Business analysis is the research discipline for identifying business needs and determining solutions to business problems. Solutions often include software development components, but may also consist of process improvement, organizational change or strategic planning and policy development. The person doing this task is called a business analyst or BA.
Business analysts not only work on the development of software systems. Those who attempt to do so run the risk of developing incomplete solutions.
While there are different role definitions, depending on the organization, there seems to be an area of ​​commonality in which most business analysts work. Responsibility looks like:
- To investigate business systems, take a holistic view of the situation. This may include examining elements of organizational structure and staff development issues as well as current processes and IT systems.
- To evaluate actions to improve the operation of the business system. Again, this may require an examination of the organizational structure and staff development needs, to ensure that they are aligned with every reprocess of the proposed design and development of IT systems.
- To document business requirements for IT system support using the appropriate documentation standards.
Correspondingly, the role of core business analysts can be defined as an internal consulting role that has the responsibility to investigate business situations, identify and evaluate options to improve business systems, define requirements and ensure effective use of information systems to meet business needs.
Video Business analysis
Sub-discipline
Business analysis as a discipline includes requirements analysis, sometimes also called engineering requirements. It focuses on ensuring changes made to the organization are aligned with its strategic objectives. These changes include changes to strategies, structures, policies, business rules, processes, and information systems.
Examples of business analysis include:
Company analysis or company analysis
Focuses on understanding the needs of the business as a whole, its strategic direction, and identifying initiatives that will enable businesses to meet these strategic objectives. It also includes:
- Create and maintain business architecture
- Conduct a feasibility study
- Identify new business opportunities
- Track and define new business opportunities
- Setting up a business case
- Conduct an initial risk assessment
Planning and management requirements
Involves planning the requirements development process, determining which requirements are the highest priority for implementation, and managing change.
Elicitation requirements
Describes techniques for gathering requirements from stakeholders in a project. Techniques for elicitation requirements include:
- Brainstorming
- Document analysis
- Focus group
- Interface analysis
- Interview
- Workshop
- Reverse engineering
- Survey
- Analysis of user tasks
- Process mapping
- Observation/shadow job
- Design thinking
Analysis and documentation needs
Describes how to develop and define requirements with sufficient detail to enable them to be successfully implemented by the project team.
Analysis
The main forms of analysis are:
- Architectural analysis
- Business process analysis
- Object-oriented analysis
- Structured analysis
- Analysis of data warehouse, storage and database analysis
Documentation
The requirements documentation can take several forms:
- Textual - for example, a story that summarizes specific information
- Matrices - for example, table of requirements with priority
- Diagram - for example, how data flows from one structure to another
- Wireframe - for example, how elements are needed on the website,
- Models - for example, 3-D models that describe characters in computer games
Communications requirements
Describe techniques to ensure that stakeholders have a shared understanding of the requirements and how they will be implemented.
Assessment and validation of solutions
Explains how business analysts can perform the precision of the proposed solution, how to support the implementation of the solution, and how to assess the possible shortcomings in implementation.
Maps Business analysis
Technique
There are a number of common business techniques that a business analyst will use when facilitating business change.
Some of these techniques include:
PESTLE
It is used to conduct an analysis of the external environment by examining the various external factors that affect the organization.
The six PESTLE attributes:
- Politics (current and potential influence of political pressure)
- Economics (local, national and world economic impact)
- Sociological (the way in which society can influence the organization)
- Technology (new and new technology effects)
- Law (effect of national and world law)
- Environment (local, national, and world environmental issues)
Heptalysis
It is used to perform in-depth analysis of business/business early on seven important categories:
- Market opportunity
- Products/solutions
- Execution Plan
- Financial engine
- Human capital
- Potential returns
- Margin of safety
STEER
This is an analysis that considers - the following
- Socio-cultural
- Technology
- Economy
- Ecological
- Regulatory Factors
MOST
This is used to perform internal environment analysis by defining the MOST attribute to ensure that the project you are working is parallel to each of the four attributes.
Four MOST attributes
- Missions (where business intends to go)
- Goal (main goal that will help achieve mission)
- Strategy (option to move forward)
- Tactics (how strategy is implemented)
SWOT
This is used to help focus activities into areas of strength and where the greatest opportunities are. This is used to identify hazards that take the form of weakness and both internal and external threats.
Four attributes of SWOT analysis:
- Strength - What are the advantages? What is currently doing well? (such as the main area of ​​the best performing activity of your company)
- Weakness - What to fix? What should be addressed? (eg the main area where you did not satisfy)
- Opportunities - What good opportunities does the organization face? (eg the main area where your competitors are performing poorly)
- Threats - What are the constraints facing the organization? (eg the main area where your competitors will perform well)
CATWOE
This is used to encourage thinking about what the business wants to achieve. A business perspective helps business analysts to consider the impact of any proposed solution on the people involved.
There are six CATWOE elements:
- Customers - Who are the beneficiaries of the highest level business processes and how does this affect them?
