Trends in Business Analysis

1. for the companies where I track the BA environment for a longer time, there is very often a sinusoidal movement, where it goes from centralized CoE to decentralized CoP and visceversa ... it is about objectives, number of projects vs. internal resources etc ... What I see at least the last 5 years in my close environment (banks, telco, utilities in CZ, SK...) is that continuously fails any convergence with (any) enterprise / business / process / functional architecture ... as the "mode" word "agile" is often miss-understood, or miss-used... and because continuously using external BA suppliers (the best for each project another) kills any possibility to manage it.

2. yes ... "just enough documentation" can be and is a symptom always, but actually what I see is in small projects / companies an opposite phenomen of more quick analysis without any documentation :-) just enough to verbally say to programmers / IT / supplier, what is expected/required... fortunately here the ultimate objective of Business analysis IS still NOT (ONLY) documenting ... but in the era of "agile/Scrum" it is going to very extreme situations. Still it is critical to identify customer/business needs for the project, and thus business analysis is still very needed ... Of course: a good PM or business/solution architect still is necessary to control the level/extension/granularity of the needed documentation ("what is enough to start?") ...

3. As Sergio said, I dont see any impact of PMI in the BA maturity... BA exists a really long-time and has his own challenges, techniques, knowledge, issues ... PMI could (in the future) give visibility, but still I think that these 2 capabilities (Business Analysis/Architecture, and Portfolio/Program/Project/PMO mgmt) as to be very clearly separated and defined (very narrowly cooperating, but clearly separate). The "sponsor" or "champion" for giving higher maturity still has to be an organization that has as his highest objective really BAA, (IIBA ...).

PMI I think that has to focus in continuous improvement of the PM capability maturity ... Projects without analysis and architecture are a chaos, Architecture without managed changes (projects) are a chimera...

4. Amen with Sergios response: Even when my business architects needed to have a very mature knowledge of the org data architecture and for analyzing business entities and contexts, the data architecture is really a service and a role with different target(s) and thus deliverables. Still it doesnt mean that in small orgs, the business analyst/architect can not do also a role of "information/data architect" ...
Of course ... there is still a vague frontier between business/process analyst, and system/IT analyst ... increased within the role of "business systems analyst" ... and it is about the work approach and the culture of the organization (and why not, their number of analysis "resources" :-)

Well, the key here is: what does means BA maturity?. Will we use the maturity model that we use for the organizations? Will we use the maturity model like CMMI and others?. I think the key is determine how we will meassure BA maturity. I think is a great point to debate so I really appreciate your initiative @Steven because, unfortunatelly, I do not see this debate inside the IIBA. But about the PMI involvement benefits the BA practice I fully agree with you.

Great point Sergio. I think there are many ways to measure the BA Maturity. But it's finding out the most appropriate way. A intimidating but definitely doable task. You mention CMMI as one, I think BAs should look at moving more to the requirements engineering approach and away from the scribe methods.

As a program supervisor, what do you look for as a successful business analyst? What is a successful analyst to you?

To be honest, maturity is a point I did not work and I did not think up to date. Perhaps is a good point to work on in the future. About your question, I will write about I do and I did when I have to define what is success (in fact, organizations pay extra money related to success so while I fully dissgree about that I am not able to avoid that). To define sucess related to project management or business analysis depends on organization strategy. The key here is to understand that all related to product objectives are matter of business analysis and all related to project objectives are related to project mangement. I am exhaustid to fight againts things like "we will growth 5% in market share next year" to be assigned to project objectives. That is not project objectives. It is a product objective or goal

I, too, believe there is a lot of common ground between project management and business analysis. When I read IIBA's BABOK®, there is quite a lot of similarity with PMI's PMBOK®.

I would say BA is a great background to have as a PM.

But take into account that business analyst and project manager are totally diferent roles and people who perform the roles must take totally diferent skills, while most of us have been performed both roles at the same time in most of the initiatives. Busines analyst focus is the whole solution but mainly in helping the organization in defining the product/service/result characteristics that must be created to put the organizational strategy into action. Project manager focus is the work needed to create the definided product/service/result and all related to that work definition, execution, control and close. Business anlyst work continues after the project is closed because business analyst is in charge to monitoring if the product/service/result is achieving the benefits stated into the busines case and, if not, a new loop starts to define what to do with the product/service/result.