The Business Analyst’s role in Business Change – Design
Introduction
The business analyst is a vital role in business change and improvement. An improvement project may require many responsibilities, including stakeholder management, design, development and deployment. The business analyst isn’t the main role performing these tasks, but does have a key impact and influence on the decisions and actions taken by the wider team. This blog covers the business change lifecycle, which is a five stage lifecycle that covers the key areas of activity required to enable successful business change.
These five stages are:
Alignment
Any new project and software development should ensure that it matches the organisation’s objectives and strategy, any proposed changes should meet internal policies and legal requirement.
This is a key stage when process mapping, the To-Be process needs to be compliant to the policies and legislation of the process. This can mean that proposed changes might not be possible due to these factors. Find out more about process mapping here.
Definition
The definition stage focuses on defining business change proposals in order to uncover the root cause, analyse the situation and define the requirements.
Design
The design stage covers the design specification, development and testing of the solution, including the business processes and software needed.
Implementation
Implementation covers the planning and preparation for the deployment of business change.
Realisation
Realisation is the review of the predicted business changes to identify which have been met and which need investigation. For example, through the use of the Engage Process Modeler a estimate time and cost saving can be produced broken down by role. This can then be investigated to see if the time saving has been realised by the new process and or product.
This series of blogs is going to uncover the business analyst’s role across these five stages. This blog will primarily focus on the Design Stage.
Design
The design stage covers several major tasks. Designing the solution and the development and testing of software to support the solution. There may be a need for extensive testing if the solution is complex. The key steps in the design stage can be outlined using the POPIT model. Which has stages of people, organisation, business process design and Information technology.
We cannot design changes to the process without considering these key areas.
The first category is people. The people in the team need to have the capability to run the system. Therefore, they need the skills and training required. Therefore, this stage requires the identification of skills that is needed for the completed system. The business analyst role is usually set to training and identifying these requirements. This will enable users to conduct their new work practises.
The next stage is organisation. If the new designed process involve a change in the team structure, consideration and analysis of the impact upon the management structure is required. This may include recategorizing jobs, new job roles, and transfer of people between roles. The role of the business analyst here is to produce these definitions.
The next stage is the business process design. This is a key stage of the role of the business analyst. The primary task is the design of the ‘to be’ business processes. As discusses earlier, the Engage Process Modeler is a workshop friendly tool that uses graphical icons to make process mapping accessible to the end users. Find out more here. However, this isn’t all the work required in this stage. A key part is improving the documentation around the process and procedures, This will need to be considered at an early stage in case it impacts the process maps.
The final stage is information and technology. This stage is split into three sections, design, development and testing.
In the design section, the business analyst Acts as the bridge between the business and the IT team. The business analyst is required to ensure that the requirements are understood and delivered. This is managed through the requirements documentation that provides the basis for the design of the solution. As they are the bridge between these two sections, they may be required to clarify and support the design.
During the development stage, the business analyst may be required to handle any queries or questions about the requirements. As the business analyst Acts as the bridge between the business and the IT team. The business analysts may need to work with the business team to describe technical concepts and demonstrate technical ideas and solutions that the IT team develops.
Finally, in the testing stage, the business analyst supports the user acceptance testing.