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While Change is Certain, Business Rules are Not

ccecere — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 11:50:00 GMT

Nowhere is the need to implement and manage change more acute than within government agencies, nonprofits, and commercial businesses. Changing regulations, changing customer needs, new direction set by changing leadership, and the necessity to launch bigger, better, different products more and more quickly mean changes are inevitable. These situations not only trigger internal changes, but alter how an organization will manage its public interactions. In addition, an organization must determine how it will manage the impact of change within already established business systems and IT processes, most of which are already quite complex.

Change can trigger the need to meet tight deadlines; to update systems, forms, and websites; and to ensure understanding and acceptance across disparate constituencies, including employees, contractors, and the public. The need to change forces consideration of a variety of questions, such as:

For changes imposed upon an organization from the outside, what does compliance mean?
How will change impact an organization’s ability to achieve its goals?
How widespread is the impact of change, and how can an organization effectively prioritize addressing those impacts with the resources, time, and money available to it?

These challenges are complex. Organizational leadership and staff must understand and successfully communicate the need to change. The organization must also have capability to identify and measure the impact of the change, develop the business and technology requirements for what must change, design and implement the necessary changes, and, finally, test the modifications made to systems and processes, and validate for future operations.

Ability to change in question

While government, nonprofits, and businesses all recognize the constancy of change, few organizations are proactively prepared to address change in an organized, efficient, and effective manner. Thus, when the imperative to change occurs, most organizations are relegated to an “all hands on deck”, “man the torpedoes”, “cost is no object” strategy to address the imperative. Since the majority of change imperatives come with a deadline, the risk of disruption to an organization’s long term strategy, short term tactics, and overall health can be quite significant.

A recent survey by Robbins Gioia provides evidence that organizations are not planning for change.

A whopping 91% of respondents felt some degree of challenge when having to respond to regulatory changes, especially those with a deadline. Nearly 21% reported this to be “very challenging” for their organization.
There is also concern about losing institutional knowledge due to retirement and job changes. In fact, 91% of respondents expressed some degree of concern about this. A full 32% said they were “very concerned” about this problem.
And finally, 86% of respondents reported that they held some degree of concern about the amount of time it takes to get a new product out the door. 21% indicated that they were “very concerned” about this.

A proactive approach to managing change

The survey explored one practice in particular that, once implemented, can significantly reduce the time, cost, and risk of managing change. That practice is the capture, documentation, and tracing of business rules.

Business rules are operating principles or self-imposed constraints that apply across all operations and systems of an organization. The need for the existence of a business rule may be triggered by internal or external policies, practices or regulations. The power of capturing, documenting, and tracing business rules to the processes and systems that are impacted is significant. Business rules are:

Specific, actionable, and testable,
Independent of any one process,
Technology independent,
Under the control of the entity or organization to which they apply, and
Can be maintained in a manner to provide immediate impact analysis when a change is to occur.

Changes, particularly significant changes, affect business rules. Regulatory changes, for example, inevitably impact the business rules the guide an organization’s operations. Changes in tax laws, healthcare policies, zoning codes, and, even changes in product features and functions, will impact the rules by which a business or government entity operates.

In spite of the clear utility of understanding business rules and their applications, 93% (126 of 136) of organizations responding to the recent survey reported that their organization is challenged when it comes to capturing and maintaining business rules. In fact, 27% reported they were “very challenged” in this area.

BAs help create Invaluable Assets

If business rules describe the framework and constraints that impact an action that an organization may take, business analysts (BAs) are best equipped and positioned to help reduce organizational uncertainty — and, therefore, risk — by carefully documenting an organization's sometimes obscure processes and rules. This work can be painstaking, but a comprehensive approach helps an organization to operate more consistently, adds predictably to projects and planning, and, in the case of rapid and unanticipated change, may provide an organization a significant competitive advantage.

It would be impossible to overemphasize the value of having an organization's business rules documented and maintained by professional business analysts. To have requirements, workflows, rules, and overall process models captured in an on-going, living data and requirements repository and available for use for any effort would be invaluable. Yet, 69% of those organizations surveyed reported that they do not use a business rules repository.

