 Business Analysis Competency
Requirements play a vital role in engineering IT systems. It is well known, for example, that the top reasons for project failure are tied directly to poor requirements. It is through the leadership of the business analyst that requirements are captured from the business subject matter experts and communicated to the technical team so that solutions can be designed and implemented that meet the business needs. As projects become larger, cross-functional, global and more complex, the role of the business analyst becomes even more challenging and more critical.
A Business Analyst Competency Center (BACC) can serve to directly improve the skills of business analysts, increasing the quality of requirements and, ultimately, the quality of delivered solutions. The purpose of the BACC is to enable business analysts to do their job effectively, serving as the liaison between the business and IT.
Doreen Evans Associates has worked with a number of clients to establish a BACC. Our approach has several components, illustrated in the figure below.
Step One: Business Analysis Competency Assessment
The place to begin is to understand the current state of requirements and business analysis. Our assessment is a packaged service, with deliverables that include findings and recommendations as well as a roadmap for how to implement the recommendations. A typical assessment takes 6 weeks and includes the investigation of our client's People, Process, Technology and Organization.
Step Two: Business Analysis Pilot Project
A pilot project provides help from highly experienced business analysts working with your in-house business analysts to improve their competencies. DEA consultants can serve as mentors or work beside your team as business analysts, demonstrating what needs to be accomplished when, and how to use best practices – all the while helping the team achieve success. Pilot projects provide a test bed for the techniques, and help to prove the concept and demonstrate the value of a robust, integrated requirements life cycle solution.
Step Three: Business Analysis Improvement
At the same time as carrying out pilot projects, work on improving the business analysis environment itself should begin. This means focusing attention on the process being used, on the tools that will support success, and on the business analyst role. The work you do here feeds back to pilot projects, and vice versa.
Step Four: Business Analysis Competency Institutionalization
Institutionalizing a business analysis competency center means building an organization that can:
- Grow and share business analysis capabilities, including education, templates and guidelines, to all business analysts
- Centralize and standardize methodology deliverables and common BA project activities
- Provide governance of and a framework for leveraging requirements best practices
- Provide governance for the quality of business analysis project deliverables
In order to create such an organization, an infrastructure must be established. DEA can help guide the work to:
- Form a leadership team to guide decisions and advocate for the organization
- Assist in determining where the organization should report and how it should interact with other groups, in particular project management
- Define roles within the organization, for example, a process manager or a project quality manager, and write job descriptions
- Define the internal processes and procedures that the organization needs to carry out, for example, participating in project planning, managing requirements publication, or maintaining project archives
- Build an infrastructure to house templates, samples, and guidelines
- Purchase and install tools for BA use
- Build a web site as a single resource center for BAs
- Define the metrics that will be used to measure success for the organization as well as for the requirements life cycle process
- Build and maintain project artifacts for documentation and reuse
- Develop an enterprise business architecture to act as a guide for future projects
Step Five: Business Analysis Competency Maintenance
DEA provides ongoing maintenance over the BACC program to ensure continuing improvement and foster the highest level of competencies. DEA accomplishes this goal through one of two models:
- DEA operates the BACC by participating in active projects, managing requirements, building enterprise architecture, and providing training to BAs.
- The client operates the BACC and retains DEA to serve as mentors by leading workshops to introduce new methodology and key developments in the requirements lifecycle and recommending new tools and techniques.
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