CHAPTER 5
Determining the Current State of Your BA Practices and Closing the Gaps
Along with a team of capable, credible business analysts and a well-placed and influential BACOE, a successful BA practice requires effective, lean methods and tools. Use the experience and talent of your BA team to assess, develop, and improve BA practices. Focus on all aspects of your practices, including people, process, and tools.
In this chapter we present the critical steps to determine the current state of your BA practices and to build a roadmap to increase the maturity of your methods and tools:
• Step 1: Assess the maturity of your current BA practice standards.
• Step 2: Develop a two-year roadmap and 12-month plan to close gaps and build effective, lean BA practices.
• Step 3: Conduct periodic BA practice maturity assessments and BA workforce capability assessments.
In days gone by, we always 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 requirements knowledge and artifacts, and integrate engineering information into BA artifacts that can be used (and reused) to build solutions. 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 business strategies, goals, models, documents, matrices, use cases, user stories, test cases, etc. Sophisticated tools should be adopted to maintain reusable requirement artifacts, impose standards, and enable education of your BA team.
An organization is only as good as its practices. To be able to make the necessary changes to business analysis in an organization, it is critical to understand the organization’s key processes and to adopt a continuous improvement mindset. New/improved BA processes need to “fit” well with existing processes and methods.
STEP 1: ASSESS THE MATURITY OF YOUR CURRENT BA PRACTICE STANDARDS
To determine the current state of your BA practice maturity, conduct an assessment of the BA methods and tools your organization uses; you can then begin to build from the current foundation. At this point you should have a number of BAs capable of performing projects at all levels of complexity: (1) low complexity, (2) moderately complex, and (3) highly complex projects/programs. Perhaps your organization also needs BAs who can perform at the highest level: (4) highly complex program/megaprojects aimed at bringing about breakthrough innovation.
The next step is to determine which practices, both formal and informal, your BA team currently uses. If your BA practices are not documented, ask your team of BAs to work together to document the practices they are using or have used to perform their work for each of the four project levels of complexity, including:
• BA policies, methods, processes, and procedures
• BA requirements management tools, templates, and job aids
• BA manager tools, templates, and the oversight process.
A View from on the Ground
REQUIREMENTS STANDARDS
Kate Gwynne
Associate Director, Business Analysis
Advertising Industry
Capture the current BA methods used in a simple table so that your team can easily and consistently communicate your BA standards to all stakeholders. Use simple communication tools to spread the word about your BA standards. Here’s an example:
It is helpful to use a BA maturity model to perform the current-state maturity assessment. The model is structured into four levels (see Figure 5-1).
FIGURE 5-1. BA Practice Maturity Model
© 2012 Kathleen Hass and Associates, Inc.
The BA practices required for each level are presented in Table 5-1. Use this matrix as a checklist to help your BA team conduct an assessment and identify gaps that need to be closed.
TABLE 5-1. BA Practice Maturity Model Competencies by Level
© 2012 Kathleen Hass and Associates, Inc.
STEP 2: DEVELOP A TWO-YEAR ROADMAP AND 12-MONTH PLAN TO CLOSE GAPS AND BUILD EFFECTIVE, LEAN BA PRACTICES
Working with your BA team, develop a roadmap to refine/adopt/develop practices that are missing from your practice, moving from left to right on the BA practice maturity model. Once your plan has been created (remember, lean, just enough investment in BA process and deliverables):
• Update the BA practice business case with new information learned from the assessment
• Include the business benefits of all major milestones
• Gain consensus and approval from your steering committee and executive sponsor for the budget and resources to implement the two-year roadmap and 12-month plan to close gaps in BA practices.
A View from on the Ground
VALUE-BASED BA PRACTICE IMPLEMENTATION ROADMAP
Kate Gwynne
Associate Director, Business Analysis
Advertising Industry
Develop simple and straightforward communication tools to foster consistency of messages about your current practices. Include all implementation plans for establishing the BACOE, building your capable BA team, and closing the gaps on your BA standards.
| BA PRACTICE IMPLEMENTATION 12-MONTH ROADMAP INITIATIVES FOR DEFINING, GUIDING, AND BUILDING THE BUSINESS ANALYSIS PRACTICE STANDARDS |
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DEFINE |
Planning and Communication
Skills and Competency Assessment
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GUIDE |
Goals and Career Path Development
Training and Development
Knowledge Sharing
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BUILD |
Requirements Management
Tools and Technology
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MEASURE SUCCESS |
Value to Customers
Wealth to the Bottom Line
Improvement to Project Performance
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Determine current and future state of BA practice within organization (people, processes, and tools)STEP 3: CONDUCT PERIODIC BA PRACTICE MATURITY ASSESSMENTS AND BA WORKFORCE CAPABILITY ASSESSMENTS
In your two-year plan, be sure to include periodic assessments of both BA workforce capabilities and the maturity of BA practices. Identify gaps in capabilities and standards and update your two-year roadmap and 12-month plans at least annually to put your organization on the path to continuous improvement. The assessments can be conducted by the BACOE staff.
A View from on the Ground
EXECUTIVE COMMUNICATION TOOL: CURRENT AND FUTURE STATE
Kate Gwynne
Associate Director, Business Analysis
Advertising Industry
Before you begin implementing new BA practices, it is important to understand what the landscape looks like today. We took a look at the people, processes, and tools/technology that will be impacted by these initiatives and identified what’s working and what isn’t. This varied from department to department, but gave us a good idea of how to move forward in manageable steps.
Here’s an example of a useful tool for showing sponsors and executives your journey: “Here’s where we are today. Here’s where we want to be tomorrow. And here’s how we’ll get there.”
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE BUSINESS ANALYST?
As a capable BA, you need to have some standard tools in your arsenal. It is important to modify your methods, style, and facilitation techniques as you grow along the maturity spectrum. Always use business language rather than technical IT jargon. Use simple models, drawings, charts, and graphs whenever possible to bring the requirements into view as a way to get your stakeholders to think visually.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE BA MANAGER/PRACTICE LEAD?
Use the experience and talent of your BA team to assess, develop, and improve BA practices. Focus on all aspects of the practice, including people, process, and tools. Resist the temptation to assign one staff person to develop all the BA standards. You want your BA team to take ownership and consequently use the standards. Create simple graphs and slides to describe your path from current to future-state BA practices.
Now that you have put your BA practice into operation and established the infrastructure needed to operate a mature BA practice, it is time to turn your attention to the final phase of developing a value-based BA practice: sustainability.