The Technique of Business Model Driven Analysis - Example

Running Head: Role of Business analysis Role of Business analysis Name Institution Instructor’s Name Subject Date Business Analysis Business analysis is a field that is involved in identifying the needs of a business as well as determining solutions to the occurring business problems. The solutions that business analysis offers solutions to include the development component, organizational change, process improvement, policy development, and strategic planning. There is the specific person who ensures that the role of business analysis effectively applies and this person is often referred us a business analyst (Debra Paul, 2006). The business analysis field is often to have great connection with requirement analysis that has great emphasis on identifying the changes that the organization requires to be able to achieve its strategic goals. The changes range from those in the strategies, policies, structures, processes, to information systems. For business to thrive with business analysis, there are several techniques that a business analyst may use and be able to facilitate change. These techniques range from techniques for analyzing and organizing requirements, to workshop facilitation techniques used to elicit requirements. Some of the most used technique include; PESTLE, MOST, CATWOE, SWOT, and DE BONO 6Hat (Debra Paul, 2006). Business analysis is sometime termed as requirements engineering due to its great overlap with requirements engineering. It however focuses on identification of the changes within an organization that the organization requires to be able to achieve its strategic goals (Debra Paul, 2006). There are various examples of business analysis and these include: “Enterprise analysis or company analysis” this focuses on understanding the business needs as a whole, identifying initiatives, and the strategic goals that will assist the business in meeting the strategic goals “Requirements planning and management” this is involved in planning on the development process and going ahead to deciding which requirements are of high priority in managing change and implementation “Requirements elicitation” this describes the techniques that are to be used in collecting requirements from projects of the stakeholders “Requirements analysis” this describes how to specify and develop requirements making them successful in implementing a project “Requirement communication” this type of business analysis describes the techniques that ensure that understanding of the requirements by stakeholders “solution assessment and validation” this gives a description of how a business analyst may verify the correctness of any proposed solution, how to assess the possible shortcomings in the implementation, and support the implementation of the solution (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2006) Roles of Business Analysis Among the things that business operators find top of the list of inhibitors to alignment and enablers of successful strategies is clear understanding and effective exchange. It is too often to find there being little business awareness on various parts of the business drivers, it is therefore of great importance to ensure that there is an ongoing sharing of knowledge across the organization given the environment dynamics most organizations find themselves. In most organizations, business analysts are not a common figure, meaning that there less or no effective business analysis that takes place there. The analysts’ roles are important within any business organization (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2006). Business analysts over time have shown a tendency to show more specialties in one of the following sets known to make up business analysis scope. There are four known tiers of business analysis these being; a.) Strategic planning- in this area, the analysis of the organizations business strategic needs is carried out b.) Operational/ Business model analysis- in this area, the definition as well as the analysis of the policies and markets of the organization is carried out c.) Process definition and design- the development of business modeling which is developed through process modeling is what this tier is involved in d.) Technical business analysis/ IT- this tie interprets the business rules and also the technical systems requirements which generally falls under IT Strategic analysis With the need for organizations to focus on the strategic matters that form part of their operations, a continuous basis in the modern world is of great importance. Business analysis serves this need for it helps in the analyzing both the organizational profile as well as its environment and therefore showing the senior management the effects of policy decisions and also on the suitable policies that need to be put into place for the effective running of the organizations operations (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2006). Architectural framework Having identified problems through the application of strategic analysis, there is great need for the organization to introduce a framework through which it is going to use to solve the problems that are in their business operations. Business analysis has a great contribution in the analyzing of the objectives, resources and processes as well as showing what the course of action should be what improvements need adoption. There are three main elements that are very essential in this aspect of business analysis effort; these being business modeling, which is, also known as business process improvement. Ultimately aimed at achieving various outcomes; business analysis plays the various roles within an organization. To assess whether the business analysis roles are of help, measuring the returns on investment (ROI) is a way to do this, it should be done on all the organization’s project, similar to keeping score. Below follows the various roles played by business analysis within an organization. Reducing waste while ensuring project completion is on time With understanding of the underpinnings of where a business creates or destroys value, an organization is able to reduce wastage that comes from delays in project completion. The delays in projects would mean an extra expense to the organization in various ways, these being in projects costs and opportunity costs. In project costs, a project team should bear in mind that they continue to rack up costs as well as expenses for every delay is it in a week or a month. On the other hand, opportunity costs come in two dimensions, which are unrealized expense reduction and lost revenue (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2006). Most of the projects that are undertaken aim at adding revenue for an organization, and every time an organization delays in completion of a project leads to it forgoing the revenue stream. Bearing in mind that the purpose of the projects