While terms like “Geek Squad” and phrases like “The geeks shall inherit the earth” are humorous, it’s common knowledge that “geeks” – high-tech specialized knowledge workers – provide tremendous value in technology and business.
Because they’re so important, it’s imperative to understand them, manage them, and lead them effectively. No one knows that more than Paul Glen, author of Leading Geeks. In this book, Glen asserts that geeks are essential for continued innovation, either to generate new ideas or to implement the ideas of others. They are knowledge workers who specialize in creating, maintaining, or supporting high technology. While they are often found in IT, they also have roles in accounting, finance, marketing, sales, or customer service.
We need them – but what makes them tick?
Geeks are, according to Glen:
- Reason-based – Geeks value logic and rational input
- Focused on problem solving – “In every situation,” Glen says, “They seek out the problem and try to solve it.”
- Childlike – Geeks are intelligent and often very successful early on, in years when they might have been developing social skills or self awareness. Based on this, they are often childlike and still new at adjusting to social situations and intuitively knowing how to act.
- Curious puzzle solvers – Geeks love intellectual activities that make use of their knowledge, creativity, and logic.
Geeks can also be poor communicators, and be prone to interpersonal conflicts. They can also be resistant to following typical organizational policies and structures, believing they should have exemptions based on their specialized work, technical skills, creativity, and intelligence.
How to lead them
Glen says effective management involves providing vision and strategy with one hand and guidance with the other. He outlines four key responsibilities that are essential in managing and leading geeks:
- Nurture motivation. Understand that geeks might not be motivated by speeches or bonuses. They are more likely motivated by having others appreciate the significance of their work, recognizing how their work affects their careers paths, and accomplishing specific goals.
- Provide internal facilitation. Help geeks exchange ideas and create opportunities for them to interact and learn from each other. “See yourself as a facilitator rather than a manager,” Glen says. “If you try to exercise power, geeks will resist and you will lose power instead.”
- Furnish external representation. This means protect them and buffer them. Geeks flourish when their needs are advocated for, and there is someone in their corner getting information, establishing and maintaining alignment, obtaining resources, and managing client expectations. Buffering geeks means keeping them away from office politics and the chatter from the outside world.
- Manage ambiguity. Because geeks are reasonable and fact-based, managers should make efforts to control all three types of ambiguity, including:
- Environmental – the organization’s purpose and values
- Structural – the way work is organized
- Task – the details of individual roles and tasks, including project roles, assignments, and judgments
When geeks have questions answered and understand what they are doing and why, they are more likely to succeed.
Geeks are intelligent, creative, motivated by reason and problem solving, and essential for innovation and technology delivery. Managers can make the most of their personalities and skill sets by better understanding how geeks think and what motivates them.
More insights on management, business analysis, and delivering business value can be found in the RequirementCoach™ Portfolio Community, a forum of knowledge sharing, presentations, and training designed for advanced enterprise-wide business analysis.
Project managers know that a multitude of factors can lead to project failure, including unrealistic goals, poor budgeting, and poor quality control. While the majority of projects that get off target can be saved, the secret to project success is not allowing projects get off target in the first place. To do that involves key steps that are often overlooked and oversimplified: Planning, staffing, and communication.
Consider everything
According to project managers Ralph R. Young, Steven M. Brady, and Dennis C. Nagle, Jr., authors of How to Save a Failing Project; Chaos to Control, just scheduling, budgeting, and monitoring a project is not enough to produce satisfactory results. Instead, project managers must plan and identify their output (i.e., all the products that the project team must create).
A product breakdown structure can be created to define each component of the output, including progress reports, technical analyses, and other deliverables. Attached to this needs to be a work breakdown structure that estimates the resources needed for each aspect of the output. The project plan should also include a “process model” that outlines the activities and outcomes for each task.
If it’s anticipated that some tasks will need to be repeated, enough resources and funding should be allocated. Authors Young, Brady, and Nagle recommend dedicating 10% of the total scheduled project time to early planning and to continuing discussions about potential problems and changes.
Pick your people
These authors also cite poor personnel decisions as a factor in project failures. Project teams should be balanced and represent multiple skills sets. Once in place, regular, ongoing meetings should occur to discuss project progress, assess team performance, and make changes as necessary. An open and inclusive culture should be cultivated where people feel safe to point out problems and work with each other toward resolution. The article gives this example: A team with too many engineers and too few managers may struggle to keep a job on schedule and under budget. Continual review and realignment of resources is crutical to long-term success.
