Business analyst techniques
There are many business analyst techniques that you can use to solve complex business problems. It depends on the project you are working on to know what technique to use when. Here are some steps to help you know which item on this list of business analysis techniques to use:
Defining the problem
The first step in solving any problem is to clearly define what the problem is. Otherwise, it’s impossible to know what the goal is and whether or not you’re making progress. When it comes to data intensive projects or reporting, this means understanding the business problem you’re trying to solve. For IT business analysts this means determining the problem the users are facing and process improvement projects, it’s determining what problems exist in the process steps.
Eliciting the requirements
On data intensive projects, once you know the problem, then you need to know what data you need, it’s time to go out and collect it. This can involve everything from setting up tracking systems to manually gathering data from sources like surveys and customer interviews. On software development and process improvement projects, once you know what the scope of the problem is then you need to dig deeper to get to the root cause. This could include stakeholder interviews, document analysis, observations and more.
This video goes into more detail about the different types of elicitation techniques business analysts use.
Analyzing the data
Once you have your data, it’s time to start analyzing it. This usually involves using statistical methods to find trends and patterns. It’s also important to think about how to visualize the data so that it’s easy to understand.
For software projects and non data intensive projects, you will need to analyze the responses received in your stakeholder interviews, document analysis, observations and discussions to make sure you have firm grounding on the As-Is state.
Generating solutions
Once you understand the data, you can start generating potential solutions to the problem. This step is all about coming up with ideas and testing them to see if they actually work.
This will create the Future-State on paper and discuss it with the team to confirm that this will actually work. In some cases you can do testing on a smaller scope to validate the idea and this is often called a proof-of-concept (POC).
Implementing the solution
The final step is to implement the solution that you’ve chosen. For the business analyst this includes documenting the requirements, having the iterative meetings with the internal team to refine and clarify the requirements so that everyone is clear on what to implement. It also includes helping with the communication of the changes back to the stakeholders and validating that the future state solves the original problem by organizing the User Acceptance Testing.
It’s also important to think about how you’ll monitor the results of the implementation to make sure that it’s actually solving the problem.