- Actors - Who is involved in the situation, who will be involved in implementing the solution and what will affect their success?
- Transformation Process - What processes or systems are affected by this problem?
- World View - What is the big picture and what is the broader impact of this problem?
- Owner - Who has the process or situation under investigation and what role will they play in the solution?
- Environmental Limitations - What are the constraints and limitations that will affect the solution and its success?
Six De Bono Thinking Hat
These are often used in brainstorming sessions to generate and analyze ideas and options. This is useful for encouraging certain types of thinking and can be a convenient and symbolic way of asking someone to "shift gears". This involves limiting groups to just think in a certain way - giving ideas & amp; analysis in the "mood" of the moment. Also known as Six Thinking Hats.
- White: The fact is pure, logical.
- Green: Creative.
- Yellow: Bright, optimistic, positive.
- Black: Negative, devil's advocate.
- Red: Emotional.
- Blue: Cold, control.
Not all colors/moods should be used
Five Why
Five Whys is used to reach the root of what really happened in one instance. For each answer a further 'why' is asked.
MoSCoW
This is used to prioritize requirements by allocating the appropriate priorities, measuring them against the validity of the requirements themselves and their priorities against other requirements.
MoSCoW consists of:
- Must - or other submissions will fail
- It should - if not have to adopt solution
- Can - to improve delivery satisfaction
- Will not have time - useful to exclude terms from this delivery period
VPEC-T
This technique is used when analyzing the expectations of some who have different views of a system in which they all share common interests, but have different priorities and different responsibilities.
- Values ​​- are the goals, beliefs, and concerns of all participating parties. They may be financially, socially, tangible and intangible
- Policies - restrictions that govern what can be done and how you can do
- Events - a real process that stimulates activity
- Content - meaningful parts of documents, conversations, messages, etc. which are manufactured and used by all aspects of business activities
- Trust - between system users and their right to access and change the information in it
SCRS
The SCRS approach in business analysis claims that analysis should flow from high-level business strategies to solutions, through current circumstances and requirements. SCRS stands for:
- Strategy
- Current Condition
- Requirements
- Solution
Canvas Business Analysis
Business Analysis The Canvas is a tool that enables Business Analysts to quickly present a high-level view of the activities to be completed as part of the business analysis work allocation. Business Analysis Canvas is broken down into sections.
- Project Goal
- Stakeholder
- Posts
- Impact on Target Operating Model
- Communication Approach
- Responsibility
- Scheduling
- Key Date
Canvas has activities and questions that Business analysts can ask to help build content. https://www.batimes.com/articles/business-analysis-canvas-roadmap-to-effective-ba-excellence.html#
The role of business analyst
Because the scope of business analysis is so broad, there is a tendency for business analysts to specialize in one of three sets of activities that are the scope of business analysis, a key role for business analysts is to identify business needs and provide solutions to business problems. the following series of activities.
- Strategist
- Organizations need to focus on strategic matters on a more or less sustainable basis in the modern business world. Business analysts, who cater to this need, are experienced in analyzing the organization's strategic profile and its environment, advising senior management on appropriate policies, and the effects of policy decisions.
- Architects
- The organization may need to introduce changes to resolve business issues that may have been identified by the strategic analysis, mentioned above. Business analysts contribute by analyzing objectives, processes and resources, and suggest ways in which redesign (BPR), or improvement (BPI) can be done. The special skills of this type of analyst are "soft skills", such as business knowledge, requirements engineering, stakeholder analysis, and some "hard skills", such as business process modeling. While such roles require technological awareness and use, this is not a IT-focused role.
- Three important elements for this business analysis aspect: redesign of core business processes; application of technology that allows to support new core processes; and organizational change management. This aspect of business analysis is also called "business process improvement" (BPI), or "reengineering".
- TI-Systems Analyst
- There is a need to align IT development with the business system as a whole. The old problem in business is how to get the best out of IT investment, which is generally very expensive and critical, often strategic, important. IT departments, who are aware of the problem, often create the role of business analysts to better understand, and determine the requirements for their IT systems. While there may be some overlap with the developer and testing roles, the focus is always on the IT part of the change process, and generally, this type of business analyst is involved, only when a case for change has been made and decided.
However, the term "analyst" lately is considered somewhat misleading, as long as the analyst (ie the problem investigator) also does the design work (solution determinant).
The primary area of ​​responsibility of a business analyst is to develop client software requirements, understand and analyze them further from a business perspective. Business Analysts are required to collaborate with businesses and assist them in improvising processes and their operational discipline followed.
Works in the organizational structure
The role of business analysis can exist in various structures within an organizational framework. Because Business Analysts typically act as a liaison between business and corporate technology functions, those roles can often succeed either in line with the business line, within IT or sometimes both.
- Business Alignment
- When Business Analysts report through the business side, they are often the subject of expertise for a particular line of business. Business Analysts typically work only on project work for a particular business, drawing Business Analysts from other areas for cross-functional projects. In this case, there is usually a Business Systems Analyst on the IT side to focus on further technical requirements.