Communicate
Finally, effective communication is needed to keep projects in control. The article suggests that stakeholders should all have the same understanding and expectations about a project’s purpose and its deadlines. They should have a way to discuss their needs and share input and receive updates about the project. In addition, project managers should work closely with stakeholders and customers to be sure they understand the “stated requirements.” Communication is vital to ensuring that developers understand what customers want and their actual needs. This communication fosters awareness and vested interest in a project so that quality control can happen throughout development, instead of as a final step in the process.
While these steps can keep projects in control, projects leaders should still be constantly on the lookout for trouble signs:
- Missed deadlines
- Defective processes
- Demands for rework
- Relying on only select team members and not the entire team
- Poor change management
- Lack of backup plans
- Staff turnover
Enfocus Requirements Suite™ can help project managers stay in control. It provides intuitive automation plus a business analysis framework and a knowledgebase of resources to give project managers full control of planning, people, and communication.
Today, businesses are responding to increasing demands to be “green” – to have sound environmental policies and to be transparent about the environmental impact of their products and practices.
Beyond the common-sense measures like replacing old bulbs or weatherproofing, going green involves taking responsibility at every stage of a product lifecycle. This calls for in-depth business analysis and an audit of all business processes.
In The Green Business Guide, Glenn Bachman describes what it takes for businesses to implement eco-friendly policies, programs, and practices, including how to set up an energy management plan and how to reduce, reuse, and recycle throughout the enterprise. Bachman describes how green organizations recognize the risk of climate change and the degrading of the environment, so they are able to respond with sound business practices. Further, green organizations know how much energy and resources they use and take responsibility for their products.
According to Bachman there are many steps involved in planning a green transition, including among others:
- Define what being a green organization means and outline intentions in going green.
- Decide who will participate in the plan and identify relevant stakeholders.
- Set a timeframe for planning and implementing changes.
- Determine how the organization will measure progress and what tools will be needed.
- Discuss how implementing a green program will affect other initiatives.
- Identify potential risks, for instance those involved with using volatile raw materials.
- Analyze the cost versus the benefits of an environmental program.
- Make recommendations about which areas to upgrade and what parts of the transition to pursue in each stage.
All of these steps call into play rigorous business analysis, which can be accomplished using a powerful business analysis tool. By providing the ability to incorporate and automate many of the tasks of the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge, Enfocus Requirements Suite™ can be an essential resource for effectively and efficiently going green.
With Enfocus Requirements Suite™, users can do a thorough situation analysis and establish a common vision among all team members and stakeholders about what being green means. This vision will be a foundation for optimizing green business processes, defining solutions needs, and validating requirements. It will also help establish and keep track of green objectives and identify any constraints involving budget, deadlines, and limitations.
As users continue the steps in the green transition, they can use the tool for effective stakeholder engagement and collaboration. Users can build inclusiveness and participation with the people and entities that have a direct stake in the environmental impact of an organization, including business owners, executives, employees, vendors, customers, and government, civic, and environmental organizations. These stakeholders can directly contribute their needs and comments in the software’s unique StakeholderPortal™, and monitor activity and updates as the projects progress.
Setting a timeframe for planning, implementing changes, and determining how to measure progress can be done with business analysis planning. Using Enfocus Requirements Suite™, business analysts can evaluate processes and their associated activities with measurable performance indicators, and also benchmark progress and results against other organizations. With this tool, users can better identify opportunities for efficiencies, as well as obstacles that other organizations have experienced in transitioning to green practices. Moreover, with Enfocus Requirements Suite™ users can perform a thorough impact analysis, and collect and evaluate information to get a comprehensive understanding of which services, stakeholders, business processes, and initiatives will be affected by the transition.
Effective business analysis can also uncover and mitigate risks involved in going green. Will resources be saved in one area, only to be taxed in other areas? Will changing supplies or equipment introduce other issues in personnel or time? Will the benefits of the environmental program outweigh the cost? And does the green solution truly meet the objectives of the green transition for the business, the stakeholders, and the environment? With Enfocus Requirements Suite™, users can do thorough risk assessment, impact analysis, and solution assessment and verification.
Finally, effective business analysis informs organizations on what areas to upgrade and which components of the transition should be done in what order. Organizations can work toward an ideal “to-be” green state – documenting, analyzing, and improving how business is done. As with the other transition steps, this can be done using Enfocus Requirements Suite™, which allows for business process portfolio management, business process analysis, and informative process mapping.
