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What Does a Business Analyst (BA) Do?. Requirements Management. Requirements Management. A key subset of the BA’s value is the management of Requirements. Requirements are the business and functional needs that a team has. They define the scope and behavior of an expected solution.
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Requirements Management A key subset of the BA’s value is the management of Requirements. Requirements are the business and functional needs that a team has. They define the scope and behavior of an expected solution. Over 80% of all failed solution rollouts are tied to incorrectly captured requirements. The Business Analyst is the formal owner of the requirement list for a given solution: it’s generation, maintenance, and approvals.
Requirements Management • The tasks a BA performs in relation to managing requirements are as follows: • Requirement Gathering • The BA seeks out stakeholders of the solution and seek input on their needs. They evaluate industry benchmarks and apply research techniques to inform stakeholders of best practices. They compile a list of results and communicate it across the community. • Requirement Definition • The BA seeks further clarification once the list has been compiled. They break down business needs into functional components that can be evaluated and sought in an actual solution to any gaps. • Requirement Prioritization • The BA works with the stakeholders to prioritize the defined requirements in order to understand and manage trade offs when they need to occur. If one requirement can be met and another cannot, which to focus on first. • Requirement Baselining • The BA publishes the prioritized, defined list and a comparison against current capabilities. The remaining items are the gaps to be addressed. This baseline is approved by the owners of the solution. • Requirement Change Approvals • The BA will manage the requirement list through the solution selection and implementation activities and if requirements change ensure the changes are properly approved.
Stakeholder Management The greatest value a BA can add to a solution is managing the stakeholders. The Stakeholders are the individuals impacting, or impacted by, a new solution. Stakeholders can be a solution’s greatest supporters, or greatest opponents. The Business Analyst assists the larger project delivery community in managing stakeholders, primarily through speaking “on their level”. They engage the business users in the context of business use cases and value generation, and the technical resources in terms of components and features they can build or implement.
Stakeholder Management • The tasks a BA performs in relation to managing stakeholders are as follows: • Stakeholder Identification • The BA seeks out stakeholders of the solution and identifies them. Missing or excluded stakeholders can seriously impede a solution so effectively identifying them all is critical. The BA also looks at organizational structure, and the scope of a solution, to determine which stakeholders to focus on. • Stakeholder Engagement • The BA ensures that throughout the project stakeholders remain engaged. This is achieved through frequent reviews and updates on the requirements, proposed solutions, and performance/quality. • Stakeholder Characterization • The BA evaluates the stakeholders and characterizes their relationship to the solution and other stakeholders. The BAs look at their power and influence, overall support for the solution, and ability to provide value to the solution (from technical inputs to change support) and helps the project team engage them to maximize their support or minimize their opposition. • Change Management • The BA’s are critical pieces of a Change Management approach. They keep the users informed of the solution’s progress and communicate value in business terms. They can lead change management themselves or work under a project or formal OCM model to support larger scale initiatives.
Quality Management The BA owns the overall quality of the deployed solution. They ensure that what has been deployed will meet the business’ needs, consistently. Quality is a complex element of every solution, because it requires a resource to conduct testing that understands the overall business workflows and processes at work, how those processes drive value, the individual task-level components of the solution, and how the solution itself works at a functional level to achieve those goals. Few stakeholders of the solution will have this holistic view, making the BA the ideal resource for testing and quality management. Where quality fails to deliver, the BA maintains the list of issues and works with technical resources or solution providers to resolve them.
Quality Management • The tasks a BA performs in relation to managing quality are as follows: • Functional Alignment • The BA seeks to ensure the capabilities of a given solution meet their needs. They look at the thread between requirements, components and capabilities to ensure there is alignment. Where gaps exist, they qualify the gaps and document any issues. • Value Generation • The BA understands the value metrics the solution seeks to deliver on, and evaluates those metrics at key points in the solution rollout. They seek to show incremental value add as these metrics begin to change and evaluate the overall value of the solution. • Performance Assessment • The BA looks at operational performance measures of the solution as well, such as runtimes, material cost, and effort required to determine the optimal and actual performance of the solution. This is reported in the context of original requirements to determine if the solution delivers on them. • Continuous Improvement • The BA retains ownership of solutions after they are deployed. They critically re-assess performance and value generation metrics at regular intervals and look to evolving best practices in industry to determine if current solutions remain valid and remain the best way to solve the underlying business needs.
Solution Management The BA owns the overall quality of the deployed solution. They ensure that what has been deployed will meet the business’ needs, consistently. Quality is a complex element of every solution, because it requires a resource to conduct testing that understands the overall business workflows and processes at work, how those processes drive value, the individual task-level components of the solution, and how the solution itself works at a functional level to achieve those goals. Few stakeholders of the solution will have this holistic view, making the BA the ideal resource for testing and quality management. Where quality fails to deliver, the BA maintains the list of issues and works with technical resources or solution providers to resolve them.
Solution Management • The tasks a BA performs in relation to managing quality are as follows: • Solution Design • The BA takes the requirements and capabilities and designs solutions to meet them. Usually a combination of process, tool, and organizational changes, solutions vary widely. The BA navigates the intersection of these approaches and designs solutions that work for the current business environment. • Solution Identification • The BA works to identify external tools and expertise that may support a solution and defines them in terms of the cost, benefit, and overall value add expected from each of these. • Solution Selection • The BA evaluates the available ways to solve the business problems being presented and works with the project team and stakeholder community to select a solution that will deliver value in an optimal manner. • Solution Recommendation • In some cases, the BA has a larger responsibility and is given autonomy to conduct the steps above independently. They evaluate the available options and present a recommendation to the project team or leadership team on which solution they recommend. This can save significant organizational resources provided the BA has sufficient skills and trust to do so effectively.
