by Adriana Beal
A skilled business analyst can add significant value to their organization, but not all BAs find it easy to identify concrete examples of their contributions to project success, apart from the occasional email from a stakeholder showing appreciation for a job well done (sometimes highlighting an aspect of the work the BA wouldn’t even consider a core activity).
If you are a results-oriented BA, you will be able to look back at the work you did in 2011, and find examples similar to this, from one of my recent projects:
A product owner explained to me a requirement he had for improving his start-up’s flagship project management application. The requirement stated that the system should support company-wide inheritance of project settings, meaning that instead of having to set up the currency or language at project level, the client company could start to create these settings at the company level, with all its projects inheriting the same values, which could then be updated at the project level if needed. The idea was to simplify the configuration of new projects, eliminating unnecessary work for the customer to recreate existing settings.
After investigating the problem and proposed solution, I came to the conclusion that the requirement as described to me wasn’t the best alternative for that particular use case. Going back to the problem the product owner was trying to solve (eliminate the need for customers to reenter the same settings any time they created a new project in the system), I was able to identify a better solution than the suggested project-level inheritance of company level settings. During the discovery process, I learned that most companies reused 2 or 3 groups of settings in all their projects (with same currency, language, and other settings for each of these groups). More valuable than making a project inherit company-level settings was to allow companies to reuse the settings from previous projects, creating project profiles that could then be applied to new and existing projects. Changes to an existing profile could be made to automatically update all projects sharing that profile without affecting projects with other profiles (a convenience that the original solution of company-level settings inheritance did not provide). Both the product owner and a focus group confirmed that my recommended solution would be much more valuable to customers, with no additional cost to the development effort.
As a business analyst, if you are constantly looking for additional opportunities to improve productivity, profitability, customer loyalty and other value-adding benefits to the business, you should have many examples of positive results to list as your 2011 accomplishments.
Even as agile approaches that ignore the BA role become more prevalent, the need for business analysis support on process improvement and solution development is not going away. Identifying opportunities to improve a solution, like in the example above, requires dedicating an amount of time to requirements discovery and analysis that most SMEs, product owners, project managers, and other team members simply can’t afford to spend on this type of analytical work. If you can look back at the projects you worked on this year and find examples of when your analytical skills helped create positive change for your organization, you can count on being on demand during 2012 and beyond. So, what did you do in 2011 that made you valuable for your organization?