Developing your Business Analysis Practice – Reaching for the Stars

By Blair Loveday . Published November 24, 2011

Recently I presented at the IIBA BA Development Day conference held at Te Papa in Wellington.  I luv’d it, had an absolute blast and it will definitely be in my 2012 calendar of Business Analysis events to attend. During the presentation, I observed lots of notes scribbling and it dawned on me that penning my notes in a series of blogs might be useful.  So here’s the first cab off the rank….

Despite the rapid growth in both the government and private sectors, I consider business analysis practice maturity to still be in its infancy and that there are few organisations in New Zealand that can lay claim to having achieved the ‘holy grail’ of a fully functioning Business Analysis Centre of Excellence (BACoE).  I liken the establishment of a BACoE to “Reaching for the Stars”. If, in your lifetime, you’re fortunate to have the opportunity to “Reach for the Stars” then please embrace the faith that someone has placed in you and absolutely go for it. If the BACoE is not quite within your reach, relax, there is hope. “Settling for the Moon” (establishing a mature Business Analysis Practice) is not necessarily a bad option (in fact I think it comes a close second), can be a lot of fun and if done well, hugely satisfying for all involved.

Attempting to define a BACoE without taking over the whole blog requires discipline, especially on my part. Given I appreciate the simple things done well, I gravitated to this definition:

A BACoE is a team of people that is established to promote collaboration and the application of best practices. There are 3 key characteristics of a BACoE that have a significant impact on its value and operation, these being its authority, role, and organisation placement/staffing within the organisation.

Whilst the idea might have popped up over-night, good BACoE’s don’t. Like any significant change effort, an effective team is needed to drive, develop and maintain a BACoE. To avoid frustration, disappointment and ultimately tears, a BACoE requires executive sponsorship, commitment, investment, good planning and execution, a champion to lead this effort and more often than not, a company culture that encourages want to be the best and embraces continuous improvement.  For me, a real point of differentiation between a BACoE and a good BA Practice is that a BACoE (or CoE) has an enterprise-wide flavour. By this, I mean an enterprise focus to business issues, e.g. alignment with the project management group, enterprise architecture, data integration, business and IT optimisation, and enterprise-wide access to information. A good Business Analysis Practice has a more local flavour, with the focus on developing a good Business Analysis framework and works lives by a simple idea – focus on the best and neglect all the rest. Whilst you never turn down executive sponsorship, support and investment if offered, you can achieve a good Business Analysis Practice by unleashing the talent that already exists in your BA team, getting comfortable with the idea of being a leader without a title, and allocating the team responsibility for making a positive difference whilst creating a work environment which make it easy for to get up in the morning and come to work.

It’s also of the view that before we even contemplate achieving Business Analysis nirvana (BACoE) we need to have first got our house in order and have established a good  Business Analysis Practice – the building blocks for a BACoE. If we are not afraid to be honest with ourselves and ask the hard questions (which we are trained to do), for many, a good business analyst practice will be all that is needed, all that is required and more importantly, will be a realistic and achievable goal that doesn’t kill the team in the process.

So which journey is the right one for you? The journey is likely to hurl you into the great unknown at warp speed but it will force you to embark on a serious of soul searching questions about yourself, your environment and your organisation which can only be good on all levels…right? I will cover this off in the following blogs but to help you get started, please consider the following four things you need to come to grips with and, may  ultimately help with the decision making process.

• What are the characteristics of your current business analysis workforce?
• What kind of business analysis workforce do you need?
• What is needed to build a mature analysis practice?
• How are you going to get there?

When coming to grips with these questions, the worst thing you can do is…..put them in the too hard basket and do nothing. According to the Forrester/IIBA September 2010 Global Business Analyst Online Survey, 28% of BAs responded have already made the decision, are involved in initiatives for creating a business analysis or requirements centre of excellence. This indicates that organisations are focusing more attention on business analysis skills and practices. I’ve also seen an emergence of organisations creating communities of practice, by this, bringing BAs together to share good practices, processes, templates, ideas and lessons learned (good BA Practice). Whilst you might have stakeholders that could benefit from understanding (at a high level) requirements management. Your executives might not care about repeatable processes, re-use, BABOK or the nitty-gritty details of functional (and non-functional) requirements, they all care about is delivering what was promised on time. This is requirements management,  it’s our zone and is why we should all care about “Reaching for the Stars” or Settling for the Moon”

In my next blog posting, I’ll dive deeper and share ideas for boldly going where others have already gone before. But for now, have fun, go wild and always remember “discipline at the core, creativity at the edge”.