and answering the right questions. They can be implemented equally well as traditional sequential procedures or as today’s, distributed business structures and networked technical (like cloud services) architectures. As event-driven, outcome-oriented business process structures, they are consistent with modern networked, collaborative business relationships and cloud technologies.

Business Process Normalization

Business Process Normalization is the analysis technique of testing the contextual meaning of a candidate business process according to the Universal Business Process Definition’s four rules.

A business analyst or process analyst need not ask a lot of questions to normalize a business process or workflow. They only need to ask a few focused questions (four in fact) and doggedly pursue and gain consensus to the four, sometimes-elusive, answers. The assumed basic structure of a business process will either be affirmed or restructured by the answers to the normalization questions. If any of the four tests have not yet been satisfactorily answered, then the analyst will need to elicit more clarity to satisfactorily answer the four process-defining tests.

Once all four tests have been sufficiently answered, the process has been normalized. Ambiguities have been resolved. A sound, fundamental business process or workflow structure has been understood. The answers to the four tests can then be used to write a contextually accurate, unequivocal, plain-language process definition. No two processes will likely have the same definition within the same domain of analysis. The normalized process’s defining structure will be the foundation of a contextually accurate, high-quality business process model, configured business procedure, or automated workflow.

Benefits of Business Process Normalization

The benefits of using the four-part Universal Business Process Definition’s rules and the Business Process Normalization technique are that they are relevant for today, it is efficient, it boosts contextual quality, it minimizes redundant and non-value-adding activities, it aids in well-written process descriptions, and it improves the potential for reusable business services.

Relevant for Modern Business Structures and Technologies. Processes that have been normalized according to the Universal Business Process Definition are event-driven and outcome-oriented. They are structured so that they can be readily implemented across enterprises’ geographies and boundaries. They are easily modeled using modern notations, like BPMN. They can be readily translated into modern networks of collaborating services (such as SaaS services in the cloud), just as well as traditional sequential procedures and workflow designs.

Efficient – Whenever discovering and defining business processes among a group of stakeholders, it’s more effective to be asking the right questions than a lot of questions. The Universal Business Process Definition frames the elicitation and normalization agenda with four simple questions. The process modeling work comes down to doggedly pursuing and getting consensus to the questions’ answers among the right business stakeholders.

Boosts Contextual Quality – Assuming that everyone will understand the same meaning for the name of a business process is insufficient. By normalizing a business process according to the Universal Business Process Definition’s four rules, the contextual knowledge and consensus about that process become unequivocal among readers of that definition.

Minimizes Process Redundancy. An enterprise may have different processes that do the same thing. They are just named differently. Any two candidate business processes that, through process normalization, answer Business Process Normalization’s four tests with the same answers are very justifiably two different names for the same process. They should be closely re-examined to decide if one of them can be, in due course, feasibly eliminated.

Minimizes Non-value-adding Activities. People, departments, and enterprises tend to propose or perform activities that they do, instead of what is needing to be done. The value of their activities toward achieving a process’ or workflow’s expected business outcome may be unclear. According to the Universal Business Process Definition, a process includes the activities that lead to a process’s expected outcome. Candidate activities that are not needed to achieve a process’s outcome should be closely re-examined and either be discarded, or they may belong in another process.

Aides in Well-Written Business Process Descriptions. The answers to the four business process normalization questions can be simply written in plain-language sentences to form consistently written, clearly written, and contextually meaningful, process descriptions. (Examples of such process descriptions can be found here.)

Improves Potential for Reusable Services – According to the Universal Business Process Definition, activities are themselves perceived and defined as event-driven and outcome-oriented processes. Each is defined in part and bounded by its initiating event and expected outcome. Because of this event and outcome-oriented structure, activities have the potential to be recognized as reusable services, which may be reused in more than one larger process.

Learn more …

You can establish or improve your business process modeling competence and learn the Business Process Normalization technique, by reading:

Universal Process Modeling Procedure – The Practical Guide to High-Quality Business Process Models Using BPMN, (Metera, 2018, 2022). This how-to guide’s topics include the step-by-step Universal Business Process Modeling Procedure, razor-sharp elicitation agendas, the Universal Business Process Definition, Business Process Normalization, basic and refined process modeling patterns using BPMN, and Universal Business Process Model Quality Checklists.

Find related topics at ProcessModelingAdvisor.com. The site’s purpose is to help you establish or improve your business process modeling competence. It includes articles, process model examples using BPMN, checklists, and access to out-of-the-box IIBA-endorsed and bespoke business process modeling training.

[1] Universal Process Modeling Procedure – The Practical Guide to High-Quality Business Process Models Using BPMN (Metera)

[2] Universal Process Modeling Procedure – The Practical Guide to High-Quality Business Process Models Using BPMN (Metera)

[3] The Data Modeling Handbook (Reingruber and Gregory)

Good at Drawing or Good at Visualizing – There is a Difference!

Written by Line Karkov on December 15, 2022. Posted in Articles.

I often use simple diagrams and icons enhanced with text done with pen on paper instead of long presentations. It is a skill that I have practiced over some years now. Sometimes, colleagues tell me that I am good at drawing, but the fact is that I am not good at drawing. I am good at visualizing, and I am also fairly good at listening. This article is about what I mean by that.

Let me demonstrate with an example. The two drawings below are similar to two illustrations I did earlier this year. They are translated into English and made generic in content to make them understandable without knowledge of our business. I have also left out the detailed text that is included on the originals. Not only do they make no sense out context, but it also emphasizes the simplicity of the actual drawing.

