Skip to main content

How a Business Analyst can Save Huge Costs for your Project(s)


It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. One begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

-          A Scandal in Bohemia - from Sherlock Holmes series of Arthur Conan Doyle

Yeah… I understand… The IT development, software testers (and other teams) may want to emphasize their importance as well here, but trust me… I am not comparing the Business Analysts job across teams! 😊

Below are few of the most important work attributes for a business analyst (software development):

  • Networking Capabilities – The ability to establish connects with the customer (first), management and the development team members.

o   Connect with customers to establish trust in organizations capabilities

o   Connect with team members to understand best practices and common features, which can be explained to a customer, to again establish greater amount of trust.

  • Requirements Elicitation and Negotiation – The ability to elicit requirements with limited availability of data from customers, do research and verify assumptions, and negotiate with customers to ensure, that only valid requirements are filtered through to the development team.

o   Ask relevant questions only to a customer / team member

o   Connect the dots to smartly to derive complex workflows and help the customer identify solutions, that need a technical intervention

o   Simplify flows and assist teams with establishing inter-dependencies between features

  • Deep Domain Knowledge – Continuously enhance the domain knowledge of self, customers (do customer stakeholder management) and all the software development teams.

o   Educate the customer on what is right and wrong from a solutions perspective

o   Develop and provide insights to all stakeholders to resolve complex domain issues. Always strive to simplify

  • Highly enthusiastic to Understand Business Processes – There is high-level of enthusiasm to understand business processes.

o   Understand business flows, business data and business scenarios in a structured fashion

o   Do research to know more and provide domain solutions to the customer and internal team

  • Excellent Communication & Documentation Skills – Is able to articulate and share knowledge with multiple stakeholders of varied mindsets and expectations.

o   Create structured documentation and clear communication to all stakeholders. Is highly effective in keeping all on the same page.

o   Can present complex information in a step-wise fashion for all to understand and has excellent communication skills to listen, interpret and answers with a proactive approach towards the domain subject

Let’s imagine, that we are lucky to have a business analyst with almost all the above qualities in our team!

What do we get on the ground?

The software development team gets a very high-clarity on the business requirements and its priorities. Apart from this, the requirements are documented in a structured way and every discussion / point is mentioned as part of a centrally placed requirements management system or repository. The changes to the requirements are also very well managed with changes being shared immediately with all, when they are known, and the documents updated.

Why is this so important?

The earlier the team gets clarity on product / project requirements, the higher the quality of the overall outcome.

The importance of this job is from a perspective of the product or service quality since, the important work functions of a business analyst forms the first and the last phase of software development.

When requirements are clear to the team earlier during development, teams can “prevent” defects from seeping through the overall design, design of modules and code. This again ensures, that the outcome can be tested by an independent / semi-independent team with a smaller number of test-cycles (saves time and efforts). There are very-few unimportant bugs to be fixed by the development team and at the end, the product / project is a Winner!

When customers or the business analysts (in some cases) get to the UAT phase, they are happy to see and test, what they wanted in the conception phase. UAT is highly productive, whereby complex tests can be developed and executed. The testing teams can “grow” their domain understanding by assisting UAT and become much more efficient in future phases of development.

At the end of the day, having a business analyst, who knows what is required to done is a blessing for all stakeholders and the success of a product / project.

- Written by Anand Nanavati (SupraDigit Solutions)


Labels:
Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Top 4-Ways to Build the Right Test Strategy

A Test Strategy is created to guide all teams on steps to achieve software quality objectives. With software companies adopting agile practices in a big way, an effective Test Strategy becomes even more important with iterative / sprint-based application development. A test strategy being a live document, should ideally plan to integrate the business, development, testing, and management teams, define the quality objectives for the intended application and chart-out a path on how all the teams can help achieve these. The test owner and the team can build an effective test strategy with these 4 best-practices: A)   Focus on Prevention – Helps avoid major issues and rework on projects. ü Prioritize requirements and business rules. ü   Communicate changes in priorities immediately and effectively to important project stakeholders. ü Strictly review and implement common require
Post a Comment
Read more

Reduce Your App Development Costs by More than 50% by "Simply Preventing Bugs"!

"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”— Steve Jobs Everybody loves to avoid a disaster, but there is a “proactive” effort to do activities that can prevent a disaster from happening. Most of the executives do not want to “get involved” in such “proactive” efforts, simply due to the love of fixing urgencies Or having a mindset that it’s not important.   I remember, when once I was working with the Quality Assurance team on a product. The development team simply refused to spend efforts on the most essential “unit testing” for their developed components! The intent was to release the software to the QA team as soon as possible and focus more on so-called “core development”. Over the years, looking at multitude of projects failing in-spite of highly experienced resources, reasonable time and the intent, I have uncovered that, prevention is the “Most Important” and “Ignored” part of software development. Why should we
Post a Comment
Read more

What is Software Quality?

“Why do we never have the time to do it right the first time, but always have time to do it over and over after the first time?” – Anonymous  Quality is something that happens at every stage of Software Development! When I talk about Software Quality, almost everyone in the Information Technology world thinks about “Software Testing”. Unfortunately, this is a myopic view of Quality as a specific team effort and not as something, that should be embedded and part of the complete Software Development Life Cycle! Quality can be defined and need not be an “ambiguous term” for an organization. For any software, quality is more aptly seen from a view of what the customers considers as ‘Quality’. Although, this is not the only way to consider ‘Quality’. Quality must be seen from the viewpoint of ALL stakeholders involved with the product. Apart from this, ‘Quality’ should be considered as everybody’s res
Post a Comment
Read more