that an organization undertakes leads to cost reduction and to improve efficiency, each month that a company delays in completing a project postpones the realization of the reduction of the expenses. With most of these cases not getting any analysis, they result in misleading ROI calculations not forgetting that opportunity costs and lost revenue have greater impact that last longer (Debra Paul, 2006). Helps document the right requirements As business analysis making sure it defines the application in such a way that it leads to meeting the end user needs, they essentially want to define the right application. With that in mind, business analysis therefore strives to document the right requirements through carefully listening to their customers as well as delivering clear requirements to the coders and technical architects who will put down the program. Business analysis therefore requires the application of the right tools and skill to help in eliciting the right requirements and documenting the requirements that are of importance avoiding rework. Wasting time on the documentation requirements that are unnecessary since by doing this, the development cycle id negatively impacted. Proper business analysis helps coders generate the required application code, which best fits in the performance of the unnecessary requirements, and for the testers need to ensure that the wanted features (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2006). Help Improve project efficiency There are two ways that project efficiency can be achieved; these being by reducing rework, this being the work being redone meaning that there was no efficiency. Rework is a word used to refer to the work which comes in as an extra activity in a project usually due to the presence of errors, being not complete, or missing parts of the requirements of a given project. Rework has overtime proved to be a problem within most organizations that most of these organizations over time include it in their budgets as well as their timelines. Rework can be highly reduced by the proper application of business analysis through proper and thorough definition process and requirements gathering not forgetting to involve the business and the technical team of the project in the processes from the initial stages to the end (Debra Paul, 2006). Another way of applying business analysis is coming up with a way of shortening the length of the project, which comes with two potential benefits. Project resource cost is transferred to other project that is if a project can be shortened by a given duration, making great savings on the running project and eventually lead to being able to start a project earlier in the future. This will result to an increase in the revenue potential since great savings increase from the projects when the time/duration is short. The above roles within the systems development life cycle domain results to proper functionality by the presence of a business analyst who typically plays the liaison function between the providers of the service of a given enterprise and the business side of an enterprise. However, the roles of a business analyst happen to change to more alternative roles in the IT sector where he takes on the roles of a business analyst, functional analyst, and systems analyst but again these roles differ between organizations giving different tittles as well as corresponding responsibilities. Why the role may develop in the coming years As the wise man says, “when the going gets tough, the middleman is the first to go”. It is clear that business analysis plays much of a middlepersons role. As for the future development of Business Analysis, there looks like there will be a Business Analysis that will be a process design master which will guide the SMEs as well as other stakeholders involved in the process design. This will result to better process which will not just be requirement based. This is because there is room for development from just a business analysis process with structured approach to the process design (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2006). Moreover, the business analyst will be leading this structured design process producing a blueprint containing structured requirements. The blueprint will represent the organizations needs that can be verified independently for the sake of completeness as well as correctness. This blueprint will separate the personal preferences form the personal needs. The separation is an important process because they account for many uncalled for conflicts arising in the requirement statements, in order to achieve this, there are few role changes that are required. The business analyst for instance will cease to be a go-between and instead lead a cross functional team in the designing business today. These developments need to be there to increase the organizational performance as well as increase the value in the core areas of the organization (International Institute of Business Analysis, 2006). Conclusion In business analysis developments in the future, process design, business process blueprint and the structured requirements will be the foundation to the development of useful and strong applications. The key future capability that will be the distinguishing factor of the business analyst from the other roles will be process mastery. This will mean an end to the middleperson activity, which will mean a reduction in incomplete, incorrect, irrelevant, conflicting requirements. This will result from requirements being independently verified passing first class quality and rise. This will eventually lead to the organization having more projects becoming a business success (CHO, 2008). One more thing that we expect to have development is in line with the roles where they will change to make the accountability more clear and precise and even create a rise in teamwork. The Analyst in the developments will be the team leader with the stakeholders and developers being making part of the team. The process blueprint will become a persistent, and a reusable organization resource applied in the management of process performance instead of being a temporary resource, which is not of use in the future. However, a focus away from elicitation to design will show great benefits to everyone. The benefits that it will yield will include among them an increased production, and more importantly increase value delivery to the organization (CHO, 2008). Bibliography Debra Paul, D. Y. (2006). Business analysis. In Business analysis (p. 238). British Computer Society. International Institute of Business Analysis. (2006). Business Analysis Body of Knowledge. Journal of International Institute of Business Analysis , 200-329. CHO, Y. (2008). THE TECHNIQUE OF BUSINESS MODEL DRIVEN ANALYSIS. Journal of Software Engineering , 587-605. Salmela, H. H. (2008). a business process analysis approach. Journal of Information Technology , p185-202. Read More