That’s easy, isn’t it? Most business analysts and those who work with them can quickly come up with a list like the one below, and they will be right, but that will not be the entire story.
- Requirement elicitation: extracting requirements from multiple sources including stakeholders (internal to the business, and external to the business), market research, internal business documents etc.
- Drawing insights from data & Making data tell stories: Avid pattern seekers, business analysts often commandeer streams (or seas) of data, tame them and tease out the insights that lay behind the many numbers. And with their classy presentations skills, they unleash the stories that the tamed data is dying to tell.
- Process enhancement: Ever observant, business analysts have the tools to analyse business processes, identify bottlenecks and propose efficient alternatives to practices and processes to save time, money, and other business resources
- Continuous Improvement (triggers for continuous delivery): With their understanding that a project doesn’t really end at the close of the project or a product final even after it has been placed in the hands of the customer, business analysts note everything that could have been better done during the delivery effort and lessons from the use of products/other artefact delivered as part of the product by the customer to suggest improvements to the products.
But more often than not, many businesses still find themselves contemplating the value that business analysts bring to the table. Indeed, there is an almost direct opposite experience, where businesses just tag on the business analysis role into their delivery structure for the sake of it and perhaps to look like they are compliant to some standard. But in both cases, businesses often miss out on getting the most out of their investment in business analysts or their lack of one.
Traditionally, business analysts sit between businesses and their IT teams, interpreting business needs into a language IT understands and can respond to and deliver feedback from IT to business. However, over the years, the discipline has morphed into a spectrum of functions and responsibilities, including on the extreme end, supporting customers and users of business systems or their products with questions they may have about the correct workings of those systems or products, and on the other end of the spectrum, advising business leaders on change initiatives with a view to help businesses create and/or capture value – and in between both ends of this spectrum, a whole lot of other responsibilities.
Defined in the third edition of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA)’ Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK), “business analysis is the practice of enabling change in an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders”. according to the same body of knowledge, analysts “are responsible for discovering, synthesizing, and analysing information from various sources within an enterprise…and are responsible for eliciting stakeholders’ actual needs—which frequently involves investigating and clarifying their expressed desires—to determine underlying issues and causes”.
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.
In the Invisible BA episode of AssitKD’s podcast: BABrew (available here: https://rss.com/podcasts/assistkd-babrew/ ), Debra Paul, Jonathan Hunsley and Stefan Bossuwé explored the Invisibility of Business Analysts and reached a conclusion that for the most part “when business analysis work, the business may not notice, in the same way, most drivers do not notice the engine oil in their car’s engine and sometimes, business fall into the quagmire of thinking business analysis is an expense they can do without and assumes the work that business analysts do can be easily done by others until they try and fail”.
However, the value that business analysts bring to businesses are numerous and I will explore three:
- Determining the justification for change – According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), s attributed to this is a lack of clarity as to the reason(s) the project is being embarked upon. This amongst many other reasons I must add. However, solving for this may increase the odds of the success of a project, even before it starts.
- Discipline & Structure – If you have been in a multi-stakeholder meeting, without a business analyst in the room, you might have witnessed a chaotic situation. Now escalate that to an entire delivery, where every stakeholder has a different view of the horse that needs to be built, and you may not be surprised with the donkey which though looks like a horse and may have at some point in its evolution shared the same genetic pool as the horse, is hardly fit for the purpose for which a horse was demanded in the first place. With a business analyst in the room, some of the conflicting ideas may have been identified and excluded.
- Procedure driven clarity – sometimes the need for change is understood, the approach to change is known, but the best way and manner to accomplish this is all up in the air. Business analysts with their strong background in methods and procedures, bring the clarity that is required and can cut the change initiative into phases that guarantee value at the end of each phase and in a way that when the time comes to stitch these different patches of change together, the business can do so without any conflicting seams and in a way that ensures value is created or that increases the odds for value being created.
