Managing Business Analysis Services: A Framework for Sustainable Projects and Corporate Strategy Success
256
Managing Business Analysis Services: A Framework for Sustainable Projects and Corporate Strategy Success
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781604270792 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Ross, J. Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2012 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
MISCONCEPTIONS, PROBLEMS AND THE AVERAGE BA MODEL
Business analysis as a discipline has been around in one form or another for over a decade. No matter what you call it, or how you prioritize it, its roles and expectations are roughly the same: Enable the development of technology products that more closely align to business and consumer needs. Business analysts do this by understanding the problems, limitations, needs, business model, and the industry, and then utilize their understanding of that information to define requirements for a solution.
COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS
Unfortunately, there are a few misconceptions about business analysis, and there are also misconceptions about the significance of the roles that analysts play in the continuity of the overall business. One misconception is that business analysis, in and of itself, is wholly the task of defining and creating requirements. In essence, the business analyst is regarded and then treated like an "order taker." This means that most analysts are not given opportunities to contribute fully towards the business goals and objectives by getting involved in the creation of a solution.
What is being missed is that the business analyst is in a unique position to be a key enabler of the long-term strategy and goals of a business simply because of the types of solutions that are needed, and the specific accumulation of knowledge and skills that they must have and be able to draw from in order to be successful within their positions. While it is appropriate to delegate and allocate specific tasks within business analysis according to levels of knowledge and experiences of the individual resources involved, the technology industry and business community at large must recognize that business analysts have the ability and unique insights to play a more critical role in the successful realization of strategic plans through the development of solutions by which the business will bring its strategic plans to life and meet their overall objectives.
It must also be recognized that, in the same way that a server at a restaurant helps to create an experience for the patron or diner and plays a critical role in the overall dining experience, the business analyst is equally involved in the creation of the experience of the business customers (both internal and external). Indeed, when the wait staff engages the customer in conversation and offers recommendations for the meal and various side dishes, the customer has a more rewarding experience and is far more likely to continue to return to the restaurant.
As a case in point, several years ago I stepped into a Fortune 500 outsourcing company as the Senior Business Analyst. My objective was simple: I was hired to set a standard for the business analysts within the company. The company was dealing with some common industry-wide issues with the placement of business analysts, and faced stiff competition from other boutique vendors with a more formalized structure in place to manage and govern business analysis. At that point in time, the customer satisfaction scores for business analysis averaged 2.5 to 3 points out of 10. The analysts themselves were struggling and feeling neglected by the executive management. Morale was quite low among the team and within individual team members.
To start my work, I began creating the processes that all business analysts would be required to utilize in order to conduct their tasks and activities. I devised training programs to roll out the new processes quickly and effectively, and authored role descriptions, a competency model, and an assessment framework for screening all business analyst candidates. I quickly found myself in high demand for interviewing prospective candidates. I also started getting calls from account managers to make recommendations for specific roles within their accounts. During one such conversation, where I was being asked by an account manager for a recommendation of an available business analyst resource, I realized that I had no idea who was available because I had not yet been made privy to that information.
Shortly after that discussion, I was asked by that same manager to prepare a resource forecast for the remainder of the year. I realized that I could not do that, either. So, I brainstormed on how I was going to accomplish both tasks and get the blessing of upper management to do it. I made a quick presentation to my manager about how I needed to "take stock" of the existing business analyst team before I could complete the forecast that was requested. I also mentioned that I had been getting requests for resource recommendations and could not make any because I did not know the majority of the analysts on the team. I argued that this assessment effort could accomplish both objectives.
Since I already had the framework for conducting assessments in place, and it was well implemented into our interviewing processes, I requested authorization to use the framework to conduct assessments of all permanent, internal business analyst resources. My point was that I could make well-informed recommendations and complete the necessary forecast with a more accurate picture of the numbers of analysts already on board, including current project allocations and domain knowledge, as well as skill levels.
Using this framework, I personally screened over 300 analysts for this company, and in doing so, discovered quite a lot about the business analyst talent pool. This effort, in turn, drew the attention of other groups that had been trying to accomplish the same standards, and so I started getting calls to support their internal framework development resource pool assessments. I was shocked to learn that groups like the project management office (PMO) had been struggling with completing this task for over two years! I initially started getting calls because they wanted to know how it was that I had managed to accomplish the task single-handedly within only seven months. Their interest peaked when they learned that it was completed in a manner that was 100% billable.
I learned a lot from this experience in terms of motivating others through structure and accountability. Successful business analysis requires the practitioner to be an expert in processes and requirements, and a generalist in every other aspect of business. I had utilized simple techniques for requirements and business analysis to create the processes and frameworks, then utilized my knowledge and experiences in inventory control, human resources management, conflict resolution, training, and leadership to support the people as part of finalizing the infrastructure. Management also caught a glimpse of how the application of this type of accumulated knowledge and skill, with a clearly defined structure or framework in place, can impact the internal and external customer experience. The BA team became highly charged, cohesive, and motivated, and the company's customer satisfaction scores for business analysis jumped to an average of 6 to 7 out of 10. We implemented the structure and organization, and they ran with it.
