Enterprise Analysis (BABOK KA)

Chaos! Stress! Everyday mess! Isn’t this an everyday situation for a business analyst? If not, either you’ve job satisfaction or you’re not being introduced to the real world of business analysis.

A person might possess great skills, however, (s)he might not be able to utilize skills without the right mix of tools and environment. A toolbox enables a person to implement the skills in the most efficient way. Possessing necessary tools is just the one part of it. Another is the knowledge to utilize the right tools at the right time to cater the solution and ensure timely committed delivery.

What are these tools? How do we map the usage of tools to the given circumstance? How can we efficiently utilize the tool? Does it depend on the solution or the approach?

In a large firm, a business analyst (BA) organization makes an effort to identify, analyze and provide a solution to the above questions. A BA organization is a prime pillar in optimizing resources to provide maximum value out of it to the business.

A BA organization consists of business analysts in various roles like Product Manager, Program Manager, Project Manager, Business Analyst, Business Systems Analyst, Business Systems Consultant, Business Process Analyst etc.  The prime objective is to analyze business to maximize value addition.

To understand more about the BA organization, it is important to understand what is business analysis

A benefit that I see of moving away from terms like enterprise analysis and strategy analysis is that removing this division between “flavors” of business analysis helps us see more clearly how BA activities can add value at all levels of the organization. Whether we’re making project portfolio recommendations or specifying a tiny software feature, the purpose is the same: help stakeholders clarify the real business need and determine the best solution to address it.

Prior to proceeding with a strategic project, project leadership needs to ensure that the project still:

• aligns with the direction of the business entity, and
• fits the needs of the targeted customer segment,
  as it did when the project was an initiative. This brief article starts at the inception of an initiative during Enterprise Analysis to the validation of a strategic project prior to kickoff. Note in this article, I include both the private and public sectors when I use the terms such as “business entity” and “customer segments.”

What is Leading with Influence?... It is about the ability to affect the actions, decisions, and thinking of others to accomplish key goals or tasks that you consider to be important. Simply put, leading with influence is about getting people to willingly follow the direction that you provide when you lack organizational authority. It is about leading when you are not in charge. As a Business Analyst, I want delivery partners on a project to follow the guidance I provide without having to demand their compliance.

I bet everyone has, at least once in their career, heard the expression:

Every organization has some degree of “chaotic” culture. Some of them breed chaos and unconsciously operate in chaos. Project management is designed to operate with structure. However, reality has always contained a dose of “Wonderland” as well. Projects find themselves at odds with the environment that they operate within when the underlying organizational culture tends to be chaotic and less disciplinary and operates randomly. Project management methodologies and execution processes’ logic and convention are contradicted by the chaotic, shape-shifting setting of “Wonderland.” This conflict threatens a successful outcome for a project. The uncertainty that projects are confronted with throughout the execution process can be fatal. Chaos, by its very nature, is impossible to control completely, and so projects struggle to deliver as they fail to manage the conflict they find themselves in with the organization’s way of life.

The Business Model Canvas is a common method to build a business plan in very large and small companies because it is both structured and very simple to understand. The Business Model Canvas is also very Customer-Driven. Yet, there has not been in the past an easy way to plan a detailed Business Architecture model starting from a Business Model Canvas to enable marketing and operation planning. In this article, we will demonstrate how to easily bridge a Business Model Canvas to a Business Architecture model to optimize with agility your marketing and operating modeling.

Usage of one enterprise architecture language capable of expressing concerns from technology layers to business needs and drivers gives tremendous benefits to the organization. It streamlines the communication and enables easy collaboration between Enterprise and Business Architects...  ArchiMate was deliberately aligned to be compliant with the TOGAF 9 framework. It is also very useful for people practicing (high-level) Business Analysis, according to the BABOK Guide. 

Customer journey mapping is a great way to understand your customer intimately to provide insights into providing targeted customer experience that empower the customer positively to drive better business outcomes.  This technique places the customer first with a deep emotional understanding, then looks backwards toward the experiences provided by the operating model, thus enabling good aspects to be reinforced and negative ones to be managed. It provides a complete 360 end to end experience of the customer to be realized driving customer insights, allowing more blue sky approaches to offsetting emotional deficits...

This article explores strategy mapping as discussed within Business Architecture Guild BIZBOK, and attempts to extend the discussion by defining a set of information and graphical principles that allows strategy to be represented graphically.

This article provides an in depth study on the concept of traceability, together with its implications and applications within a business context. Traceability is a term used in the IIBA BABOK, among other professional practices, in the context of requirements where requirements are said to be traced that provides alignment of requirements to each other. This implies that there are different classes or abstractions of requirements such as stakeholder, business and functional requirements. Traceability allows the alignment between all types or abstractions of requirements, telling a kind of story to how they all interrelate. 

Data migration is typically the most forgotten or underestimated component of an IT project which is the process of making a copy of data and moving it from one system to another, preferably without disrupting or disabling active business processes. On some occasions, it is not easy to understand that a data migration is needed in the project and ...

Strategic Enterprise Analysis is the study, modeling, and maintenance of the strategic direction of a company. This article is about conducting SEA. Moreover, it is about how a senior business analyst facilitates this executive board effort.

Are you a Senior BA who is looking for a new challenge? The Management Consulting BA role may be for you. This role is particularly interesting for BA’s who have adapted best practices to their strengths and are looking for a greater degree of independence and responsibility.