Business Requirements Advocacy is neglected in the business analysis practice!  Once considered to be an essential part of IT teams, the business analyst has become an integral position in any successful, market-driven organisation. Rightly said to be the change agents for any business, business analysts help organisations adapt to the changing environment while meeting the needs and demands of all their stakeholders, including employees, customers, and suppliers.

There is much to say about the often challenged relationship between IT and “the business” that has existed since IT became IT. Centralization, decentralization, self-service tools and applications, enterprise tools and applications – the pendulum swings again and again.  You’d think by now that we’d get it. There is no one all-encompassing data management or BI solution that will satisfy all of your data related requirements.

In this article, I am going to focus on the key 3 tools that you can use to help you identify the pain points in your workflow.  One of the key things to identify when working in a visual manner is understanding where your blockers are. It is only when you have identified these blockers, you then able to do something about them. There is no use trying to change something when you don’t have the evidence to baseline the problem. As business analysts, we wouldn’t tell the business where the problems are without conducting a thorough root cause analysis. So, why do we do it at work, why do we think without evidence we know exactly what the problem is and the impact it has on. 

The purpose of this article is to cite an example of using Lean-Agile project management for a small home construction project – a bathroom remodel. The remodeling firm unknowingly uses a Lean-Agile project approach that was the result of lessons learned over years of experience. In fact, when I questioned the remodeling firm about Lean-Agile, the firm’s response was “What is that?” Regardless of what you call it, the firm uses their construction approach because it works.