Homeless: A Business Analyst's Life
Without the adequate management, structure, and framework for performing the job of a business analyst, there is a resemblance to the displacement of homeless people. Business analysts move from project to project like temporary shelters that give them a sense of empowerment over their situation for a short while, but in the end, they almost always have to move on.
Whereas homeless people have little or no shelter from nature or other people, many business analysts do not have the protection and shelter that comes from having a structure within an organization where they belong, and where they could grow and thrive. The analysts go on about their work on requirements as if it is the most important work in the world. However, there often seems to be little recognition of the value of that work by the business stakeholders or their technology peers, who are looking only at the bottom line in terms of how much time it will take or how much it will restrict their ability to be creative in development.
Like the homeless, there can be little or no routine or predictability in the work of a business analyst because there are so few standard frameworks to provide that level of guidance for them. Analysts trying to change their circumstances often look like the guy on the street corner carrying an "End of the World" sign, warning of the doom and gloom of the shared situation.
However, it does not have to be this way. Business analysis managers and BA communities can make a difference and change this underappreciated situation. Many business analysts do not report into a formal operational structure. They report temporarily to project managers and recruiters, but for the most part, do not have the basic infrastructure that so many other roles within an organization take for granted. It is infrastructure that enables personal and professional growth, job satisfaction, leadership, consistent improvement, and ongoing performance. Each of these attributes of infrastructure has a direct and indisputable, deterministic impact on the end product and the quality of the work done to build that end product. This lack of infrastructure for business analysts is definitely a problem that needs to be properly addressed.
CENTERS OF EXCELLENCE
Many companies are transitioning to a Center of Excellence (COE) as a model for building a structure, a formalized process, and consistency. While I can attest to the merits of this model (having built several from the ground up for clients), this is not a permanent solution until we start really looking at building out a full-scale operational and delivery model for business analysis as a part of the organization. Until that structure exists, Centers of Excellence are only like temporary housing; they lack the stability and continuity of an operational model.
Does that mean that Centers of Excellence are not important? Absolutely not! Centers of Excellence are absolutely valuable in that they provide and foster skills within all members of the organization to readily adopt a business analysis group, and for the business analysts themselves to internalize the structure and processes advocated by that Center.
In fact, Centers of Excellence can be quite dynamic and foster a level of innovation and leadership that you may not see within a typical business model that comes with a standardized organizational structure because every member of the team contributes and adopts more accountability and responsibility for the ownership of processes, templates, and events. The Center becomes a focal point for learning and knowledge-sharing in the same way that coffee houses often spark pedagogical debates and discussions among college patrons.
Centers of Excellence can challenge the norms of the company's social fabric, and the discussions and resulting work can be both rewarding and cutting-edge. But in order to progress, a solid business model needs to be in place to ensure the continuity and health of both projects and people, and to ensure the synergy and alignment of the centers and their patrons to the overall mission and values of the company at large.
A Center of Excellence model can be a cost center much like other research and development (R&D) labs. However, normalized and acclimated business units have the potential and opportunity to be both cost and revenue generating centers, and we need both. Much like a coffee shop, the Center is where many discussions take place, and process and action can be fluid and sporadic, whereas a socialized business unit must work within the strict parameters of the company and the organizational structure. They must demonstrate return on investment (ROI) for all activities, meetings, and events in order to justify taking people off the shop floor when they could be performing revenue-generating activities for clients.
However, the biggest difference between the two models is that typically, within an organizational model, there is a standard reporting structure for the analysts up to a functional manager, project manager, or recruiting manager, and in the Center of Excellence model they have an informal reporting structure to leadership. Therefore, the head of the Center very often has no formal ability to manage the analyst resources for allocation, competency, and key performance indicators (KPIs). In fact, the competencies, unless well-defined and marketed by the Center and then socialized by the remainder of the company, can have little impact on the actual competency expectations of the line managers to whom the analysts actually report. The competencies are merely "suggestions" for performance expectations and measurement, with little or no bearing on the actual performance.
Because business analysts are well-dressed and show up on time, people do not notice that they are "homeless." Or, even how that sense of homelessness impacts their performance and attrition, and how ultimately the quality of their work could become detrimental to the entire business. (Even the smallest termites — in this case bad projects — can bring down a house when there are enough of them and they are not managed.)
It is no wonder that some business analysts jump ship and move on to become project managers, or something else. They are tired of living in the park and sleeping on benches, and want a real "home." At some point, they realize that in order to fully belong somewhere, they have to move into a house, and any house is better than no house at all.
For anyone who believes that analyst's are satisfied with the current business analysis model, and further believes that these services are well-managed and well-defined, you will be shocked to learn that there is a long way to go before we can consider the business analysis area to be optimized. Business analysis as a whole is not optimized to the point that it contributes in a major or consistent way to the overall health, effectiveness, competitiveness, or compliance of the business organization.
