Business Analysis

Summary

Business Analysis is the natural extension of your organization’s Strategic Planning and Operations Management. Business Analysis is the process of defining your organizations requirements, assumptions, constraints, priorities, efficiency and capability. This is how you define your current status, project your desired future state, and determine the gaps between them. This is the phase where you gather the facts, synthesize them, and create a succinct and direct report of the current state of your business, and what is, and is not, working.

Why

The purpose of gathering business requirements it to help people in your organization understand how things operate, what needs to be done, the scope of work and control for systems and projects, and most generally what the requirements, constraints, assumptions and needs are for any project, system, or process. Requirements are the definition of the work: in technical environments, that definition needs to be specific, clear, articulate, and complete enough to begin working effectively.

What

The process of gathering the technical facts of your business operations – measuring performance, documenting processes, scoping risk, outlining problems, reporting on performance. The goal is to get a complete and accurate assessment and understanding of your business operations, and to define the critical requirements, needs, and gaps that you currently have that are preventing you from you optimal efficiency, output, and delivery for your clients.

How

There are a lot of tools, frameworks, templates, exercises, and processes that you can run that will help you capture the information you need to best understand your business. You can use existing reports, dashboards, and KPIs. You can use existing documentation. You can interview employees, enlist consultants, and commission reports and state of the enterprise documentation. Typically Business Analysts will be asked to investigate a specific domain, system, process or set of data in order to determine that status and efficiency of a given area. They will use the available tools to measure and capture the status, and then report back and make a business case for improvement, enhancement and modernization. The purpose is to: control risk, maximize efficiency, and capture new opportunities.