IT Hire Wire

Robert Schechter
IT business analysis

Conducting JAD or business requirement gathering sessions can be a nightmare.  As a business analyst, the ability to find a path through the thick weeds of requirements is an important skill set.  In my experience with leading requirement gathering sessions for system migrations, identifying which requirements are crucial for a business is challenging.  A good percentage of the information captured from “subject matter experts” is based upon their assumptions which can not be validated rendering the information as useless.

Q: How do IT business analysts build up their skills in weeding through business requirements?
A: IT business analysts can build up the requirement management skills in the following ways:

1. Join a business analysis group such as the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) to gain insight from other business analysts by sharing different perspectives and best practices
2. Refine business analysis skills by taking certification classes or training courses such as:
   -Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP)
   -Business process analysis and design
   -Building logical data models
   -Developing requirements with use cases
   -Defining business systems with Unified Modeling Language (UML)
   -Recognizing and controlling requirement risk
3. Use reference guides such as Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK)
4. Refine requirement elicitation techniques to better understand and confirm the information being gathered

Q: What are the challenges IT business analysts will face in leading business requirement projects?
A: Some of the challenges IT business analysts may face with requirement management are:

• Lack of clarity with the scope of the project
• Requirement change requests being poorly managed
• Missing stakeholder requirements
• Conflicts between IT and business areas
• Project not in-sync with organizational goals/vision

Q: What is your experience in this area?
A: In the first quarter of 2009, my role was Business Architect/Lead Business Analyst on a corporate enterprise assessment for real-time claims processing. With foresight, the stakeholders allowed three months to complete this assessment.

All of the business and IT stakeholders were engaged from the very start including two project managers, one for IT and the other for business. The subject matter experts supporting the Legacy claims systems mapped the current state which assisted in the completion of a comprehensive framework for the business architecture. This was pivotal in completing this assessment
Consensus with the business architecture was granted within 6 weeks which allowed a month and a half to develop three technical solutions for real-time claims adjudication. The business architecture framework was easily understood. Therefore, senior leadership was able to determine which of the three solutions the enterprise should move forward.

Since the enterprise assessment was thorough and comprehensive, the Business Case and Project Charter were easily completed in just a few weeks. This saved weeks of preparation time in the project initiation stage.  In addition, the high-level requirements that were gathered during assessment were leveraged for detail requirement gathering. This reduced the requirement management stage of the project by one month.

Upon the project initiation, leveraging the information and organization from enterprise system assessments shortened the time durations of most of the SDLC phases. Also, surprises from changes in scope, varying objectives, or lack of feasibility were eliminated

Tags: Business Analysis, IT Career

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