For businesses, going green is not as easy as hiring a new vendor or switching out a light bulb. As Bachman points out, going green entails creating environmentally sound physical plants, formulating an energy management plan, rethinking transportation management plans, and accounting for water, air, and waste management. There are a lot of moving parts, and a lot of factors and risks to keep in mind. Enfocus Requirements Suite™ is the business analysis tool that can make the green transition sound, thorough, and effective.
It’s no secret – rigorous business analysis is essential to establishing a solid corporate strategy and competitive advantage. In Analysis Without Paralysis, Babette E. Bensoussan and Craig S. Fleisher assert that a thorough analysis of an organization’s strategy, industry, rivals, and business setting can provide an objective assessment of competitive position. Further, analysis can enhance an organization’s capacity to respond to environmental changes, ensuring that decisions are based on solid data and that the tools for improvement and change are available.
But where to begin? The authors report that business leaders do not have to be experts in statistics or quantitative analysis to derive the benefits of analysis. A general understanding of 10 analysis techniques can be a good start.
BCG Growth/Share Portfolio Matrix
The BCG Growth Matrix compares an organization’s current market share to the market’s growth prospects, and places the results in four categories:
- low growth and high market share equal a “cash cow,” calling for organizations to “milk it for all it’s worth.”
- high growth and high market share denote a “star,” calling for a timely investment.
- high growth and low market share can indicate a “problem child,” calling for further study.
- low growth and low market share mean a “dog,” calling for selling or closing the related business activity.
While the matrix is simple, the authors note that market share does not always indicate profitability, while some firms are very successful in low-growth markets.
Competitor Analysis
Understanding competitors can help organizations discover and manage prospects and risks, and learn about rivals’ strategies, responses, plans, capabilities, and vulnerabilities. A formal and systematic model for analysis involves gathering and evaluating four categories of data about competitors:
- drivers or future goals, philosophies, and strategies,
- current strategies,
- current capabilities and resources, and
- management assumptions.
This analysis can help organizations act rather than react in regard to their competition.
Financial Ratio and Statement Analysis
Financial Ratio and Statement Analysis, or FRSA, can help organizations understand a past, static view of progress or performance. This analysis involves developing a basic understanding of an organization’s finances, including:
- liabilities, net worth, and current, fixed, and noncurrent assets,
- current and long-term liabilities,
- owner’s equity,
- revenues and expenses and their relationship to the balance sheet,
- position statement and the statement of changes in owner’s equity, and
- ratios like “inventory to sales” or “debt to equity.”
Five Forces Industry Analysis
Information on an organization’s competitive environment can be ascertained by identifying and ranking an organization’s:
- threat of new entrants,
- bargaining power of suppliers,
- bargaining power of buyers,
- threat of substitute products or services, and
- degree of rivalry among existing competitors.
With this information, organizations can see how changes in forces affect the other forces, how changes influence industry profitability and performance, and how to act in relation to an organization’s overall industry.
Issue Analysis
Analyzing external environments can help organizations understand and respond to emerging societal or policy issues, such as pending legislation that might affect operations. For example, social trends may affect an organization’s hiring or HR policies. Many issues and areas can shape an organization’s operations and plans, and preparing for them can give leaders the flexibility and time to get out in front of them and be responsive.
Political Risk Analysis
Political risk analysis can help organizations understand their external environments, including government policies, political actions, tax and tariff regimes, and legislation. All these factors can have implications for an organization’s globalization, outsourcing, intellectual property protection, and political stability. While a great deal of information about political environments can be found online, the authors caution to check the sources’ reliability and to not make assumptions.
Scenario Analysis
Scenarios or detailed descriptions of what the future might look like can be used in strategic planning. Scenario analysis clarifies uncertain situations or situations that are subject to change. Computer-generated econometric models can be used to assess quantitative variables or the impact of changes. By creating multiple descriptions of the future, deductive reduction can be used to explore the possible paths of each scenario, and inductive reduction can be used to limit variables to the ones most likely to occur. The authors say a good scenario analysis can kick-start discussions, thinking, and action among strategy makers.
Macroenvironmental Analysis
In this analysis, the corporate environment is considered in three concentric rings that look like a target pattern. The center is the company’s internal environment; the next ring is the operating environment; and the outer ring is the general environment, which involves variables outside a company’s control.
