The Value of Business Analysis

(1569 words/6.5 minute read)

What is business analysis?  Who is a business analyst?  They are the coolest people and things since sliced bread (well…if you think sliced bread is cool that is).  I LOVE LOVE LOVE being a business analyst!  Yet it can be a hard sell to people who don’t know what a business analyst is or what they do.  I always tease that business analysis is like the big supermarket warehouse sample process: you don’t know you need something until you try it.  Then once you try having a business analyst around, you want to buy them in bulk!  But we’re never on your shopping list.  Only those who have experienced the wonder and awesomeness of a business analyst are the ones who can’t live without us!  But you actually probably need a business analyst or at least people with these business analysis skill sets more than you realize.
 

So let’s step back and answer:
 

What is a Business Analyst? 

A business analyst, by definition from the International Institute of Business Analysis® (IIBA®) is anyone who does business analysis work.  And business analysis is identifying needs or opportunities and recommending solutions that deliver value as you look to address those needs or opportunities.  Yes, these are the people who can analyze and develop great business cases.  These are the people analyzing the options and balancing the pros and cons.  These are the people helping analyze the financials and balancing risks and reward.  And reading this now, how many of you feel like you’ve been a business analyst this whole time (and just never called it that)?

And while all this is true, the fact is: 

“a person with a true business analysis mindset IS the person you can’t afford to live without.”


Who on your team is as much concerned with what the industry is doing as they are how your employees operate?  Who on your team focuses on understanding and empowerment of internal teams to improve processes and be more efficient and effective yet is still champion the project to be successful?  Who can step back and look across not just the business architecture, but the enterprise architecture to help align the functional areas’ goals?  But, most importantly, who does NOT “own” the solution space, functional process or system application that can truly take an unbiased perspective on what is best for the overall organization and all the stakeholders included in the enterprise?

That unbiased view that is solely focused on highest value delivery is why we need business analysts and those with business analysis skills in our team whenever we’re changing how we work or considering our options to change.

So what would a business analyst commonly do?

Just like the pace of technology, and how exponentially fast, it’s advancing, so we see the same kind of advancement and evolution of the business analysis role.  There’s multiple areas where you’ll find business analysis professionals, working hard to deliver that value.

• Enterprise and strategic levels – strategy planning and balancing organizational capabilities with long-term goals and strategies
• Project management – championing change by defining requirements and tracing them into implementation and ultimate solutions
• Daily operations – analyzing existing processes, looking for any efficiencies and areas to improve for greater effectiveness
  
  

In my own work I often teased that I was “Here to help.”  What do I help with?  Whatever needs helping with!  I have a technology background, so I understand capabilities of systems, and what are common use cases that get the most value out of those systems.  But then I have a very process-focused mindset where I like to understand how business operates. I love defining process models that articulate who does what with whom, when and where.  That these make great knowledge repositories for articulating business needs and ultimately those requirements that must be married up to our solutions or result in our project work.

But then consider your own efforts. The analysis skill set doesn’t need to come in at the start and stay with you throughout your entire adventure. Bring a Business Analyst in when you’re struggling to get momentum going with your project. Bring a Business Analyst in when you’re trying to understand the details so that you can complete those RFPs successfully. Bring in a Business Analyst when things are NOT working as planned.  This will give you an insight of what you may be missing because you’re so close to the content knowledge that you get someone who understands the way things work from a broader perspective, and can often find that overlooked insight that might be actually easy to fix.

As broad as this job description may be, that might be the best thing you need. You don’t want someone pigeonhole into a single roll where all they see all day our nails, because they walk in only with a hammer you want someone who sees possibilities and opportunities.  A common technique that’s used with Business Analyst like myself is that I always know for every issue. There’s three areas we can often look at:

• People
• Process
• Technology
  
  

Technology can be an easy fix to solve daily process challenges. But as you get into larger more complex situations, sometimes we realize it’s the process itself that need to change and of course we’re talking change that often involves the people helping people adapt adjust and leverage changes commonly becomes your hurdle to achieving success with your change work.  That’s the value of a business analyst mindset. They don’t see one solution, but they look at opportunities to leverage both existing and emerging solution sets.

So how do you bring in business analysis into your organization?

Sure the first way is to hire Business Analyst. You’ll need to define out what that scope of work is though I would encourage don’t be afraid to go broad so that those who are passionate about the business analysis field and delivering ultimate value will have that free to look at everything and anything that is going on and be part of the solution.

Another common role is to analyst and special areas. We see this a lot in technology spaces as we have application, subject matter experts (SMEs).  Very common to Salesforce analyst or CRM or ERP analyst positions at larger organizations that want to leverage their investments.  We’re also seeing quite the rise in the functional areas role such as financial analyst, risk analyst, marketing analyst, customer analyst – these are all highly needed roles that understand that line of business so well it can look to all those people, processes and technology that need to inter operate within that space.

Now the other way to bring in business analysis skillet is to train.  Look at what your training budget has and take a heart perspective on how you’re proving the ROI of all those training investments. It’s one thing to go off or spend a few days at home on the zoom training session, but seriously ask how you got that time and money and the actions of your teams.  Could you draw the line from what they learned to what behaviors or actions changed upon coming back from training and how fast you observe those changes?  FYI – this is one of those scenarios business analysts love to analyze and prove the value!  But seriously training is one solution to a need that should have an expected outcome that can be tied back to the resource investment.  And from experience, business analysis training is one of the easiest types of training to directly tie back to daily operations and productivity that end up producing longer value returning solutions to the organization.

Take for example: I teach process modeling techniques.  You spend two hours with me and a cost of XXX.  That same analyst then analyzes a process (with confirmed results) in half the time they did before the training.  That same analyst then has over 300 similar sessions with business areas understanding the business throughout their employment with your organization.  While you might expect a logical growth in skill set as they get more experienced, you have some tangible outcome that the time and money spent on training has been more than returned on investment.  Same goes for requirements analysis work.  Articulating good requirements results in better solutions. Simple as that!  So if you train your teams to get better at articulating requirements the first time, think of how many change requests you just saved, but the change request itself to the solution, and the time to deal with the change request.  Too many of these changes occur because the business side was not well enough understood for the technology team to implement it the first round.  So I’m very passionate that any business analysis related type training has to have a very hard ROI.  And why am I so confident? Because I’m a Business Analyst and I have those kind of tools in my toolbox to successfully analyze the business value out of any scenario!

I hope you continue to follow me for greater insight into the business analysis world and ways that you can immediately get value out of any investment you make in understanding and applying these concepts in your work.  Always happy to share as the business value I get from understanding your challenges gives my toolbox an even greater amount of solution options for those future opportunities I know will come along!