Building the Foundation: The BOK on BA

According to Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide, anyone who performs business analysis activities regardless of their title is a business analyst. The business analyst role has deep roots in IT, but there are many who perform business analysis activities outside of IT as well. Business analysis can be used whenever products, services or processes are being created or enhanced, or when seeking to understand customer needs.

Several people asked us in last week’s blog post to associate business analysis with innovation. Business analysis enables innovation as it fosters creativity and moves us away from the age-old habit of thinking we know the best solution before fully understanding the problem space. Many associate innovation with technology, but it isn’t just technology that should be innovating, and thus, not just IT departments that should be leveraging business analysis. 

In my experience as a business analysis instructor, one of my most memorable classes was a Business Analysis Essentials course with a group of television producers. As you can imagine, they started out with a lot of skepticism, questioning the value of spending the next couple of days with me learning about honing in on their business analysis skills. Someone asked, “Did our boss sign us up for the wrong course?” Television producers oversee all aspects of video production on a program, including casting, set design and screenwriting. Essentially, they are delivering a product, the television program, to meet the needs of the viewers. It is essential to first identify those needs by performing business analysis activities and then provide recommendations to meet them. By the end of day one, they realized they were in the right course.

Some other notable scholars of business analysis that have passed through my classes are scientists, event planners and building architects. One scientist was tasked to find new and innovative ways to ensure we have clean water and learned to use business analysis skills to perform research and ultimately provide a recommended solution. Event planners provide a service and use business analysis to understand and bring to life their clients’ vision of a fairy tale wedding. Building architects also use business analysis to understand the needs of their clients when designing their forever home. 

There are so many uses for business analysis skills and so many people that perform business analysis activities without even knowing it. My favorite part of teaching these classes is the aha moment when people realize they’re a business analyst! We all have a little bit of the business analyst in us. For this reason, as Laura mentioned in her blog post, we are trying to focus on business analysis as a discipline rather than the role of the business analyst. We use Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman’s, It’s the Goal, Not the Role as a motto on our team to remind ourselves of this.

As we put together the Foundational Standard in Business Analysis, we want to ensure what is described as business analysis can be applied to not only IT projects, but within non-IT environments as well. It would really help us out to hear more examples of the non-IT applications of business analysis, like the ones I described in this blog post. That way, we can keep an open mind and together, develop something that is useful and relatable to all practitioners of business analysis. This way we can all innovate!

We are looking forward to seeing your examples of non-IT applications of business analysis in the comments!

This week I thought it would be fun to engage the community by providing a bit of insight around what is in store with PMI’s Foundational Standard in Business Analysis. I have seen the question posed more than once, “Why do we need this standard?”

As we mentioned at the product launch, PMI was waiting to hear from the community after the unveiling of Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide.  Did the community want and need more? Was the community wanting to see PMI move forward with the development of a foundational standard to support the business analysis profession and serve as a reference for the PMI-PBA^®?  Well, the answer was very clear by the feedback received, and so here we are developing the standard!

The core development team brainstormed ideas for building off the success of the practice guide while also addressing the most recent trends in the industry and the needs/desires of the community. So let’s take a look ahead… 

1. The new foundational standard in business analysis will align well with the PMBOK^® Guide, and by doing so will help project managers and other team resources understand how the work of business analysis aligns to the work of project management.  The business analysis standard will align and integrate the knowledge areas and process groups presented in the PMBOK^® Guide to help address the confusion surrounding how business analysis is performed in relationship to project management.

2. But wait!! Business analysis is performed outside of projects, and therefore equally important will be the alignment to PMI’s Portfolio and Program Management standards. There has been much misinformation in the community regarding the scope of business analysis and therefore this alignment should help address those concerns.

3. Now our team would be remiss to simply frame up an IT-centric waterfall-based standard. We know business analysis is performed on a lot of projects including IT ones; but we also recognize the importance of understanding what business analysis looks like in iterative and adaptive project life cycles too. PMI’s Foundational Standard in Business Analysis will embrace adaptive (agile) project life cycles as much as predictive (waterfall) approaches.  And while I am talking about the breadth of this standard, let me also mention “across industries”. So think of this new standard as a one stop reference for business analysis across life cycles, across project types and across industries.

4. Speaking of one stop reference, one of the biggest thrills for me in seeing PMI move forward on these business analysis initiatives, is that for the first time in our community PMs and BAs can have standards that align, use a common vocabulary, and emphasize the desired and well-needed collaboration that many organizations struggle with. By having these two critical disciplines under one PMI umbrella, teams can easily obtain complementary resources required to make their projects, programs and portfolios successful.

5. Also, PMI’s Foundational Standard in Business Analysis will continue to utilize the collaboration points that the community so loved with the practice guide. We aren’t stopping by looking solely at the PM and BA roles, but instead are looking at how business analysis resources work across the organization with many role types to perform business analysis successfully.