These variables are often defined as:
- STEEP -- social, technological, economic, ecological, and political/legal or
- PEST -- political, economic, social, and technological
This analysis helps organizations recognize and address social factors (e.g., unionization, consumer ethics, income); technological factors (e.g., bandwidth, access); economic factors (e.g., inflation, GDP, interest rates); ecological variables (e.g., power sources, pollution, environmental rules); and the political milieu (e.g., encompasses activism, regulatory regimes).
SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis calls for an assessment of a company’s strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats. The authors say a SWOT Analysis assesses a company’s capabilities in relation to its outside environment, so it pairs well with five forces and STEEP analyses. SWOT Analysis is beneficial at the product, division, or operating levels to consider:
- What can we do?
- What might we do?
- What do we want to do?
- What do others expect us to do?
While SWOT Analysis is simple and cost-effective, the authors caution that it can produce answers that are too general or subjective.
Value Chain Analysis
Value Chain Analysis (VCA) considers two sides of an organization’s functions:
- primary activities -- supply and distribution logistics, operations, marketing, sales, and service, and
- support activities -- technology, personnel, and infrastructure.
VCA allows organizations to adjust profitability by changing these components and also visualize the organization’s relative position in its industry. A limitation is that VCA requires a substantial investment in time for benchmarking, customer research, competitive analysis, and industry structure analysis. Read more about Value Chain Analysis.
As a business analysis tool, Enfocus Requirements Suite™ can help organizations initiate and act on rigorous business analysis using any of these tactics.
Learn more about Enfocus Solutions’ Business Analysis Planning.
Do you paint with a spoon? Do you pound nails with a pencil? Eat with a shoe? Probably not – they are all the wrong tools for the job. Using them for these purposes will waste time, exhaust resources, and leave you with undesired results.
What tool are you using to increase project success, meet stakeholder needs, and achieve overall business goals? The right tool is one specifically designed for requirements management, collaboration, and analysis. Download these free resources to find out everything you need to know to pick the best one.
Choose an effective requirements management tool that:
Put down the spoons, pencils, and shoes. If you’re looking for the right tool for the job at your organization, download the valuable information above.
Written by Kelly Burroughs, Business Analyst - Enfocus Solutions
Can you relate to this scenario?
You’re a business analyst working in a software company who has been in talks with a potential client for weeks now. The sales team has done a great job showcasing the software, the client likes what they see so far and they’ve requested a statement of work to see what it will cost them.
Given the problems your company has run into previously with misalignment between estimated scope and cost of work and actual scope and cost of work, they’ve decided to bring you in to perform a deeper level of business analysis during the pre-sales phase. Your goal? To better understand the needs and expectations of the potential client to help your company deliver a more thorough statement of work, and a more accurate estimate of costs.
Win the deal but understand their needs wrong? Chances are your client will feel deceived and won’t be happy about being asked for more money – while your company will take a hit to their reputation as well as their bottom line.
But win the deal and understand their needs correctly? Chances are your client will be satisfied – and your company will only build a stronger reputation and bottom line.
Fact is, understanding the scope of work that will need to be completed for your potential clients is key to delivering a successful project once you do get the contract. There are few things more frustrating for a client then to sign a contract for an estimated cost, only to be asked for more money later on. There’s also nothing more damaging for the company asking for it.
So as the business analyst, how can you make sure your company get’s it right? We’ve got a few suggestions for you.
1. Gather Background Information
Before talking with the potential client, start to gather as much information about them as you can.
Talk to Sales. We all know how much sales people enjoy a good conversation – which is great if you’re an analyst looking for knowledge they have. A great starting point for understanding the client is to talk to the sales person who has been dealing with them to date. Often your sales person can be a wealth of information for you to start with. They can help you to understand who the company is, what their vision is, what the company culture is, and possibly most important - give you a good idea of who the key stakeholders are that you can talk to.
Ask for Existing Documentation. Companies won’t always be willing to provide you with a lot of documentation before a contract is signed, but it can’t hurt to ask. Talk to your sales team for access to any documentation that has already been provided by the client, and make a request for additional documentation if possible. Focus on asking for documentation that will help you to understand their existing business processes, organizational structure, and stakeholders.
Get Surfing. The Internet can be a wealth of knowledge these days when trying to do initial research on a company. Your client’s website is the most obvious place to start, and also the best place for accurate information. Gain as much context and understanding as you can about them – going into stakeholder conversations with a foundation of knowledge about what they do is a great advantage to have. Not only does it help you to have more productive and valuable conversations with the stakeholders, but it also provides you with more confidence to conduct them.
