Johannesburg, 25 Feb 2010
Business analysts must ensure they have the ability to deal with the details of projects while maintaining the ability to step back and see the bigger picture. Their inability to do this is a key reason why software projects deliver so many features that companies don`t use, leading to excess expense and time taken to deliver projects.
Business analysts have an important role to play in delivering software development projects on time, within budget and according to specification. This requires a deep understanding of what business needs and the priority of these needs. Simply documenting a "shopping list" of business requirements is not good enough.
Business analysts must have the ability and expertise to assess user requests so they do not end up with a list of nice-to-have features in the software or business system and do not deliver low-value, high-effort requirements before others. That scenario results in additional development costs, project time overruns and features that are not used.
Standish Group`s CHAOS Report of April last year demonstrates that even fewer projects are now succeeding against time, budget and functionality requirements. Only 32% made the grade while 44% were challenged, which means they were late, over budget, did not deliver required functionality or any combination of those three. Up to 24% failed outright, which means they were cancelled before completion or were delivered but not used.
Jim Crear, Standish Group`s CIO, says: "[These numbers] are a low point in the last five study periods. This year`s results represent the highest failure rate in over a decade." The situation in South Africa is not significantly different to that abroad.
Business analysts need to ensure that "what business needs, business gets" as opposed to "what business wants, business gets". If this is not done, the business analyst risks becoming just a scribe. Whatever business wants, business gets, without the analyst having a deep understanding of what business really needs, why it needs it and what business`s priorities are. This is a common shortfall and partly explains why we have so much software developed that is not used, because programmers end up writing low-priority requirements.
There are four different types of requirements that business analysts need to be aware of and against which they must rank all of their requirements:
* Those that require a lot of effort and are high-value to the business;
* Those that are high-effort but low-value;
* Those that require little effort and offer high value to the business to give the fastest return; and
* Those that are low effort yet offer low value.
Analysts want to steer clear of communicating requirements that require a great deal of effort, yet offer little return, and want to concentrate instead on those that require little effort yet offer high business value. In some cases there will be a lot of effort involved in delivering something that is strategically important to the business, and that needs to be noted in the requirements. Business analysts must prioritise their list of requirements according to business needs.
Organisations need to recognise that they need to train their business analysts, ensure that the appropriate skills are developed, and put into practice. Without this investment they will simply end up with highly paid requirements documenters.
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