Career Forums

 "What I'm looking for is someone who has a good grasp of what's necessary for a small organization to develop business analysis processes/structure"

As a "Greenhorn" or "Experienced", before you start to develop Process or Structures ... see what the business is about, their market and what their Competition is doing.

Look at the different processes currently in use (ie: Sales (Phone / Web, etc), order entry, inventory, shipping, returns ... etc. See if there are ways to optimize.

Talk to Management / users to see if there is any current problems with processes in use ... maybe poor screen designs (UI / UX), manual transactions that could be automated and already automated transactions that could be improved.

Work with users and watch what they do ... question why they do this or that, is there something they would like to have a system do, take notes and document the process and then have it reviewed by the users.

Don't try to do too much at once, start at the most important process (maybe: Sales / Data entry to get the cash flow) and work your way down, optimizing the Product / Service Pipeline ... also, keep an eye on what could be expanded for the future state processes.

Look at everything as a "Gap Analysis" ... see what they are currently doing (Current State) ... then document the requirements for the "Future State". Once you have that, then you can work on developing documentation, work flows, data flows, etc to achieve the new process.

A New company is a challenge ... everyone is basically doing their own thing and you have to put chaos in order ... and you will see that people don't like change and may even steer you the wrong way to prevent you from possibly eliminating them by technology.

Have Fun !!!