The forthcoming sections of this chapter present and discuss the current, most widely used application for business analysis services, exploring the application of services by applying the SWOT analysis technique to expose underlying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that are inherent in the business analysis model. These sections elaborate on the losses in productivity, quality control, and effectiveness of the results that are created as a result of the management situation in this model. This elaboration exposes the common requirements missteps that can occur as a result of poor management, and a lack of standardized and formalized processes.
Business analysis is more than just getting users and stakeholders into a room and taking down their wish list of features, putting the wishes into a formal document, and then getting back into the room later to get everyone to agree to what has been written down.
THE AVERAGE BUSINESS ANALYSIS MODEL
First, let's be honest, there really is no "average" business analysis model per se, but merely a rudimentary process that is followed by many companies, including consulting firms. In this process, individual business analyst resources are expected to be project-ready and come to the table with the required skills and experiences. The problem is that there are few trusted avenues to acquire those skills and experiences outside of the emerging International Institute for Business Analysis (IIBA), and these resources have little or no support to acquire them. Companies rarely pay the kind of money for training that business analysts really need in order to formalize their skills through legitimate training organizations.
As to how the management of business analysts is conducted, and how they report into the company's organizational structure, really depends on the individual company. If anything, the management model for business analysts could be said to fall under the service delivery model or the PMO, but this, in and of itself, really only defines the basic role, costs for the service, and a limited number of success factors and expectations. Unfortunately, this means that there is a huge gap in terms of specific deliverable expectations, quality, consistency, and general outcomes.
In many companies, as illustrated in Figure 1.1, the general process for allocating resources is that business analysts typically report to either the PMO or resource management group (RMG) operationally. When a new project need arises, the analysts are allocated to the project and suddenly find themselves either reporting jointly to the PMO and a project manager, or to the RMG and a project manager. In the case of consulting firms, they may also find themselves reporting to an account manager, or a stakeholder, or quite simply, once they are allocated to a project, all other management goes away and they simply report to the project manager.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Managing Business Analysis Services"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Barbara Davis.
Excerpted by permission of J. Ross Publishing, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword ix
Preface xi
About the Author xvii
Section 1 Explosing Business Analysis Theories and Practices 1
Chapter 1 Misconceptions, Problems and the Average BA Model 3
Common Misconceptions 3
Centers of Excellence 6
The Average Business Analysis Model 8
Decomposing the Average BA Model Utilizing SWOT Analysis 10
Five Critical Requirements Steps That Get Missed 15
Chapter 2 An Optimized Business Analysis Model 25
Business Process Modeling 27
Needs Analysis 27
Stakeholder Alignment 29
Benefits Realization Planning 30
Requirements Planning 38
Requirements Definition and Analysis 45
Requirements Verification and Validation 50
Requirements Management 51
Benchmarking Requirements 55
Tactical (Task-Oriented) Governance 56
Chapter 3 Business Analysis Stewardship 61
Chapter 4 Functional Governance 67
The Organizational Impacts of Micromanagement 68
Crisis and Opportunity 75
Section 1 Conclusion 77
Section 2 Introduction: Managing Business Analysis Services 79
Chapter 5 Organizational Structure 83
Leadership 86
Coordinating Resources 92
Summary 95
Chapter 6 Resource Management 97
Capacity Planning 100
Talent Acquisition 102
Defined Roles 106
Resource Attrition 110
Chapter 7 Performance Management 113
Building Organizational Capability 113
Building Organizational Excellence through Manufactured Resource Maturity 115
A Competency Model 122
Key Performance Indicators 130
Summary 135
Section 2 In Conclusion 137
Technology Issues 137
Business Continuity And Sustainability 138
People + Process + Tools = Results 139
The Role of Management in Quality Requirements 142
Section 3 Introduction: Creating Seamless Transition point Across Delivery and Engagement 145
Chapter 8 Service Delivery 147
Billing for Service 148
Service Expectations 149
Defined Services 151
Elements of an Effective Service Delivery Model 154
Developing Effective Service Delivery Model 167
Addressing Common Service Delivery Problems 171
Summary 175
Chapter 9 Engagement Models 177
Elements of the Engagement Model 178
Types of Engagement Models 183
Issues Encountered During Engagement 186
Developing Effective Engagement Models 190
Summary 191
Section 3 Conclusions About Service Delivery and Engagement Models 193
Section 4 Introduction: Transitioning to a Managed Business Analysis as a Service Model 197
Chapter 10 Determining Your Transition Strategy 199
Vision 200
Mission 201
Success and Failure Criteria 201
Planning Management and Fit Within the Organization 202
Communication 205
Leader Selection 206
Selecting Quick Wins and Uniting the Team 208
Chapter 11 Implementation 213
Change Management-In the Aftermath 215
Keys to Success 216
Section 4 Conclusions About Transitioning to a Managed Business Analysis as a Service Model 219
Epilogue 221
Index 225