Business Analysis 101

The primary reason for the failure of the application to meet the needs of the business is the failure to take into account the existing process issues. Therefore, to be truly effective, Business Analysts and Project Managers must concentrate a portion of their efforts on activities associated with traditional process improvement. Lean Six Sigma for Services and DMAIC is an ideal method to use for these types of activities.

When performing business analysis, specification development, and project planning there are several fundamentals that I always take into consideration:
1. The business process must be fit for the purpose it is intended:

• Fundamentally it is free from quality defects and steps that add no value to the process
• Its processing steps are well defined and as straight through as possible
• It manages exceptions and hand-offs with minimal motion
• It follows industry best practices and meets regulatory and compliance requirements

2. The application design and particularly the underlying data models:

• Must support continuous process improvement
• Must support actionable business intelligence and data driven decision making based.
• Must support regulatory and compliance requirements without burdening the process or the people working within the process
• Must facilitate a regulatory or compliance audit

3. Business Processes are difficult to analyze and automate because:

• They are typically slow because there is too much work in process, too much time spent on non-value-add work (e.g. over-lapping internal controls and re-keying of data), and they are rife with exception handling
• They are less visible in nature, and have a tradition of individuality and freedom, that makes problems harder to identify and fix.
• They are characterized by a lack of meaningful and actionable data for decision making. The computer applications supporting the business process does not capture the necessary metrics to support a root cause analysis and continuous process improvement.
• They seldom follow a best practice model
• They often fail to ensure customer privacy or facilitate segregation of duties (e.g. SOX compliance)

4. Business process owners and their staff cannot articulate their needs to the level of detail needed to complete a specification:

• They seldom have sufficient knowledge of the process objectives
• They fail to remember the exception processing which is a real killer
• They do not thoroughly understand the elements of risk mitigation in a project

more