Business Analysis – Overview
I have found that there are a broad number of approaches to Business Analysis at both a Strategic and Tactical level. Unfortunately, they often seem to be mis-applied and project’s tend to go into analysis paralysis. Some initial thoughts for discussion:
Strategic Business Analysis
This is high-level analysis that should identify problems and opportunities at the strategic business level. We should be looking at Business Modelling techniques to give us a holistic view of the entire business. The key objective is to produce and prioritize outline business cases that will ultimately lead to transformation projects. We only need a high-level analysis to do this. Our intent is to construct a context and governance framework for decision making and the execution of strategy. Order of magnitude estimates are generally sufficient to establish relative priorities. The common mistake is to try to analyze everything to the same level of detail – this results in paralysis of the entire business. No projects get started, or priorities are constantly shifting resulting in no project actually being completed.
Tactical Business Analysis
This is a more detailed analysis step that should be used after a business case has been accepted and a specific transformation project initiated. The purpose of this analysis is to clearly define the scope, business need and requirements of the project. Some examples of practical techniques include:
- Building a glossary of Business/IT terms
- Developing a conceptual models
- Developing Business Scenarios
- Outlining Business Processes, Rules and Requirements
The common mistakes are:
- Over analyze everything to the point where the design of the solution is over constrained and utlimately compromised. This typically leads to project paralysis, cost overruns and poorly executed solutions.
- Overly rigid adherence to a waterfall SDLC where the Requirements Analysis must be signed off before work starts on design and implementation. This typically leads to long duration projects with expensive change cycles as users realize what they asked for 6 months ago isn’t really what they want when they see it in user testing.
Some questions we might consider:
- How do we draw the line between Strategic and Tactical Analysis?
- How do we decide we have enough information?
- What are the most effective analysis techniques in different project scenarios?
