The Community Blog for Business Analysts

I’m a strong believer of putting finishing touch to any initiative. Project Initiation is always tough and complex and need lots of research but if BA is unable to give the finishing touch then he is not done yet. So, I thought to put few of my views, challenges and observations during Implementation phase that I have faced. BABOK does a great job in explaining the Strategy Analysis and Solution Evaluation however real time challenges are most of time unspoken. As a Product based Business Analyst I often face few challenges which are altogether different than the last one.

 Stakeholder involvement and Governance: This is one of the challenging and critical step to find out the exact governance of stakeholders. Each stakeholder interest towards the product implementation do impact the final stage of the product. Lack of interest do hamper the product implementation. So if any stakeholder has less interest so its critical to know the reasons. Sometimes its better too to know why if any stakeholder shows more than needed interest. Maintaining correct and verified Project Charter does help in this.

 Over Expectation: Customers are always demanding and they should be as they are the one who are paying for all these, however as a Business Analyst you must be very smart to distinguish the expectation and over expectation of client because over expectation often makes your system more complex to use by the end-user and customer which ends with spending more bucks and gaining less.

 Deadline and Release Planning: As a business analyst make sure that circumstances don’t control you and your team, and you deliver your project successfully even if you don’t meet the original deadline. The art of prioritizing the solution requirement helps you to pass through. You should keep some time in buffer so that you have availability of resources to fix the unwanted issues or the deadlock condition in approval or implementation.

 The Acceptance: Most of the time I have found more involvement of people in acceptance compared to when you do the brainstorming or focus group. Sometimes customer say that they aren’t looking for this altogether. So, providing a view of your product before acceptance saves you. Do not ever try to give more than requirement (without information), customer will treat it as a bug because they haven’t requested it. Though sometimes over-explanation saves.

 Training: Sometimes it happens that everything is as per the client request and you are at a better stage to close the project but you end with hearing that there is no such benefit by the new implementation. I have observed that sometimes the user is not aware of the new feature or do not know how to use the new feature at all. So, Training to right people is very important. Sometimes you should move desk by desk to see if customer the using it fully.

 Getting feedback: Learning from your mistake is very important however knowing what went perfect is important too. Feedback from customers is very important to learn and grow as a business Analyst.

There are number of other challenges that do a Business Analyst phase. I would love to hear.