In recent years it has become more and more apparent that the job description of Business Analyst has become diluted and distorted. Can this be considered the natural evolution of a profession or is it a profession that no longer has a clear job description? Is this a profession that has moved past the point of clear boundaries or are the boundaries still there but blurred based on the need to adapt to a changing world to meet the needs of people rather than the needs of the business? What can we do to win back the respect that the Business Analyst profession deserves? Exactly whose responsibility is it to maintain a professional and respected image of this profession? Should the recruitment process of Business Analysts be an exercise in requirements gathering?
If it is allocating your internal resources, making a new hire, or bringing in a consultant; what is the best process to match the right business analyst to the right project? For organizations that truly value the role of the business analyst this is one of the most frequently pondered questions.
Companies that want to have the right people in the right roles need to address four main stages; defining the BA’s roles in the project, attracting the best talent, matching the BA to the project and finally, making the selection and continuing to support.
As an agile analyst, you know how easy it is to get lost in a blizzard of project details. The way to keep focused is to remind yourself of the chief reason for using agile processes: to deliver business value for your organization. With that in mind, we’ll look at specific ways you can combine two approaches: agile and lean.
When I’m not consulting or managing projects, some of my time is spent teaching MBA classes at Drake University. The fact that I teach both project management AND creativity for business creates consternation among some of my friends and colleagues. After all, can a project manager really be creative? Aren’t those mutually exclusive skills?
My response is a great project manager also must excel at creativity to remain a viable, valuable asset in today’s marketplace. Gone are the days of simply managing scope within a budget and schedule; project managers must be multi-faceted utility players. Project and program managers are being expected to create solutions, to facilitate conflicts, and to motivate resources toward a goal in ways never before anticipated.
Business analysts are at the sharp end of one of the great challenges of information technology – how to build the systems organizations need. At the same time, organizations are demanding more sophisticated systems – the “dumb” systems of yesteryear are no longer enough.
Business-process-modeling technology provides a powerful set of tools for describing and automating processes. The technology is so powerful that it often seems there are no limits to what BPM can do. But not every process that is automated needs BPM. Following on last week's discussion of process discovery, the JargonSpy asks the question: What sort of processes should be automated using BPM?
Businesspeople and technologists alike quickly get drunk on business-process modeling when they first become competent in the technique. Like wikis, business-process modeling allows you to capture the detail that you have in your head and then leave placeholders for what is not yet baked. In wikis, this takes the form of pages of text that link to other pages covering concepts that you will fill in later. Wikipedia is full of links to pages waiting to be completed.
The analogous act in business-process modeling is to put a box in to cover a step ("solve the halting problem" or "find qualified leads") that is part of the process but that you don't want to worry about just then.
Author: Dan Woods
If a single word can represent an entire year, then 2008 was the year of change. Of course, the next American president ran an entire campaign on change, but, more specifically, the business world as we know it will simply never be the same. We’ve all learned that no company—no matter how thoroughly it is woven into the fabric of the economy—is isolated from the need for improved efficiency, due diligence and corporate responsibility.
With change having such a profound influence on 2008, 2009 will likely be shaped by the business world’s ability to adapt to that change. And, of all the groups of professionals working today, few will serve a more important role in that adaptation than business analysts. Requirements management and development, which has for so long been the unsung hero of the successful project lifecycle, is poised to begin receiving the prominence it deserves.
Here are 10 key trends to look forward to in business analysis for 2009. They represent the on-going evolution of requirements management and development and the ever-increasing value of the modern business analyst.
Does it ever feel like no one really appreciates what you do as an architect? It doesn’t matter what you’re designing, the consensus seems to be that what you do is just a lot of planning and thinking. No one seems to understand how much time and effort you have put into understanding every nook and cranny of the business so that your projects succeed not only from a physical deployment perspective, but from an organizational perspective as well. Essentially, your main role is to lay the foundation for your entire organization to succeed in business. Whether that’s from an enterprise, application, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), or other architectural design doesn’t matter. Your role is clearly one of the most pivotal in any organization, yet it's also one of the most misunderstood.
I say “one” of the most misunderstood because there is another worker bee in the hive who performs just as many pivotal yet misinterpreted tasks as you: the business analyst. As you work at defining the organization and deployment structures of your design, business analysts work at defining business problems and opportunities and turning them into solutions for customers. In other words, the business analyst is another key role that’s often misunderstood.
The misunderstandings occur because on the surface, it appears that both of you are attempting to do the same job. You—the architect—are undoubtedly the best person to design a practical solution for business requirements that you’re not particularly close to. At the same time that you are designing a solution, the business analyst—arguably the person much closer to those business requirements—is attempting to design a practical solution for them. Ultimately, you both want the same thing: a solution that works for the business and is cost-effective. The problem is that the two of you are coming at that solution from different angles.
Just imagine the possibilities if you and the business analyst learned how to put those angles together to form the perfect square.
Author: S. E Slack
The U.S. economy is bleeding jobs, but -- at least, so far -- the high-tech industry is something of a safe haven. That's not to say there haven't been tech losses or that it's easy to find an IT job. However, people with the right skill sets and the savvy to sniff out the particular areas of demand are much better positioned than professionals in some of the more-beleaguered industries.
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Demand for IT business analysis is also on the rise right now, according to Rubillo, driven by a couple of different factors. Of particular importance in these recessionary times is the need for analysis that can wring out the most efficiency from a software application.