6. Last, but certainly not least, let me also share that we really put the focus on business analysis and not business analysts. Does this seem odd?  Well let me explain that many adaptive life cycle projects such as Scrum, don’t recognize the role of the business analyst explicitly and so we need to evolve too!  Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman so eloquently state this point in “It’s the Goal, Not the Role” and this team is really taking this to heart. The objective is to focus attention on how business analysis supports the end goal - successful product delivery, regardless of job title performing the work. We continue this thinking within PMI’s Foundational Standard in Business Analysis.

We hope you are as excited as we are about the evolution occurring with these critical disciplines and being able to finally align and come together under one umbrella, share a common framework and language and move us towards a shared understanding of what it takes to perform business analysis. We can’t wait for you to engage with us further during future review processes and help contribute to this advancement in business analysis to support project, program, and portfolio efforts. 

So what do you think?  What are you looking forward to seeing and what ideas are valuable to you and your organization?

In my previous post, I talked about the need for executive buy-in on business analysis activities and some ideas on how to grab their attention. And as I mentioned in that post, they are not our target audience for PMI’s foundational standard on business analysis so we need to find other ways to win their support. In this post, I’ll explore another avenue to attract executive attention—­delivering successful outcomes.

Executives care about the business outcomes they are funding with their projects. As business analysts, we have to show the link between our analysis and the project’s success. First, we need to measure whether we’ve met project goals or delivered successful outcomes.

But how do we measure that? What should we even be measuring? Should we measure a reduction in missed requirements? Or whether our business analysis deliverables are done on time? No! (Well, at least not for the purpose of getting your executive team to buy into the value of the business analysis role.)

A phrase I love to say quite often: remember, requirements are just a means to an end.

At the end of the day, doing good business analysis work or producing perfect requirements is not actually useful if it doesn’t lead to successful outcomes. Launching successful products is a worthy end goal. Delivering business outcomes is a worthy end goal. Delivering the desired business value is a worthy end goal. Business analysis, I’m sorry to say, is not actually a worthy end goal.

That said, business analysis helps identify the business problems that need to be solved or the opportunities that can be capitalized on. Business analysis helps elicit the objectives the team is striving to deliver. We help identify the risks that will keep us from being successful, the assumptions about our objectives that might derail us, and the requirements that help ensure we construct the solution that delivers success. We work in lockstep with our business stakeholders and IT stakeholders every day to enable alignment between the organizations, so that the solutions delivered solve the business problems. (The Needs Assessment chapter of the Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide describes identifying problems and opportunities in more detail.)

So the good news is that business analysis is 100% necessary to deliver those aforementioned worthy end goals. And while executives don’t all value business analysis yet, they do in fact value business outcomes. And therein lies the key to their hearts … or minds at least! If we can help deliver successful projects, then we can be reassured that the business analysis we perform is successful, which hopefully leads to executives supporting our cause.

Some takeaway points to think about:

• Define measurable business objectives: Do you have these defined for every project you work on? The only way you can deliver successful business outcomes is to understand what success actually is. Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide describes Goal Models and Business Objective Models as mechanisms to capture these in chapter 4.
• Plan to measure: Surprisingly, most organizations don’t come back to measure objectives after the fact, so plan for how measurement will happen (including building in features to support measuring success if needed).
• Go back and measure: When its time, measure whether the objectives or success metrics were achieved. Failure is OK as long as you grow from it. And you can’t grow if you don’t know you even failed, so don’t be afraid to measure this.
• Report on success (or lack thereof): Summarize the results and make sure they are reported to executives.

I’d love to hear what others’ experiences are with defining success measures and actually measuring them. I think this is one of the hardest things we do as business analysts, so please share with us your successes, failures, funny stories, horror stories, or questions you want to pose!

If you are interested in learning more about performance measurement, you'll want to take a look at PMI's Foundational Standard on Business Analysis when it comes out for public review in 2017!

It probably goes without saying that PMI’s foundational standard on business analysis has a pretty obvious audience—those who actually do business analysis as part of their everyday job. In fact, it’s pretty unlikely executives or CIOs are going to pick it up for some light reading. That’s why I wanted to use this post to help those of us doing business analysis day-to-day think about how to make sure our executive-level managers get value from what we do, and even better—that they recognize it!

A couple of weeks ago, Cheryl’s post zeroed in on the value of business analysis (and this standard!), highlighting that poor requirements management—a key component of business analysis—is one of the top reasons that projects fail. So we all know that our executives should value business analysis, but do they?

Checking in: Do Executives Really Care?

Think about your own organization—does your CIO truly care about business analysis and whether you do it well? What about your CMO, CFO, or even CEO?

PMI’s Pulse of the Profession In-Depth Report: Requirements Management: A Core Competency for Project and Program Success showed that top management and executive/project sponsors do not fully value requirements management as a critical competency. 9% don’t value it at all, only 36% fully value it, and the majority (55% only somewhat value it. My experience is that some CIOs do care, but they will also cut scope on business analysis when budgets are tight. In fact, within the last couple of years, there was pretty upsetting news in our industry when a US corporation (that we will keep nameless!) completely cut the business analysis function as part of its move to an agile approach.

