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In my 15 years as a business consultant working in Perth, I have come to understand that every successful IT or business project has included business analysis.

Yep, that’s a big statement. You may think that this is said in self-importance or with self-serving intentions, but I assure you this is not the case.

To qualify my statement, even if a team doesn’t have someone charged with the title “business analyst”, or a BA is not a dedicated role on a team, it doesn’t mean that this critical work is not being done. There are many consultants, solution architects and developers that have the skills and experience.

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What is business analysis specifically and why is it so critical to IT and business projects?

Business analysis involves liaising with various stakeholders to understand an organisation’s needs, structure, policies, and operations to find solutions that help the organisation achieve its objectives.

Often, this requires analysis and communication of business requirements, identifying areas for process improvement and organisational change, strategic planning and analysis and working to drive an organisation to its desired future state through implementation of business solutions (technical and non-technical).

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When business analysis is not done effectively, the business benefits that are expected from implementing solutions are not achieved.

This may be because:

An organisation has missed the opportunity to implement the right solution that best meets their needs:

• The chosen solution does not adequately meet the organisation’s requirements (often due to a lack of collaboration between business users and sponsors leading to misalignment of what is wanted and needed in a solution)
• There is an alternate, better solution that was not implemented (because feasibility and solution evaluation was not conducted to evaluate candidate solutions against functional and non-functional business requirements).

A solution has not been implemented well, and so has not been fully utilised or adopted by users:

• This may mean the solution does not work properly or is not utilised to its potential and business benefits are left unrealised (typically this is when you see a heap of manual workarounds are implemented to “make the system work”)
• Implementation takes longer and costs more than it should (for example, if a team charged with implementing a new solution lacks direction around the content or priority of business requirements, they may waste time and money working on the wrong things)
• Users choose to ignore the new solution and revert back to the old way of doing things

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More discussions on Business Analysis

Need someone to help you with a business problem or need some business analyst capability on your agile project? I have loved working as a business consultant in Perth for 15 years and am ready to chat through more and provide assistance where I can. Get in touch.

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