2. Understand Deliverables
Often the high level deliverables the client is expecting will already be established before you enter the picture. So before talking to the stakeholders, make sure you understand what deliverables your client is looking for. Understanding these high-level deliverables will help you to focus your conversations with your stakeholders in order to get more details.
For example, does your client expect training as part of the implementation? If yes, when you talk to them you can start to understand the scope of the training further: what type of training do they want – train the trainer, or full on group training? How many people will need to be trained? What training materials do they expect? Will it be on-site or will you need to provide training facilities?
And if there isn’t a clear understanding of the deliverables before you interview your stakeholders, be sure to make it a part of those conversations. Too often assumptions are made about what a requested deliverable will entail – and too often it happens to be different than what was actually expected by the client.
3. Interview Stakeholders
Usually you will have access to at least a few key stakeholders to interview in order to understand what their needs and expectations are.
And this is the time to put your best business analysis foot forward; the conversations you have with your stakeholders and the information you can receive from them is key to setting up a realistic scope of work that later translates into a successful project outcome.
Here are some topics to focus your interviews around:
The Problem. Understanding the problems your client is trying to solve will help you to understand how the solution you have can help them. It will also help you to understand if the problem goes beyond technology and also includes people or processes as well; both of which can impact the scope, schedule and costs. For example, if during your conversation you are told the biggest problem is the amount of time it takes your client to make decisions and they believe your software will give them the right information to make better ones – you might also start to ask questions around what their decision making process is. Because after all, it may not be just a technology issue, right? And if it’s not, there is probably a bigger scope that needs to be discussed.
Their Vision. Ask the stakeholders you talk to what their ideal world looks like once the solution is implemented. How will their jobs be easier? What benefits do they envision the solution providing? Is how the envision the future much different from how they operate today? Understanding the vision of the stakeholders will help you as analysts to understand what that gap is between where they are today, and where they want to be in the future – and how large that gap is. The amount of change being introduced into a company can significantly impact the amount of work you need to include within the statement of work. For example, if they are currently a company that operates largely on manual processes but envision a future of complete automation – that will take more than just a clean implementation of your software, that will probably mean changing their underlying processes as well.
Desired Features. Stakeholders understand features much better than they understand requirements; so focus your conversations around the features they are looking for in their ideal solution, and not the more detailed functional requirements. Aim to understand how your company can make their jobs easier. To keep your conversations focused, efficient and productive, start broad and slowly narrow your conversations down until you can start to understand in as much detail as you can what features they are looking for within each impacted business area. For example, you can start with “What business areas within your organization will be most impacted by this new software?” Let’s say ‘Finance’ was otheir response - you can then ask “What are the most critical activities which take place within Finance?”, to which they might respond ‘Customer Invoicing’. With this activity now identified you can start to get into the features by asking “And for customer invoicing, what features do you see being most valuable to you?”. This will help you to start to understand what features they want versus what features your software currently has – and how the two can align to provide the customer with the benefits they are looking for. If time is an issue, be sure to focus on the most impacted business areas and most valuable features.
Assumptions. Too often assumptions are made about how the implementation of a solution will take place. When talking to the stakeholders, do your best to verify those assumptions or identify new ones. You want to understand what role they expect to play within the implementation, who the resources are you will be working with, if their existing technical infrastructure is sufficient for your software, what their expected timelines are, etc., etc. Especially important to understand are resources. As you interview the stakeholders, try to understand what resources they will be providing for you to work with and how much of their time they can provide. Ask who the key stakeholders are for the business areas you discuss, how available they would be to you once the launch starts, and what their experience level is within the business area.
4. Send Out Surveys
Companies won’t always agree to it, but asking to send out surveys can help you gain broader insight into their needs. Keep the questions simple (last thing you want to do is annoy a potential client with a lengthy time consuming survey!) and relevant to the recipients. Give them an opportunity to identify existing problems and what benefits a solution will bring them. You can then take those answers and start to think about how your software can help them to solve those problems, and provide them with those benefits – and how much of a change it will be to achieve that.
Using these recommendations - or as much of them as the potential client agrees to - can only help your company provide a more accurate statement of work to your potential clients in the pre-sales stage. And the result? Besides winning the deal and establishing expectations you know you can deliver on, you as the analyst will be in a great position to continue your business analysis work post-sales.
