When Business Analysis (BA) is done well, it can prove to be a very valuable department in your organisation.
For it to be successful, your analysts’ skills must align with your business problem. Creating a team with the right amount of experience whilst working within the confines of limited resources can often be a real challenge. This is why many organisations enlist the help of specialist BA consultants. Investing in external assistance can help you overcome specific challenges as well as creating a road map for future improvements.
The problems with this traditional approach only become clear some time after the completed analysis. Your consultants will have presented the change plan and, perhaps, even helped you implement it. But a few years later the changing business environment means this plan is now out of date and you need to start the process over again.
Until now this has required the organisation to re-engage an external consultancy since their internal team have been unable to acquire the specialist knowledge those original consultants had. In the meantime, monitoring these specialist areas has been neglected. You often end up involved in a larger, more complicated project to resolve issues that would not have occurred if checks were made on a regular basis.
Changing the status quo
Whilst the above situation is common it has also been unavoidable most of the time. The consultants breeze into your organisation, work their dark magic then leave when the spell is complete.
We want to show you the secrets behind that magic.
You may ask why would we want to give away our secrets. Well, it’s simple – we want you to have a successful business. When we work on a BA project we don’t just analyse and run, we’ll work closely with your internal teams to understand their capabilities and restrictions in the same way as we would the issue you have engaged us to resolve. We tailor our approach to suit your needs. Our simple four step process allows us to assess your current capabilities while providing core themes for an improvement roadmap. What’s more, we’ll stay in touch with your teams and provide regular coaching and reviews to make sure your team stays on track.
The result is a business that is better able to recognise risks and opportunities and then create the best change plan to resolve them. With this level of adaptability you can gain a competitive advantage by reacting to, and capitalising on market change first.
How it works
The good news is that our process doesn’t require you to commit to great swathes of time for learning, study and assessments. We watch your teams in action and conduct workshops and interviews to access a deeper understanding of what is, and what should be. Our approach to includes a tailored four step process to suit your needs.
Step 1: Framework
The framework component relates to the activities that contribute to how the current business analysis team functions at present. Things likely to be assessed during this phase are existing standards, processes, templates, tools and reporting.
STEP 2: Operating environment
The operating environment is associated to the structure of the business analysis department. It’s important to know how they work in the context of the rest of the organisation. The perception of the BA team and the level of control that the organisation has on how they are utilised are two vital elements.
Step 3: Resources
The people in the team are most important element. This component will review their skill set, existing arrangements for coaching and mentoring as well as having a clear plan for career development.
Step 4: Business alignment
The concluding step to the maturity assessment is aligning the changes to the business analysis team with the rest of the organisation. This can be multifaceted covering customer needs, adjusting to internal processes for the strategic direction of the business.
Your tangible results
During the assessment we will help you to recognise quick wins, as well as an action plan to address any pain points (real, perceived or hidden) that have arisen. We will help you to create a team vision so your BA’s are fully aware of, and engaged with achieving the planned results. We’ll also help you explain the role of Business Analysis, and the value the team brings, to the rest of the organisation so they too are on-board in assisting the change.
Your plan will be built using Agile Principles, where change occurs in regular discrete iterations, providing quick wins early in the process, and flexibility to adapt to any unexpected changes. To make sure the plan is implemented successfully we offer coaching to guide the full development of your teams so support is always on hand. We believe in on-going, long term relationships that help you remain a flexible, adaptive, but most importantly, successful organisation.
