Business analysis Flashcards
Describe the business change lifecycle
- Alignment
- Definition
- Design and development
- Implementation
- Realisation
The heart of it is the business case
What are the principles of Business analysis
- Root causes not symptoms
- Business improvement not IT system change
- Options not solutions
- Feasible, contributing requirements, not meeting all requests
5 Entire business change lifecycle, not just requirements definition
6 Negotiation not avoidance
Describe the variants of the BA role
- Technical Business Analyst
- Business Process Analyst
- Senior Business Analyst
- Business Architect
what is alignment
Aligning the organisation to the external environment - this is where business strategy is created
What is definition
Looks at the options for change in order to accomplish the strategy
What is Design and development
Taking the big picture view (POPIT) and breaking it down into requirements. Requirements should be across the whole POPIT
What is implementation
This is about applying the change to make the AS-IS to become the TO-BE
What is realisation
this looks at
supporting new change,
measuring if the perceived benefits have been reached
The aim is for the new changes to become business as usual
What are the concepts of the T-shaped professional
Horizontal - a varied breadth of knowledge and skills - generalist (teamwork/communication/networking/critical thinking)
Vertical - Detailed knowledge and skill within a certain domain -Specialist ( stakeholder engagement/ requirements elicitation/ process modelling/ data modelling)
Identify the three areas of competency for a BA
Personal, business, professional
Describe business analysis and the strategic context
Strategic context is the ‘big picture’ think united kingdom vs towns/cities
Mission statement - what is your core purpose in life
Values - how would your peers describe you
Vision - What is the single biggest aspiration that you have (in the next 5 years)
Strategy/Strategic priorities - What are 2/3 things that you will do to make your vision a reality
Current state informs the strategy execution that leads to the future state then they use performance measurement which builds the current state view
Techniques used to analyse the current state:
Strengths/weaknesses
- Internal environmental analysis (VMOST/ Balance scorecard/ Performance measurement)
Opportunities/threats
External environmental analysis
- PESTLE
Define the factors assessed using PESTLE to analyse an external environment
Political, economic, social, technological advancements, legal, environmental
Identify the elements of the VMOST technique used to analyse an internal
environment
Vision, mission, objectives, strategy and tactics
Describe the following elements of performance measurement
1. Critical success factors
2 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs
CSF is a qualitative statement such as improve customer experience
KPIs are the quantitative measurement of these targets such as 10% reduction in complaints
you can’t have CSF without KPIs or you can’t measure success
Describe structure of a SWOT
Strengths/weaknesses (internal factors)
Opportunities/weaknesses (external factors)
Describe the POPIT model
Its a triangle with IT in the middle and it has people, organisation, processes around it. Org is at the top, people bottom left and processes bottom right
Describe the purpose of the business model canvas
Helps to capture the rationale of how an organisation delivers, creates and captures value. Can be done for future and current state.
areas included:
Key activities
what are important things we need to do to keep the business going
Customer segments
who are the different customer types we have
Customer relationships -
How do we establish and maintain relationships with our customer segments?
Channels
How do we communicate and reach our customer segments in order to deliver value?
Revenue streams
how much cash do we create for each segment
. Key resources
most important assets
Value propositions
what are the products/services which create value for customers
Key partners
Who are the network of suppliers and partners that make the business model work?
Cost structure
What are all the costs that are incurred that makes the business model work?
Identify the services in the Business Analysis Service Framework
- Situation investigation and problem analysis
2 Feasibility assessment and business case development
3 Business process improvement
4 Requirements definition
5 Business acceptance testing
6 Business change deployment
Stakeholder engagement - this is a trick one that happens throughout not a service perse
- Define workshops
- Advantages/Disadvantages
- techniques for discovery/visualisation workshops
collaborative forums where multiple stakeholders feed into the discovery work to understand the current situation. As business analysts you then visualise your findings
discovery: Round robins, brainstorming, brainwriting, post-it, stepwise, breakout groups
Visualisation: Process models, rich pictures, mind maps, context diagrams, use case diagrams, task scenarios, user stories
Define observation
5.2.1 Advantages and disadvantages of observation
5.2.2 Formal observation
5.2.3 Shadowing
Observe the organisation and the staff working in it as early in an investigation as you can,
to get data about the environment and work practices
3 Define interviews
5.3.1 Advantages and disadvantages of interviewing
An ‘interview’ is always a formal one-to-one meeting
* An interview may be useful when:
* A dominant stakeholder discourages others’ participation in a group session
* A stakeholder disagrees with a statement but feels unable to express open
disagreement- could be various reasons why
Define scenarios
5.4.1 Advantages and disadvantages of scenarios
You the Business Analyst takes a user step-by-step through a task in order that each step
may be visualised
Scenarios are helpful in requirements elicitation and analysis to help us discover
* Where we need alternative/unhappy paths
* New information or tacit knowledge
Define prototyping
5.5.1 Advantages and disadvantages of prototyping
Prototyping focuses on creating simulations of a process or system.
Not prototyping may cause the wrong solution to be built
Define user role analysis
5.6.1 Advantages and disadvantages of user role analysis
5.6.2 Personas
Identifying stakeholders who must access services in a business system.
Personas are descriptions of fictional users and their goals (usually includes a large
demographic of users)
They support the needs of many users
Enables the development team to focus on what the customer needs and will
help evaluate decisions that need to be made about requirements
Define quantitative approaches
5.7.1 Surveys or questionnaires
5.7.2 Activity sampling
5.7.3 Document analysis
Surveys are beneficial in obtaining a limited amount of information from a large spread
of people
Activity sampling is observing how workers spend their time against each activity
Document analysis involves you the Business Analysis reviewing reports or documents to
unearth data about a company and its associated processes or IT applications.
Describe the following two diagrammatic techniques used to record a business
situation
5.8.1 Rich pictures
5.8.2 Mind maps
