BREAKTHROUGH BUSINESS ANALYSIS – Implementing and Sustaining a Value-based Practice, by Kathleen (Kitty) Hass provides a straightforward implementation framework to ensure your BA practice is the right fit, brings value to your organization, and sustains it through the rough roads ahead.
Business Analysis for the 21st Century
Business analysts of the not-too-distant future must and will become visionaries, innovators, strategists, and transformational leaders, executing strategy through project results. Successful business analysts will learn how to embrace organizational values, empower their teams to thrive, bring customers into the change process, and drive innovation through global partnerships. Don’t blink, or you may miss out on this exciting business experiment.
Business analysis seems to be a self-improving discipline, and we have energizing new challenges and opportunities ahead. We need to change the way we do projects to achieve faster time to market and deliver innovative solutions that add value to the customer and wealth to the organization. Only then will we be contributing to a sustained competitive advantage for our organizations.
The Future
Traditional business analysis jobs are going away and are not coming back. BA tools are growing up, and typical BA tasks are being automated and commoditized. Instead of being regarded as documenters, BAs are being sought out to focus on strategy, value, innovation, and leadership. So how do we make the transition from a BA discipline that is project/requirements focused to one that is adding value at the enterprise/strategy level? Breakthrough value-based business analysis centers on many of the woefully inadequate essentials of business/technology projects. It changes the focus. It strives for the following elements:
- Decision making: collaborative
- Thinking: global, holistic, strategic
- Complexity: leveraged to achieve creativity
- Leadership: shared, diverse, expert
- Teams: collaborative, high performing
- Methods: adaptive, experimenting, creative, visualizing, agile
- Solutions: innovative, competitive, unsettling, disruptive
- Value: delivered often
Realizing the positive impacts of a value-based BA practice could very well mean the difference between success and failure for businesses negotiating 21st century challenges. Breakthrough Business Analysis provides a framework for implementing a BA practice that is strategically positioned and value-based. This book provides a wealth of wisdom and insight for determining organizational readiness and then implementing and sustaining a value-based BA practice. The framework presented involves three phases:
- Readiness: “Is our organization ready? What is the right fit?”
- Implementation: “How do we build the BA practice?”
- Sustainability: “How do we run our BA practice like a business?”
Finally, we have a thorough examination of how to implement strategic business analysis (BA) in organizations and make them stick. Targeted to IT managers, product owners, strategists, project portfolio managers, BA managers, BA practice leads, enterprise business analysts, and anyone who wants to improve business practices, this new book offers a stage by stage approach to ensure your BA practice is customized to your organization, becomes a lasting discipline, and adds value to your customers and wealth to the bottom line.
Take the lead and be your organization’s champion of a value-based, breakthrough BA practice that is focused on value to the customer and wealth to the bottom line. As Roxanne Miller, President, Requirements Quest states in the Foreword to the book: You can apply the concepts in this book in organizations of all sizes and industries. Use it as a reference. Read it once, and read it again and again. Each time you read this book, you’ll come to understand the depth of the advice Kathleen presents. You’ll also benefit from the experiences shared by the book’s contributors.
There is a buzz in the air about the future as business analysts continue to stand out in organizations as strategic assets. Breakthrough Business Analysis leads the 21st century as a definitive treatise on implementing and sustaining value-based business analysis practices.
Author: Kathleen (Kitty) Hass, Management Concepts
Kathleen (Kitty) Hass is the world’s leading expert in strategic business analysis and complex project management. She has written dozens of articles and nine books, including the renowned series The Business Analysis Essential Library; The Enterprise Business Analyst: Developing Creative Solutions to Complex Business Problems; and Managing Project Complexity: A New Model, which was awarded PMI’s David I. Cleland Literature Award. She is a director on the IIBA board and is on the BA advisory boards for Capella University and the University of California, Irvine.
The book is available now through your local bookstore, on Amazon.com, or directly from Management Concepts Press at www.ManagementConceptsPress.com.
Management Concepts Press is part of Management Concepts, Inc., an integrated training, consulting, and publishing company dedicated to the mind at work—from entry level to executive leaders.
Breakthrough Business Analysis: Implementing and Sustaining a Value-Based Practice, ©2015, 280 pages, 7” x 10” softcover, ISBN 978-1-56726-464-7, $49