Part One – Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring
By Retta Witter, Senior Consultant, J. Geiger Consulting, Inc.
I’ve been on this journey since the late ‘90s and have had the honor and privilege of working alongside others that have influenced me in meaningful ways, have helped shape my career path and have helped me understand how to get from idea to done. Recently, I began down the path of achieving my BA certification through IIBA. It has really opened my eyes and I want to share the things I have learned in a conversational manner with the hope that I can repay those that have helped me by “passing it on”.
In all 6 business analysis knowledge areas of the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK), you will learn about key pieces of data. I will focus on a different section in each of the different blog posts, but I will not be regurgitating the BABOK. This series is to serve as an audit and overview with some personal insights because you can read the book on your own. Because this is taken from a book, (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2015), at the bottom is the citation for the information I have used.
We’ll start our journey together with this. Every knowledge area has these key pieces of data.
· Inputs
· Elements
· Guidelines and Tools
· Techniques – There are a total of 50 used multiple times among the 6 knowledge areas
· Stakeholders – There are 11 generic ones used multiple times among the 6 knowledge areas
· Outputs
These pieces of data are all very integrated and the process is not linear. Let’s dig into the first BABOK area, Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring.
Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring
Summary
If you are looking to take an IIBA test this knowledge base covers about 5 to 15 % of the test questions depending on which one you are looking to take. However, when you are thinking about a project or initiative understanding how you are going to plan and organize the requirements and activities are key to having a successful outcome.
Purpose
The purpose of Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring is to define an appropriate method to conduct business analysis activities.
The business analysis approach should:
• align to the overall goals of the change,
• coordinate the business analysis tasks with the activities and deliverables of the overall change,
• include tasks to manage any risks that could reduce the quality of business analysis deliverables or impede task efficiency, and
• leverage approaches and select techniques and tools that have historically worked well.
A little background
I have been working in the information technology field for over 20 years. I have been implementing enterprise requirements planning systems (ERPs) as a large part of those years. The projects that have been successful are ones where the project managers and the business analyst are working hand in hand with the planning and execution. This give the domain subject matter experts (SMEs) a level of comfort in understanding better how the project will be run.
The task that I connect with most is 4 – “plan business analysis information management”. Knowing where to store/retrieve/organizing the information collected on a project makes for a smooth interaction with the domain SMEs. If they know and understand the naming convention or logic behind how documents are stored it makes retrieval later much smoother. If your project is as short as 3 months, remembering where to find documentation is generally easier but the larger 18+ month projects can tax anyone’s memory on where something was stored.
Another task I connect closely with is the 3 – “plan business analysis governance”. It makes me think of audits and I cringe, so I have a healthy respect for it. Early in my career I worked for a company that has government contracts and if we did not follow all the regulations, we could not only lose that business but also get fined by the government. The thought of the loss of the business to my company as well as the impact it would have on my fellow employees had a very lasting impact on me. I started working there around 2000, before the Sarbanes–Oxley Act had been passed yet all of the information was on the news, so being in IT, the leadership of IT and the company strongly stressed compliance regulations and the need for an audit trail. Because I was so new to my career it became a real foundation for how I choose to do my job on a daily basis going forward. If you were working around that time you know what I am talking about, if not you probably learned about it in school.
A solid plan in place really does make the difference between whether a project is a success or, worst case scenario, is an abject failure, not getting completed, forcing a write off. I have been a part of both. The ones that are successful are ones that are planned well and was easy to understand the status of each phase. When you are repeatedly changing the tools used or methodology used it is very demoralizing and emotionally draining. No one wants to work on a project like that and it does not build confidence in the product or process from the end users’ perspective. All great things start with a solid foundation and BA Planning and monitoring is that for a project.
There are 5 tasks to Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring
1) Plan Business Analysis Approach – define an appropriate method to conduct business analysis activities.
2) Plan Stakeholder Engagement – plan an approach for establishing and maintaining effective working relationships with the stakeholders.
3) Plan Business Analysis Governance – define how decisions are made about requirements and designs, including reviews, change control, approvals, and prioritization.
4) Plan Business Analysis Information Management – develop an approach for how business analysis information will be stored and accessed.
5) Identify Business Analysis Performance Improvements – assess business analysis work and to plan to improve processes where required.
Below, are some sample techniques to use in the Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring phase. I bet you have used many of these before, either formally or informally:
Brainstorming – an excellent way to foster creative thinking about a problem. The aim of brainstorming is to produce numerous new ideas, and to derive from them themes for further analysis.
Interviews – systematic approach designed to elicit business analysis information from a person or group of people by talking to the interviewee(s), asking relevant questions, and documenting the responses. The interview can also be used for establishing relationships and building trust between business analysts and stakeholders to increase stakeholder involvement or build support for a proposed solution.
Item tracking – is used to capture and assign responsibility for issues and stakeholder concerns that pose an impact to the solution
Process Modeling – a standardized graphical model used to show how work is carried out and is a foundation for process analysis
Survey or Questionnaire – used to elicit business analysis information—including information about customers, products, work practices, and attitudes—from a group of people in a structured way and in a relatively short period of time.
Workshops – bring stakeholders together to collaborate on achieving a predefined goal.
I recommend that you review Chapter 10 in the BABOK to learn additional techniques and expand your knowledge of the tools available to you as a BA.
Which of the 5 tasks do you connect with the most? I would love to hear about them in our comments section of this blog.
Bibliography
International Institute of Business Analysis. (2015). BABOK A GUIDE TO THE BUSINESS ANALYSIS BODY OF KNOWLEDGE (Vol. V3). Toronto, Ontario, Canada.: IIBA.