What value do business analysts bring?
In carrying out their duties, business analysts support businesses in clarifying their thoughts around key initiatives (sometimes even helping to determine if those key initiatives are required in the first place), devise a strategy for executing the initiative – including but not limited to identifying change management and transition needs that should be in place for the planned initiative to have a chance at succeeding – and articulate all of these in documents generally referred to as business requirements specification and known by variations of this name across different types of businesses. The majority of the time, this document details the boundaries of the initiative, identifies how the initiative connects with the business’ short to long-term strategies and the details of what needs to be built or procured in order to fulfil the needs of the initiative and invariably the needs of the business.
Business Analysis Communities & Resources
Communities IIBA IIBA Chapters IIBA South Africa IIBA Business Analytics Special Interest Group (LinkedIn) IIBA CBAP Group (linkedIn) Resources: Bridging the Gap: https://www.bridging-the-gap.com/ BA Times: https://www.batimes.com/ BA Excellence BABOK Study Group Modern Analyst: https://www.modernanalyst.com/ 5W-1H: https://joenewbert.com/5w-1h/ Thought leaders Angie Doyle Adriaan Reed Edward Ngubane Joe Newbert Paula Bell Ryan Folster Thsepo Matjila Paul Benn Jared Gorai Lucy Davies Oluwakorede Asuni […]
What if we could all be design thinkers?
Yep! That is possible. We would be doing what we are ding today in our different teams within the delivery pipeline, except that: We would be thinking more about the customer than our egos or what we believe to be smart; We would meet with real users (customers) – who have bought is using or […]
Design thinking is about the customer, not about design for its own sake
Yep! Design thinking may have been originally gifted to the world by industrial design firm Ideo*, **, today design thinking is as much about the design as solution architecture is about designing structures. Design thinking is an iterative process, that saves businesses from themselves and lets them interact with their customers before drawing the first […]
Projects and Project Management
For many years, I have had to repeatedly answer questions on what projects are and what the disciplined practice of project management is and I thought to write a quick and short primer here. This is no way exhaustive, but aimed at answering some of the questions many have about the discipline and possible help […]
Business analysts are not professional scribes
It is easy to reduce business analysts to scribes – those human recorders who type out the dictates of business into a business approved template. Which is then signed off by business and forced down IS/IT’s throat for implementation and all the other good things that happen in downstream. But is that really the function […]