Such assets and models become valuable property and tangible company assets, available to jump-start future process improvement and new product development undertakings. Such models lay the foundation for an organization's continuous optimization efforts based on solid understanding of rules, requirements, and business process models. These models provide the capability to determine that when X changes, A, B, and C are also impacted and must change as well.

Who took the survey

RG set up an online survey that got 146 responses. Of these participants, the majority was from government agencies and nonprofits, 40% (58). Others came from across private industry:

16% of respondents came from the financial world, banking, investment, and insurance
12% of respondents were from the professional services, such as accounting
Manufacturing and transportation made up 10% of respondents
High tech, telecommunications, and utilities made up 9%of respondents
The remaining respondents constituted 13% including travel and leisure, advertising, and retail.

You can take the Business Rules Survey. Find it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RGBusinessRules.

Author: Sandy Sears, PMP, CBAP, SA, PMI-PBA, is the Director, Financial Services Team, for Robbins Gioia. As a former executive at a large insurance company, she was responsible for IT process and practice development and was a key player in a large IT transformation effort, leading the rollout of project management, business analysis, and testing practices and tools across the organization, as well as the development of standardized processes for project portfolio management, IT financial management, and the SDLC. At a previous company, she was the recipient of the prestigious Chairman’s Award for her work in introducing a new annuity product line in Tokyo, Japan. She has been a speaker at industry conferences, for professional and education organizations, and on radio shows.

10 Lessons to Remember When Implementing a Stage-Gate® for NPD

ccecere — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 16:27:00 GMT

Many large organizations have adopted a gated approach to reduce new product development (NPD) risk. One of the key features of such an approach is a set of “go/no-go” decision gates which, in principle, ensures that each project remains aligned with its original strategic intent and its value remains high enough to justify its continuation to the next development stage. But along with processes and methodologies, there are fundamentals that companies must remain true to when developing new products.

The following are 10 lessons learned when the business units of one of the world’s leading Oil & Gas upstream services companies, with over $20B in annual revenue, decided to revisit their processes to optimize the return on investment of individual NPD projects. The process used, Stage-Gate®, is time tested and well understood, but a focus on five distinct components and another handful of lessons learned made a critical difference in ensuring NPD went off with fewer problems and surprises.

The first five and second half of best practice

One important conclusion resulting from using the gated NPD process implementation is that there are five distinct components, all of which must be embedded in any NPD methodology to maximize its effectiveness. They are:
1. A robust business case
2. A strong risk-management approach
3. A comprehensive integrated launch plan
4. A governance discipline where leaders are engaged and accountable
5. Clear ownership of and accountability for the NPD process
But what are some best practices beyond these five well-known known components? Here are five more:

1. Don’t ignore (proven) advice
Few organizations want to deliberately ignore lessons learned from others who have executed similar initiatives. For example, there are 10 tips for successful implementation of Stage-Gate that two of its leading experts have shared. But what happens when a company only heeds eight out of the 10 and, further, does not fully follow those they claim to adhere to? Often, the lessons not followed lead to gaps and weak points in execution. In this Oil & Gas company’s Stage-Gate implementation, the leadership’s conscious choice not to emphasize change management and internal communication delayed the adoption timeframe by up to six months.

2. Avoid overkill
When this initiative started, the gated approach was defined in full-blown form, describing the process that the largest, most complex, and highest-risk NPD projects would follow. After an initial set of large-scale projects went through a pilot phase of the Stage-Gate process, demand for the use of the gated approach grew. However, it quickly became apparent to many of those who wanted to apply Stage-Gate that it would be overly burdensome for smaller, less risky projects to adopt the same level of detailed documentation and governance oversight. Fortunately, others external to this organization had already developed a set of best practices for scaling the Stage-Gate process for projects of different sizes and degrees of risk. Drawing from that work, three versions of the Stage-Gate process are now used, differentiated by the management level of the members of the governance committee, the degree of formality of some specific gate reviews, and the level of detail of required documentation.

