Business analysis is a relatively recent business practice, so business analysis maturity is low for many organizations.
When it comes to determining the maturity of your business analysis practices, consider these 11 questions:
- Are your customers dissatisfied with your product quality or IT services? They may submit formal complaints, or you may just hear rumblings around the water cooler.
- Do your business and IT stakeholders frequently have dissimilar interpretations of requirements? Do you find you’re speaking a different language regarding the type of information that’s needed; how that information must be collected, managed, and traced; and what ultimately the product or process must accomplish?
- Does your business analysis process fail to address the five types of requirements specified in the IIBA and BABOK: business requirements, stakeholder requirements, functional requirements, nonfunctional requirements, and transition requirements? Many times these requirements are poorly defined, or are used inconsistently. And often organizations address only one or two of these types, and not all of them.
- Are business cases seldom prepared or used only for funding purposes? If they are prepared, are they written accurately and completely and shared with stakeholders? At the conclusion of a project, do actual results differ from those indicated in the business plan?
- After the requirements elicitation process, are stakeholders not involved on the project until it’s time for acceptance testing? Are they not given opportunities to track their needs and scenarios, comment on requirements, and stay engaged in the process?
- Do your solution alternatives not consider impacts on stakeholders, business processes, and IT services? Mature business analysis involves effective impact analysis. One change can create a ripple effect throughout the enterprise that BAs must know about and understand.
- Is your requirements elicitation haphazard? For accurate and thorough elicitation, stakeholders must be engaged. And for stakeholder engagement to be successful, it must be planned, measured, and enabled.
- Are key stakeholders often excluded in requirements elicitation? Low-maturity business analysis often focuses only on stakeholders who are already engaged or interested. With mature business analysis, organizations identify, engage, and monitor all stakeholders involved.
- Are important requirements frequently missed? Are they captured for one project, but overlooked on the next? Is your organization using no tool – or the wrong tool – to visualize what’s needed, by whom, and when?
- Do frequent and often unnecessary requirements changes delay projects? Do you have a way to manage change and keep projects on time, on budget, and on scope?
- Are ROI or other measures of financial benefits not estimated and measured on projects? Effective, mature business analysis can determine whether projects are really providing value.
Answering yes to one or more of these questions can indicate that your business analysis maturity is not at an ideal level.
A BA Center of Excellence is an excellent way to increase BA maturity and drive more value to your business. It brings an enterprise focus to many business issues, including data integration, project management, enterprise architecture, and business and IT optimization, along with enterprise-wide access to information.
A BA Center of Excellence unites your organization in using a standardized methodoloy, enables BA training, creates a repository of enterprise knowledge, and encourages collaboration. Using this resource can help BAs understand their continuously changing roles, and can help your organization:
- Develop and manage better requirements
- Align IT services with business needs
- Deliver more business value
- Create strategic capability to gain competitive advantage
- Diversify risks
- Facilitate better collaboration between users and developers
- Integrate and align people, processes, and technology
Organizations can get everything they need to establish a BA Center of Excellence with Enfocus Requirements Suite™, the only requirements management software that comes with a proven framework for business analysis and a knowledgebase of tools, practice guides, resources, and training courses.
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