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Skills you must have to be “THE Business Analyst of the Future”…No, the list does not include “formal training”
Step 2: Enforce a process
You have found the right people for your development team and you are comfortable with the skills discussed in the previous article. Now you must enforce a process. Hey! Didn’t we say you don’t have to get embroiled in process bureaucracy?
Yes, you really don’t.
You may or may not have heard such buzzwords as Waterfall, Iterative, Agile, etc. when discussing the SDLC processes you follow. Irrespective of what anybody says, know that it is not required.
There is a difference between usefulness and necessity. While it is absolutely useful to know the terminologies and better still the underlying principles, it is not necessary to know these for successfully managing software development projects.
Remember one of the skills required for “THE Business Analyst of the Future” is “thinks logically”. Well, in addition to thinking logically, a structured approach is a must to go from start, past the finish line successfully.
“…That is, a process must be followed.”
But make sure you don’t get trapped in process bureaucracy. Only do so much and no more.
What does the process normally have? There can be umpteen steps depending on who you talk to but the main ingredients are still the same.
You have to
- communicate with the customer
- understand and analyze the business requirements
- communicate with your development and testing teams
- plan the project such that high quality work is delivered that meets all the requirements (or scope) and is within budget and time
Never lose track of the last bullet point above. Projects fail only because of one or more of those ingredients in the Project Management Iron Triangle (viz., scope, time and cost) are not tracked and/or controlled correctly.
For achieving this, you need to define a process that suits the particular project best. Once defined, this process must be communicated, agreed upon and adhered to strictly, in order to achieve the goals. So there must be a process for executing the work and there must be a process for communicating with the internal teams, external teams and the clients.
The process must be laid out either as a flowchart or as steps in a document. You must be clear as to the responsibilities of various stakeholders, tools needed and the documentation requirements for each step. The examples below (both flowchart and the steps in a document) demonstrate some of the steps for executing the work. In these examples, “BAF” refers to “THE Business Analyst of the Future”.
So as not to lose track of the process, you should check off items as they get completed, as shown in the image below. Whether you use a flowchart as above or a document as below, it is up to you, but you must adhere to a process.
An example communications plan is shown below. You must add to or subtract from the list per your requirements. It is equally important to strictly adhere to this plan as well.
We stress the importance of this again as this is one part that is easily lost sight of, especially in companies that do not yet have strict processes in place.
For example, if a customer does not really care for a weekly update, the “project manager” may, at some point, stop sending weekly (or whatever frequency they were agreed upon in the initial communications plan) updates, which in turn, leads to losing sight of the project plan that was created.
So a process must be defined keeping in mind the constraints, but once defined, it must be communicated and adhered to at all costs.
Any software development process mainly consists of
- Requirements Gathering and Analysis
- Project Planning, Tracking and Reporting
- Design and Development
- Testing (QA)
- Release and Deployment
We will go through them in more detail in the next sections.
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You have the right people and the right processes to manage projects but… What next?
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