Earlier this year, my manager asked me to do a drawing of our IT strategy. We work in an organization that is in the non-profit sector and we are not an IT organization. Out of 200 employees, 10 of us work with IT – all development is outsourced. The audience of this strategy was a management team where only my manager has a background as an IT professional. So, we needed to make it visual and easy to relate to. Part of our strategy is to rely as much as possible on software-as-a-service, so that we always have evergreen applications, and we don’t need to take care of upgrades etc. ourselves. “Evergreen” is a great image that is easy to understand and also easy to draw. I decided to include that in the visualization. When we talk about enterprise architecture and strategy, it is common to perform gap analysis and plan for closing that gap. A gap is also easy to draw. So, my first draft looked like the drawing below, with some text added on each side to about the goals of the initiatives and the applications that were impacted.

My manager presented this to our CEO, who said: “It’s a pit that we are filling with dirt?”. Having primarily worked in IT organizations, I have never questioned this metaphor of the gap. But he was right. When you think about it, it isn’t really that inspiring to just fill a gap. Ok, we needed something else. I have earlier used a Greek temple to illustrate IT architecture strategy. I like the comparison of solid, sustainable IT architecture with classic architecture with its timeless qualities. My first thought was an aqueduct transporting water to our evergreen application landscape. But I liked the idea of something that could transport our organization and was afraid that the aqueduct was too abstract. So, I decided to illustrate it with a bridge inspired by Roman architecture. The pillars of the bridge are made out of the initiatives on our roadmap. One pillar is made up of the initiatives for improving our services, and the other the initiatives for improving administration. Together, they will enable the organization to walk across from a withered to an evergreen field. That resulted in this drawing (again, with additional text next to the side of the pillars related to the goals):

This was the drawing that was presented to the management and later to the board. I think it is a better drawing than the first one and that is not because it technically is a better drawing than the first one. But because the metaphor was more fit for purpose. This is what I mean, when I say that my strength is not drawing, but visualizing. The ideas for how to visualize various topics comes from listening to how people talk about their work, the topic for the visualization, and the feedback that I get. You might notice that the first drawing includes seven initiatives, the second only six. This is an example of how the structure can sometimes dictate content. We had to prioritize and leave an initiative out that is more related to infrastructure but was included for its significant impact on business users.

Below is a drawing that my son Thorbjørn did recently. He is 10 years old.

I think we can all agree that he technically is better at drawing, than I am. Look at the facial expressions and walking legs as examples. So, just to emphasize the point even further: You do not need to draw as well as a 10-year-old to apply your drawing skills at work. You probably do to be a professional graphical facilitator, but that’s a completely different story.

As business analysts, many of us are well trained at visualizing. We use this skill when we do process maps, application landscapes, mockups, conceptual models or logical data models. Use this to your advantage, and you will find, that it is possible to learn the drawing skills that enable you to apply visual thinking in your business analysis practice.

Curious about visual thinking, but don’t know where to start? I wrote these articles last year, which might give you some inspiration:

Start your visual facilitation journey with letters. – Business Analyst Articles, Webinars, Templates, Jobs (batimes.com)

The icon library: My favorite analogue tool – Business Analyst Articles, Webinars, Templates, Jobs (batimes.com)

The Strategic Flexibility Approach in Solution Design

Written by Giorgos Sioutzos on November 30, 2022. Posted in Articles.

Compared with strategic management, strategic business analysis focuses on designing a sustainable solution in order the long term strategic goals and future demands to be fulfilled with the best way. Constant changes in internal and external environment require business analysts working on a specific solution to constantly assess solution approach and capabilities for success.

Strategic flexibility it terms of a solution may be defined as the ability of the solution to adapt to substantial, uncertain, and fast-occurring environmental changes that have a meaningful impact on the solution performance.

Strategic business analysis involves a future outlook. Detection of emerging threats and opportunities, prediction of their future impact, and the development of solution responses is something that should be considered before a solution definition. Ideally, the “future paths” should be incorporated in the solution itself in order “strategic adaptations” to be achieved with less cost and effort.

Because the environment is so uncertain and fast moving with many potential threats and opportunities, business analysts often finds it difficult to react using conventional business analysis approaches. Evaluating the likelihood and nature of the impact of each environmental change that can consequently affect the solution requires is challenging.

It is common that during the analysis phases of a solution definition, considerations of alternative ways to increase solution’s flexibility tend to be limited and ad hoc and not comprehensive, systematic, or formal.

Moreover, internal and external constraints on the style and experience of the business analysis team tend to dictate an inflexible approach that is not taking into account the future challenges and adaptations that will be necessary for the solution’s sustainability.

Another challenge in embracing strategic flexibility is the lack of objectivity in flexibility and scalability options. This is inevitable given the lack of information for the future conditions and the difficulties in predictions. Options concerning sustainable solutions tend to be subjective and informal. Flexibility levels are rarely monitored or even measured. An example of a subjective KPI is the time and the cost required to modify core flows in a system or the time and effort required incorporating a new group of users in an existing solution.

Identifying assumptions that had been made during design phases is crucial in order to clear out the future state and to develop contingency plans that can contribute to lower time, cost and effort in future changes. Well-defined contingency scenarios with specific responses associated with each future specific event may be decrease the response time required, once those events occur.

Paying attention at the confirmation of the elicitation results and trying to find areas for sustainability and preparation to change improvement should be cultivated in business analysis approach.

Last but least working towards defining specific evaluation criteria concerning the long term horizon solution flexibility as a response to future events is essential in an era of fast – moving and numerous environment changes.

References:

David A. Aaker, Briance Mascarenhas, (1984) “THE NEED FOR STRATEGIC FLEXIBILITY”, Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 5 Issue: 2, pp.74-82, https://doi.org/10.1108/eb039060