However, we also know from PMI’s Pulse of the Profession report that when top management and executives fully value requirements management, their companies are significantly better at meeting business goals. In fact, the percent of projects that meet their goals goes from 44% to 66% when executives value requirements. So, while all executives might not value business analysis today, if we can get them on board with our mission and the time we put into good requirements work, our organizations will be more successful. And as follows, our executives will be successful. So do our CIOs care about what we do? Directly—probably not. But indirectly—very much so!

So let’s talk about how we can generate more direct support.

Attract Executive Attention

As Sue pointed out in her post, we have to spread the word and be advocates for business analysis. Part of this is evangelizing what we do up organizational hierarchies to the executive level. The goal is that one day executives will understand the business analysis role, support it, and fight for it in budgets. So how do we get their attention?

Executives love metrics to help them better understand the state of the organization. One approach is to report out on business analysis related metrics. Here are a few suggestions of metrics you can start with:

• Business objectives exist: These represent the measurable end goals for the business, so start by measuring whether they are even defined for projects. They can’t know if projects are successful if we don’t define end success. For example, maybe set a revenue growth target for the project.
• Business objectives achieved: Did projects achieve the business objectives? Even if the answer is no, at least you now have transparency with executives about that and that you will take steps to do better next time.
• Interim success metrics:  Sometimes the end business goals can’t be measured until well after a project is complete, so look for something to demonstrate your project is on track to meet its goals. Examples might be new customers registered, user adoption of a new solution, or increases in customer satisfaction.

We’d love to hear your feedback on this topic. Do your executives care about business analysis? Do they support your teams by allocating enough time to good business analysis practices? What have you done that successfully got their attention?

And check back next week for a related post. I’m going to discuss how business analysis can help define and achieve successful business outcomes that executives very much care about.

Very important! As Cheryl Lee said last week, “Business analysts (BAs) are sometimes seen as the annoying siblings who ask a lot of silly questions that hinder progress on projects. Organizations are sometimes unsure on how to leverage business analysis in order to deliver successful outcomes.” 

Let’s face it, business analysis is an aspect of initiatives that sometimes gets shortened or skipped. It’s not that business analysis is unimportant; some just believe other work is more important.

Finding some root causes

So why does this happen? Those of us who already know the value of business analysis do not need to be convinced. PMI’s Pulse of the Profession In-Depth Report on Requirements Management tells us that the #2 reason why projects fail is poor requirements, where most business analysis is focused. Many of us (project managers, business analysts, testers, trainers, developers, etc.) understand how important business analysis is. So, are there just too few of us? 

I recently went to a meeting on land conservation, where the very inspirational keynote speaker, Dr. M. Sanjayan, had a wonderful message from which we can learn. 

To summarize, he said, as an advocate for a cause, be careful that you’re not just talking to others who are already convinced. Instead, focus on those who do not yet care as much. Help them know why—from their perhaps skeptical perspective—it is in their best interest to care.  Dr. Sanjayan used an interesting turn of phrase—rather than “how we can save nature”, he focused on “how nature can save us”.

So I would say we also need to direct our message to those who are not yet convinced about the importance of business analysis and frame it in terms which directly impact the folks to whom we are speaking.  Promote the idea that business analysis is not just “nice to have”, but rather “something you can’t be without.”  

So what can YOU do?

Here are a few ideas, hoping that you have more to share ::-)  (No, that’s not a mistake in my smiley; mine always wear glasses ::-)).

• Consider setting up a forum so that those who already know the value of business analysis can share ideas and experiences.Brainstorm a list of folks who need to learn more about the value of business analysis and what topics would be of interest to them and invite a wider audience to the forum.
• Set up a fun in-person or virtual event where folks can try business analysis techniques on non-work problems to see how business analysis can clarify ideas. Visual modeling techniques are particularly appealing. For example, how about a process model for how to coordinate a trip by your hiking club? Or a little data model to structure the information kept about your book club?
• Have a presentation or roundtable discussion at a local PMI chapter about how BA/PM collaboration can support successful project work. For ideas, check out the collaboration points in PMI’s Business Analysis for Practitioners: A Practice Guide (free for PMI members to download!).
• Cheryl created a wonderful BA Community in her Ontario PMI Chapter.  You can do the same in your chapter and invite people inside and outside the chapter.
• Set up an executive forum where executives can learn from a speaker to gain more top-down recognition and sponsorship for business analysis.One of the agile user groups to which I belong has a yearly executive half-day meeting where executives present to executives. One attendee recently reported that his exec immediately latched on to what the presenter provided and went on to convey the message to all of his reports.That’s powerful stuff!

Your thoughts? What topics would you suggest to advocate for business analysis to the as-yet-unconvinced? Looking forward to learning from all of you ::-).