PART II
Implementation: It’s All About the Fit
Once you have assessed your organization’s and your own readiness to implement a new or advance an existing BA practice, you will be ready to turn your attention to: “How do we build the BA practice?” Implementation involves several key elements:
• A home for your BA practice
• A capable BA team
• Effective, lean BA practice standards.
A HOME FOR YOUR BA PRACTICE
In Chapter 3 we examine the types of models typically used to provide a “home” for the BA practice. The BA practice home is a department that is accountable and responsible for building and sustaining effective BA practices. The model most often used is a BA center of excellence (BACOE). This center should be small enough to be manageable and is typically authorized to manage the BA team, the business case process, organizational BA standards and frameworks; methods, training, tools, templates, techniques, and metrics; and communication.
A CAPABLE BA TEAM
Today, BAs are mostly project-focused, creating and managing requirement artifacts. To become a valuable corporate asset, BAs need to become holistic thinkers who are strategically focused, concentrating on innovative solutions to complex business problems. In Chapter 4 we present a groundbreaking approach to building a capable BA team.
EFFECTIVE BA PRACTICE STANDARDS
Traditionally, we followed the maxim, process first, then tools. The good news is that BA tools have grown up. Good BA standards are now embedded in integrated requirements management tools. The tools help educate BAs on best practices, integrate and manage the requirements knowledge and artifacts, and integrate engineering information into the BA artifacts that are used to build the solution. The bad news is that most BAs still use desktop tools that are difficult to maintain and are not integrated. As a result, the BA is burdened with creating, maintaining, integrating, and synchronizing all of the business strategies, goals, models, documents, matrices, use cases, user stories, test cases, etc. In Chapter 5 we focus on the sophisticated tools that today’s BAs need to adopt to maintain reusable requirement artifacts, impose standards, and enable the education of the BA team.
We also discuss the need for periodic maturity assessments in Chapter 5. It is often said that we don’t need to do a maturity assessment because we know that our capabilities are immature. The problem is, just knowing that your capabilities are immature is not actionable. Assessments provide useful information about strengths as well as identify gaps that need immediate improvement to grow to the next level of maturity. Assessments shed light on exactly where you are, provide a step-by-step improvement roadmap, and facilitate continuous improvements based on proven maturity models.