3. Understand the process
If the Stage-Gate process is a framework that overlays an existing NPD process, then a primary exercise in implementing that framework is to align stages and gates to the existing process. This presupposes that the existing NPD process is well understood and well documented. With this in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that one of the most powerful exercises carried out during the subject Stage-Gate deployment was the development of detailed process maps representing all major work streams within the entire end-to-end NPD process. While the maps are valuable in and of themselves, the numerous tools being developed using the information contained in the maps, such as role and responsibility matrices (a detailed RACI matrix), deliverable matrices (who owes what to whom when, using what template), etc., will be even more valuable since they will be used in day-to-day project execution.

4. Use Flexibility
Another best practice that emerged is “Flexibility”—a disciplined process for allowing project-specific deviations from the baseline Stage-Gate approach adopted within each business unit. (The baseline in this case is the Stage-Gate process as customized by the business unit in the process mapping sessions.)
Flexibility consists of three elements: (1) justification for the proposed deviation, (2) identification and rating of the associated risks and, if needed, risk-mitigation actions and contingency planning, and (3) approval by the project’s governance committee for the proposed deviation.

5. Prepare a software infrastructure
In the implementation described here, a comprehensive yet low-cost infrastructure was created in Microsoft SharePoint. This infrastructure significantly improved the outcome of Stage-Gate-based NPD efforts by enabling collaboration and transparency in project execution and alignment of work with the Stage-Gate framework. Among the components of this infrastructure are tools to:
• Manage and share documents across all work streams and through all stages
• Manage action items and deliverables
• Identify, track, and manage risks
• Facilitate gathering data for gate reviews
• Record and communicate gate review decisions and feedback
• Capture and share lessons learned

Conclusions

Every company strives to consistently deliver new products that address customer needs cost effectively while achieving reliability, quality, safety, and other important customer goals. While challenging, there are a number of critical success factors that can greatly improve the odds of success.

If several components are embedded in the gated NPD approach, the chance of success of programs executed using it will increase considerably. Yet, it stands to reason that likelihood of successful products will be further enhanced by applying what others have learned the hard way—the second half of best practices described above.

Written By: Mark Barnett, PhD, MBA is Senior Executive Consultant, at Robbins-Gioia, LLC (http://www.robbinsgioia.com). He has 15 years of experience leading business transformations within multiple industries, including oil & gas, high-tech R&D and manufacturing, telecommunications, and insurance and financial services. Mark served as RG's engagement lead at one of the premier international oil & gas products and services companies, implementing a common new product development framework across 10 business units. He is also an thought leader in the area of Customer Experience Management, transforming organizations to place customers at the center of everything they do, leading to increased revenue, improved service quality, and reduced operating cost.

[1] Edgett, Scott J., and Jones, L. Michelle, “Ten Tips for Successfully Implementing a Stage-Gate® Product Innovation Process,” Reference Paper #33, Stage-Gate International and Product Development Institute Inc., 2012.

6 Strategies for a Better PM/BA relationship

ccecere — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:28:00 GMT

Given the importance of the relationship between the Project Manager and the Business Analyst on a project team, how can an organization nurture this key relationship and, in the process, ensure better team performance? Here are six basic strategies you can employ:

1. Train and cross training PMs and BAs on methodology and roles. Each should understand the responsibilities of the other and agree on how to attain outcomes.

2. Build two-person teams of PMs and BAs who can work together more than once so they can get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

3. Reward collaboration and cultivate PMs and BAs who exhibit the best characteristics of their respective roles.

4. Chose PMs and BAs who naturally understand the value of compromise and work actively together to manage risk.

5. Develop a mindset where professionals over-communicate to ensure that nothing gets missed.

Finally, (6) pay close attention to interdependencies. One of the major strategic areas of overlap between the PM and BA roles, for example, is the area of scope definition and management. These professionals should be deeply involved in discussions such as this which are deceptively straightforward, but end up playing havoc on schedules and budgets.

Cathy Cecere

Marketing Manager with Doreen Evans Associates, Inc.

http://www.doreenevans.com

The Social BA - 5 Reasons to get Active Online

ccecere — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 13:32:00 GMT

Business analysts who are self-avowed social media enthusiasts will tell you that being part of a large, online community where help is only a click away is worth the time and effort. In fact, these professionals suggest that the only problem with a bit of scanning, reading, clicking, or posting on LinkedIn and Twitter every day is finding the time in a busy BA’s schedule.