Project managers know that a lot of factors can lead to project failure: unrealistic goals, poor budgeting, and poor quality control. While the majority of projects that get off target can be saved, the secret to project success is not letting projects get off target in the first place. To do that involves key steps that are often overlooked and oversimplified: Planning, staffing, and communication.
Consider everything
According to project managers Ralph R. Young, Steven M. Brady, and Dennis C. Nagle, Jr., authors of How to Save a Failing Project; Chaos to Control, just scheduling, budgeting, and monitoring a project is not enough to produce satisfactory results. Instead, project managers must plan and identify their output: all the products that the project team must create.
A product breakdown structure can be created to define each component of the output, including progress reports, technical analyses, and other deliverables. Attached to this needs to be a work breakdown structure that estimates the resources needed for each aspect of the output. The project plan should also include a “process model” that outlines the activities and outcomes for each task.
If it’s anticipated that some tasks will need to be repeated, enough resources and funding should be allocated. Authors Young, Brady, and Nagle recommend dedicating 10% of the total scheduled project time to early planning and to continuing discussions about potential problems and changes.
Pick your people
These authors also cite bad personnel decisions as a factor in project failures. Project teams should be balanced and represent multiple skills sets. Once in place, regular, ongoing meetings should occur to discuss project progress, assess team performance, and make changes as necessary. An open and inclusive culture should be cultivated where people feel safe to point out problems and work with each other toward resolution. The article gives this example: A team with too many engineers and too few managers may struggle to keep a job on schedule and under budget.
Communicate
Finally, effective communication is needed to keep projects in control. The article states that stakeholders should all have the same understanding and expectations about a project’s purpose and its deadlines. They should have a way to discuss their needs and share input and learn updates about the project. In addition, project managers should work closely with stakeholders and customers to be sure they understand the “stated requirements.” Communication is vital to ensuring that developers understand what customers want and their actual needs. This communication fosters awareness and vested interest in a project so that quality control can happen throughout development, instead of as a final step in the process.
While these steps can keep projects in control, projects leaders should still be on the lookout for trouble signs:
- Missed deadlines
- Defective processes
- Demands for rework
- Relying on only select team members and not the entire team
- Poor change management
- Lack of backup plans
- Staff turnover
Enfocus Requirements Suite™ can help project managers stay in control. It provides intuitive automation plus a business analysis framework and a knowledgebase of resources to give PMs full control of planning, people, and communication.
A center of excellence (CoE) is a structured team of people and resources that an organization establishes to promote collaboration and best practices. A center of excellence brings an enterprise focus to many business issues, including data integration, project management, enterprise architecture, business and IT optimization, and enterprise-wide access to information.
A CoE helps business leaders implement and support improvement initiatives to meet goals at an overall business level. A Business Analysis CoE helps organizations deliver increased value by bolstering the trademarks of business analysis:
- Understanding the business domain
- Analyzing inputs, outputs, and stakeholders
- Mapping processes
- Identifying deficiencies
- Envisioning and communicating potential solutions
- Performing cost analysis and projections
- Understanding and representing business units and their needs
- Identifying and articulating details
- Ensuring that the target vision is met
A BACoE is a high-performance enabler, closely integrated at a strategic level within a business. It consists of a variety of skillsets and roles that promotes business change and proactive optimization. A BACoE provides organizations with a means to instill standardization, best practices, collaboration, education, and BA maturity, which can result in:
- Improved quality of requirements
- Better collaboration between the user and developer communities
- Alignment of IT services with business needs
- Integration and alignment of people, processes, and technology
- Increased business value
- Strategic capability for competitive advantage
Strategic activities of a BACoE include:
- Conducting research and providing the executive team with accurate competitive information
- Identifying and recommending viable new business opportunities
- Preparing the project investment decision package to facilitate project selection and prioritization
- Managing expected business benefits during project execution
- Measuring actual business benefits after the new solution is deployed
Standardization
One of the key benefits of establishing a BACoE is that it standardizes practices across the organization for greater efficiency and analysis. This standardization is helpful in regard to methodology, quality, tools, processes, information, and compliance mandates.
Methodology
Inconsistent output usually occurs when multiple BAs all use different approaches and tools for elicitation, documentation, and facilitation. A BACoE increases the consistency of business analyst outputs by standardizing and unifying an organization’s methodologies and approaches.
Quality
A BACoE assumes leadership in formalizing the expected quality, format, and presentation of artifacts. A BACoE’s support of projects ensures that the same care and professionalism are applied to all projects within the organization. Through this unifying and methodological approach, a BACoE produces consistent project results and outputs.