"Companies are increasingly aware of understanding the real world implications of an IT investment," said Rubillo. "A new software application, for instance, can result in bottlenecks in the supply chain, or a need for new resources -- or the ability to cut back on others. Companies want to get ahead of these developments as they implement their new IT investments."
Companies are also looking for untapped savings from pre-existing systems, he added.
Author: Erika Morphy
Billions of dollars earmarked for new technologies, at the same time billion-dollar projects are failing. Virtual teams who can’t implement Virtualization. Service Oriented Architecture when customers are no longer oriented towards your services.
Where can you turn to? Who can you trust?
Enterprise Business Analysis is the solution
EBA is Strategic, Process and Organizational Consulting: o Strategic – Planning and execution. o Process – the steps. o Organizational – the whole enchilada. o Consulting - Internal or external, the combination of expertise and intuition, Techne and Poesis, improvisation and practice in planning and supporting the enchilada’s goals.
You are already familiar with EBA, under its many masks for the diagnosis of the patient, and prescription for the cure:
Author: Sam Cherubin
The problem of business-IT alignment is of widespread economic concern.
As one way of addressing the problem, this paper describes an online system that functions as a kind of Wiki -- one that supports the collaborative writing and running of business and scientific applications, as rules in open vocabulary, executable English, using a browser.
Since the rules are in English, they are indexed by Google and other search engines. This is useful when looking for rules for a task that one has in mind. The design of the system integrates the semantics of data, with a semantics of an inference method, and also with the meanings of English sentences. As such, the system has functionality that may be useful for the Rules, Logic, Proof and Trust requirements of the Semantic Web.
The system accepts rules, and small numbers of facts, typed or copy-pasted directly into a browser. One can then run the rules, again using a browser. For larger amounts of data, the system uses information in the rules to automatically generate and run SQL over networked databases. From a few highly declarative rules, the system typically generates SQL that would be too complicated to write reliably by hand. However, the system can explain its results in step-by-step hypertexted English, at the business or scientific level.
As befits a Wiki, shared use of the system is free.
Author: Adrian Walker
Good business solutions begin with good business analysis. But what's needed to excel as a business analyst and to get projects started on a good footing? Much has been (and will continue to be) said about the set of skills that go to making a good business analyst. Forrester Research, for example, has published a spreadsheet (called the Business Analyst Assessment Workbook -- Note: subscription required) that lists more than 150 attributes of a good business analyst, grouped into categories such as Core Capabilities, Business Knowledge, Job-Specific Skills, Technical Knowledge etc. (I was particularly pleased to see this last category: It is important but not quite obvious that business analysts should also have a rudimentary general understanding of technology environments and architectures… mostly built up through seeing past analysis engagements fructify into delivered solutions).
Although the workbook is obviously intended as an assessment tool, I also found in it good for use as a training tool — for example, to bone up on technology approaches to business needs and to study sample projects, correlating the original business requirement with the type of solution delivered. Here are 10 items from the Forrester list that I found particularly interesting and beyond the obvious (in no particular order)...
Here we are, the end of another year, and the question I ask always is, what have we learned? If we are not learning something, be it from a success or a failure, or something in-between, then how can we move forward?
Information security is something that needs to continuously improve and refine itself, otherwise it will fall behind the curve of those that choose a different avenue to your beloved data store. A tool that information security practitioners often use, especially after a security incident like a virus outbreak or full out attack, is holding a “Lessons Learned” meeting. The core concept is to be able to take something away for the incident, no matter how big or small, so that the next encounter of a similar kind does not have the same result as the first.
Across North America, businesses in all sectors are adopting standard development methodologies to turn out a higher quality of goods and services. The tried and true approaches that have yielded such great results for competitors are heralded as best practices. But here is the sad news: no one methodology fits all. In fact, different methodologies are appropriate in fitting diverse projects. Some projects are so unique, future-thinking Business Analysts (BAs) are finding that the adoption of new hybrid concepts is the only smart way to go in problem solving tomorrow’s projects. The word ‘fresh’ describes that feeling of turning over a new leaf when January 1 rolls around each year – and the sentiment we as individuals strive to maintain all year long when we set New Year’s resolutions. Much in the same vein as these annual goals, BAs seeking an innovative means by which they can see their requirements come to fruition are increasingly interested in the study of the existing methods that are in place within the industry, as well as fresh methods established through modeling and fusion.
It’s Monday morning and, as you arrive at your desk, you know that it is going to be a busy day. The new portal project is going to be promoted into production in a couple of weeks and there are still a few items to clear up. As you fire up your e-mail client and take the first sip of coffee, your shoulders start to tense up. The subject line of one of your e-mails reads “Threat Risk Assessment Finding Report” and it is marked important. This not the way you wanted to start the week, but you remember the report was due on Friday, the day you decided to “call in sick”. As you open the message, realizing you can no longer avoid it, you cross your fingers hoping it won’t be too bad. Then you remember why you hate these reports so much, they are confusing and seem overly alarming in their findings. Critical, Severe, High, Medium and Important findings all over the place, red, orange and yellow screaming in your face, reams and reams of technical output, patches missing, vulnerabilities exposed, buffer overflows, exploitations amok, privilege escalations, and on and on. Oh your head hurts now. Where do you begin? What’s important, and how much is this going to push the timeline back? You know the launch is in two weeks and there are functional issues that need to be addressed, there is no time to deal with all this!
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