Yet even the BA who is the most fanatical fan of social media admits that the endeavor has the potential to be very addictive. And upper management often looks at virtual networks with one eye on the clock and another on the purse strings. Yet most executives are coming to the realization that social sites are here to stay.

The BA Benefit of Being Online

What are the benefits to BAs who spend time on these sites? Senior Business Analyst Amirudapriya Balakumar says she has always believed that a “cumulative brain/thought process” is greater than the knowledge held by one person. She looks toward LinkedIn for enhanced knowledge and awareness. Business Analyst Peter Measures agrees, “I really enjoy having my perspective on the profession challenged on LinkedIn. It is a really useful learning tool.”

Having your professional convictions confirmed or questioned, thereby helping you grow as a BA, is a great reason to become part of an active, online community, but there are at least five additional reasons BAs should consider joining other BAs online:

1. Re-engage. One of the greatest, but often overlooked, benefits of social media for BAs is that they become re-engaged with the profession that they love. Quite simply, when you’re able to socialize with others who are performing the same work and facing the same challenges, you become re-energized. Each and every day I hear from BAs who are sharing ideas, attending classes or webinars, speaking at events or networking at meetings. Who can read these updates and not be inspired to do the same?

2. Share. There are many BAs who work as solo practitioners at small organizations and for them a virtual community can be a lifeline where they are able to brag or vent without limits. When this tweet went out, “You know you’re a BA when …” Business Analyst Sarah Entwistle tweeted back “… you have your head in your hands.” Because there are times when only another BA understands what you are going through, it’s good to know you are always able to go on LinkedIn and ask an old colleague for advice, post a question on a BA group, or shout out a quick query on Twitter. More often than not—and rather quickly—you are offered a needed template, linked to a helpful web page, sent a white paper or directed to someone who can offer more specific help.

3. Keep up. There may be no single better way to stay in tune with the latest BA trends and strategies than online and with social media. There is a constant stream of links to web pages, white papers, articles, slides, templates and other resources—and it’s usually free. Yes, it often takes some doing to work through the “spam” and get to the information you need, but diligent BAs will join the LinkedIn groups that discuss topics that interest them most, follow those on Twitter with the best information, and search on hashtags that are the most helpful. (See below for some tips.)

4. Network. The fact that social media gives you a chance to interact with other BAs is undeniable. You can easily get to know those who face the same challenges and interact with others who can offer you career advice and personal opportunities. You have the ability to ask questions of experts, voice your disagreement with the status quo and, perhaps, influence the future of your profession.

5. Find employment. Of course, social media allows you to talk with recruiters and hiring managers who are looking for professionals like you. Jobs and other opportunities are posted daily. Just ask Senior Business Analyst Debra Bambridge who is a recent convert to LinkedIn and freely admits she snagged an interview because of her online affiliation with a respected professional.

Comradery Amid Chaos

There are many groups that exist on LinkedIn and the landscape can seem chaotic. But there are ways to narrow your options and find useful discussions. The first step is to search “Business Analysis” under “Groups.” The results will show the name of each group, as well as the size and how active the group is. They’ll also tell you who in your network is a member of the group and you can further filter your search from there. Here are some popular groups to consider starting with:

IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis) with over 35,000 members. Lots of job postings in main discussion section, but there are resources posted and some conversation.
Your local IIBA Chapter group. Some are better than others.
Business Analyst Times and ModernAnalyst.com – Business Analyst Community each have a group. Both are active.

Twitter users do not have groups to join. BAs on this site follow those who offer them the information they need—@BABOK (the official Twitter account of the International Institute of Business Analysis) and @IIBA_Boston for example—and use hashtags to further filter the content they see. You can search on any keyword preceded with a hashtag. According to a recent poll of BAs on Twitter, the following hashtags help BAs keep up with the most relevant industry posts:

· #BAOT or #baot (business analysts on twitter)

· #rqmnts (requirements) or #requirements

· #IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis)

· #businessanalysis

· #businessanalyst (primarily for job hunters)

· #BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge)

· #CBAP (Certified Business Analysis Professional)

Cathy Cecere

Marketing Manager with Doreen Evans Associates, Inc.

http://www.doreenevans.com