- IT alignment
- In many cases, Business Analysts live only in IT and they focus on business and system needs for a project, consulting with various problem experts (SMEs) to ensure a thorough understanding. Depending on the organizational structure, Business Analysts can be aligned with specific development labs or they can be grouped together in a pool of resources and allocated to projects based on availability and expertise. The first builds the expertise of certain subjects while the latter provides the ability to acquire cross-functional knowledge.
- Business benefits analysis center
- Whether business analysts are grouped together or scattered in terms of reporting structures, many companies have created business analysis centers of excellence. The center of excellence provides the framework used by all business analysts in an organization to do their work, usually consisting of processes, procedures, templates and best practices. In addition to providing guidance and submission, it also provides a forum to focus on continuous improvement for business analysis functions.
Destination
Ultimately, business analytics want to achieve the following results:
- Create a solution
- Give enough tools for strong project management
- Increase efficiency and reduce waste
- Provide important documentation, such as requirements documents, project initiation documents, and more.
One way to assess this goal is to measure the return on investment (ROI) for all projects. According to Forrester Research, more than $ 100 billion is spent annually in the US on special and internally developed software projects. For all these software development projects, keeping accurate data is important and business leaders always request a return or ROI on the proposed project or at the end of an active project. However, requesting ROI without sufficient data from which values ​​are created or destroyed can result in inaccurate projections.
Reduce waste and finish the project on time
Project delays are expensive in several ways:
- Project costs - For each month of delay, the costs and expenses of the project team continue to accumulate. When most development teams have been outsourced, costs will start accelerating and very visible when contracted on time and material (T & amp; M). A fixed price contract with an external party limits this risk. For internal resources, the cost of delay is not easily visible, unless the time spent by the resource is tracked against the project, since labor costs are essentially 'fixed' costs.
- Opportunity costs - Opportunity costs come in two types - lost revenue and unrealized cost reductions. Some projects are specifically done with the aim of pushing new or additional revenue down to the bottom line. For each month of delay, the company waits a month from this new revenue stream. Another project goal is to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Once again, every month the failure to delay the realization of this cost reduction one more month. In most cases, these opportunities are never captured or analyzed, resulting in misleading ROI calculations. Of the two opportunity costs, the lost revenue is the most horrible - and the effect is greater and more lasting.
N.B. On many projects (especially larger ones) the project manager is the person responsible for ensuring that the project is completed on time. BA's job is more to ensure that if a project is not completed on time then at least the highest priority requirements are met.
Document the exact terms
Business analysts want to ensure that they define requirements in ways that meet business needs, for example, in an IT application the requirements must meet the needs of the end user. Basically, they want to define the right application. This means that they should document the exact requirements through carefully listening to 'customer' feedback, and by providing a complete set of clear requirements to the technical architects and coders who will write the program. If a business analyst has limited tools or skills to help him obtain the right requirements, then chances are high that he will end up documenting requirements that will not be used or that need to be rewritten - resulting in rework as discussed below. Time wasted documenting unnecessary requirements will not only impact business analysts, but also impact the rest of the development cycle. The code maker needs to generate the application code to perform these unnecessary requirements and the tester needs to make sure that the desired feature actually works as documented and encoded. Experts estimate that 10% to 40% of features in new software applications are unnecessary or unused. Being able to reduce the number of these additional features even up to one-third can result in significant savings. A minimalist approach or "Keep it Simple" and the minimum technology support a reduced amount of costs for the end result and ongoing maintenance of the implemented solution.
Improve project efficiency
Efficiency can be achieved in two ways: by reducing rework and by shortening the length of the project.
Rework is a common industry headache and has become commonplace in many organizations that are often built into project budgets and timelines. This usually refers to the additional work required in the project to correct errors due to incomplete or non-existent requirements and may impact the entire software development process from definition to coding and testing. The need for rework can be reduced by ensuring that the collection of requirements and processes is thorough definition and by ensuring that the business and technical members of a project are involved in this process from an early stage.
Shortening the length of the project presents two potential benefits. For each month that the project can be shortened, the cost of project resources can be transferred to another project. This can lead to savings on current projects and lead to earlier start times of future projects (thereby increasing revenue potential).
Business analytics qualification
The three most well known Business Analysis Qualifications are:
- Business Analysis International Business Analysis Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA)
- Level 1 - Entry level Certificate in Business Analysis (ECBA)
- Level 2 - Certification of Ability in Business Analysis (CCBA)
- Level 3 - Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP)
- Level 4 (not yet available) - Certified Business Analysis Thought Leader (CBATL)
- Project Management Institute - Professional in Business Analysis (PMI-PBA)
- BCS Int. Diploma in Business Analysis
See also
- The cost is flooded
- Data Presentation Architecture
- Company Life Cycle
- International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA)
- Operations research
- Real option assessment
- Needs analysis
- Lack of revenue
- Spreadmart
- Feasibility study
- cf. business analysis
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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