Tools
A standard set of tools is essential for preparing high-quality, standardized business analysis artifacts. Information on useful and approved tools for the preparation and management of artifacts is a central responsibility of the BACoE. Examples of such tools include requirements management tools and visual modeling tools.
Processes
A BACoE is responsible for all aspects of requirements processes, including artifacts. To facilitate this, a BACoE prepares analysis artifacts with an equal level of quality in every aspect of the organization.
Repository
In addition to processes and tools, a BACoE provides a repository of deliverable standards such as templates, checklists, and other guides for high quality preparation of business analysis artifacts. The BACoE is responsible for the management of a standard competency model and associated training curricula, certifications, competency assessments, formalized role definitions, and practices for knowledge sharing. This also includes the creation and maintenance of shared knowledge repositories, discussion forums, and collaborative websites such as “wikis.”
Compliance
A BACoE helps ensure the standardization and consistency needed for compliance and adherence. If the approach to these is unified, the auditing process, as well as changes, additions, and training, become easier.
Best Practices
Another responsibility of a BACoE is to understand and share best practices, which include industry standards for use cases, data models, process models, and other types of visual and textual documentation. Best practices can be assembled through extensive research, collaboration, and discussions with other organizations.
Collaboration
A BACoE is also essential for collaboration. Business analysts are not islands of knowledge; they are members of multidiscipline teams, where ego is often a major contributor to internal friction. This means that BAs need to succeed in a project environment and avoid being proscriptive in their proposed solutions. To do this, they need to take a collaborative approach.
Education
A BACoE helps improve and develop BAs’ professional expertise while bolstering their skills and providing standards and process-related guidance. A BACoE also ensures that BAs have the tools to flourish. This includes up-to-date education, training, coaching, and mentoring by dedicated staff, virtual members, or consulting resources from outside the organization.
Maturity
A final benefit of establishing a BACoE is increasing an organization’s business analysis maturity. It provides a resource for standardization, quality, best practices, collaboration, and education, propelling an organization’s BA capabilities immediately forward.
With Enfocus Requirements Suite™, organizations can find everything they need to establish a BACoE, including a proven BA methodology, central repository, training, and an easy interface for collaboration.
While using a BACoE has many benefits, shifting to this approach can present certain organizational challenges.
Establishing a BACoE resource may destabilize the sense of balance and power within an organization. Executives are required to make decisions based on benefits to the enterprise versus to their specific areas. Functional managers are often afraid of losing their authority and control over the resources assigned to them. In addition, project team members may be unclear about their roles and responsibilities, and how they will be given assignments. These ambiguities may manifest themselves as resistance to change, and could pose a risk to a successful implementation. Therefore, it is imperative that robust coordination and effective communication about how the BACoE will affect roles and responsibilities are part of the implementation process.
Another challenge is that the business drivers behind creating the BACoE must be established very early. If the organization’s motives are poorly defined it can be detrimental to the objectives, purpose, scope, and functions of the BACoE. Also, it’s important to appreciate that the idea for creating a BACoE does not have to come from IT; it can originate from any area. What is important is that the BACoE serves the entire organization, rather than just a small segment of it.
Another potential difficulty that almost every fledgling BACoE eventually runs into is bridging the gap that divides IT and the business. To overcome this, a BACoE must be prepared to provide multidimensional services to all the diverse groups in an organization. This requires making certain that the BACoE is centralized. According to a USAG/SAP survey, "Organizations with centralized COEs have better consistency and coordination, leading directly to less duplication of effort. These organizations configure and develop their IT systems by business processes rather than by business unit, leading to more efficient and more streamlined systems operations."
In addressing these challenges, it is further helpful to understand what happens in the various phases of BACoE development.
Phase 1: Project-centric. A BACoE is almost always project-centric in its early formative phase. The goals of the BACoE at this stage are to build the confidence of and become an indispensable resource to the project teams. During this early phase, the BACoE is building trusting relationships with business analysts, project managers, functional mangers, and project teams. In addition to developing business analysis practice standards, the BACoE is providing services to the project teams, and training and mentoring for business analysts and high-performing project teams.
Phase 2: Enterprise Focused. As the BACoE begins to win confidence across the organization, it is likely that it will evolve into an enterprise-wide resource serving the entire company. At this point, the BACoE begins to facilitate the implementation of an effective portfolio management system. The BACoE is building the foundation to serve as a strategic business asset providing management with decision support information.
