Part of the BA role, as defined in my organisation at least, revolves around controling the flow of work into IT.
I doubt we are unique in that we have scarcity of resources. We get around three times as many requests for work than we can actually deliver so there is a real need to ensure what is being developed offers the best business value.
Do other people have similar responsibility in their roles? How does your organisation prioritise what work happens and how do you then flow that into development in a controlled manner?
Hi:
Probably the biggest thing is to fromally define project scope, and have all stakeholders sign-off on it and the required resources to support the defined scope project.
The trick of course is to define the projects scope. The best tool for nailing down scope is called a context diagram. A context diagram is a data flow diagram in which the entire system is displayed as a single process/function. You can learn more about context diagrams and project scoping by researching on-line.
However, there is one very important thing that no one else is going to tell you. That is that typcially, no one - not even top management - knows the "big picture" well enough that they can give you the info to create a context diagram. So what you need to do is create some lower level data flow diagrams and then summarize them up into a context diagram.
Tony
Skawn (like the name)
This is just a quick note about IT strategy and IT alignment; that is how best IT supports the business strategy. So what items should we be working on? Well, the short answer is those items that support the business strategy, the rest are nice to have but do not add particular “business” value. See http://www.cioindex.com/nm/templates/ITStrategy.aspx?articleid=2623&zoneid=38 for alignment. Check out Enterprise Architecture for IS/IT strategy. Zachaman and ToGaf are good places to start.
warm regards,
K
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