Phase 3: Business Strategy. During the third stage of development, the BACoE is considered a strategic asset serving the executive team. At this point, it is well understood that business analysis has a positive effect on profitability and that organizations achieve strategic goals through well prioritized and executed projects. Emphasis at this stage is in business analysis through the BACoE.
Steps to Establishing a BACoE
Although maintaining and disseminating information using a BACoE can require a significant investment in financial and human capital, the initial establishment of the resource can happen with minimal early efforts:
- Assess the current state. Begin by testing the current skills of your business analysts and conducting focus groups with project managers to understand their needs.
- Determine the desired future state. Evaluate skills and compare them against industry benchmarks such as the IIBA’s Business Analysis Competency Model.
- Perform an analysis of gaps. Identify shortcomings or issues between the current state and the desired state and what needs to be done.
- Specify the desired level of maturity. Once the gaps have been identified, determine what level of maturity is needed to support projects.
- Develop a competency model. Create a framework and strategy of how competencies are achieved, established, and shared.
- Disseminate improvements. Devise a strategy to disseminate needed improvements through internal and external training, pilot projects, self-study, online forums, wikis, and project mentors.
- Maintain and continuously enhance new competencies. Use regular retrospectives, surveys, focus groups, individual competency assessments, and periodic training, and offer opportunities to attend business analysis conferences and networking gatherings.
Implementing a BACoE is a process that takes time and the dedication of experienced professionals. It isn’t a something that gets set-up and is done. Continual improvement of documentation, processes, tools, and training material is needed to keep your BACoE delivering the best possible value to the organization; however, the rewards are worth it:
- Better requirements
- Greater alignment between IT Services and business needs
- More business value
- Strategic capability to gain competitive advantage
- Diversified risks
With Enfocus Requirements Suite™, organizations can find everything they need to establish a BACoE, including a proven BA methodology, central repository, training, and an easy interface for collaboration.
A common problem in many organizations is an inability to bridge the gap between IT and other business units. Through business alignment, organizations can use IT to achieve business objectives and improve the business value of their IT investments.
A Value Chain is a vital technique used in the business alignment process that can identify the chain of activities performed by the organization to deliver value to stakeholders. By analyzing a Value Chain, organizations can identify which activities are best performed by the business and which would be best outsourced. This technique can help business managers and leaders determine which projects to focus on when defining a problem statement, and help them develop support for a project when creating a business case.
Features of a Value Chain
A Value Chain is a description of the key activities performed across a company or an entire industry. Usually depicted as a linear flow of activities, a Value Chain should show where value is being created. To do this, the Value Chain data should be quantitative, not qualitative, and should indicate the costs and revenues of activities at each stage of a product’s or process’s development cycle.
By visually showcasing this information, the Value Chain technique is instrumental in clarifying key stages of activity in a company or industry, where value is created, and any shifts along the Value Chain. The technique is also useful for:
- Determining whether there is any backward or forward integration in an industry
- Learning whether and why competitors may be targeting specific areas of a product or process
- Revealing a customer’s or stakeholder’s experience with an organization
- Mapping key players at each stage of a development process and evaluating their roles and areas for improvement
- Analyzing any changes in the value that activities are delivering
However, despite this usefulness, many organizations do not fully apply the technique, focusing only on key activities and not determining where value is actually created.
Getting the Most Value from a Value Chain
There are three steps in developing an effective Value Chain:
- Identify individual activities. Distinguish between primary and support activities, and sort all activities into categories based on their cost, return, and the reasons they are performed.
- Assign values to the categories that best represent their contribution to your organization’s competitive advantage.
- Order the categories broadly, determining links among different activities and their values.
This data can be ascertained by investigating previous projects, interviewing clients and industry experts, examining internal cost information such as client management accounts, and piecing together secondary data sources including annual reports, broker reports, industry reports, and database searches.
Once the categories of activities are detailed in the Value Chain, you can then map costs, returns, and key players across the Value Chain where applicable. This is key to determining value, the aspect many organizations overlook. It’s imperative to understand, at all stages of the Value Chain, what value may be changing and why. This can provide critical information in assessing your organization’s competitive position.
More information on creating Value Chains for your organization can be found in the RequirementCoach™ Portfolio Community in Enfocus Requirements Suite™. There, users can find advanced resources, training, and dialogue for better business analysis throughout the enterprise.