Business Analyst

This role is crucial in helping an organization identify, articulate and establish the rationale for change – a fundamental concept of business agility. But the business analyst must also have the right tools and processes in place to help them align with other key stakeholders to ensure that they are defining an effective transformation approach.

KEY CHALLENGES:

• Aligning all investments with strategy. Traditional planning approaches see a disconnect between the enterprise wide, top-down planning approach to setting goals and objectives, and the bottom-up, often siloed, approach to defining the projects and initiatives that are supposed to deliver on those goals and objectives. This makes it hard for business analysts to define and explain the most effective and efficient solutions to ensure the best possible contribution to strategy is made.

• Harmonizing across all project execution styles. Organizations today have to deal with the tri-modal reality of delivery. Work is delivered using traditional, waterfall project management, agile and ad-hoc methods. There is frequently difficulty in monitoring performance and managing resources across those different approaches, resulting in incomplete pictures of what’s happening. This leads to delayed and flawed decision making and hurts overall performance. Business analysts must have clear insight into how work is being delivered in all approaches to provide the most effective guidance and consulting.

• Benefits realization and outcome management. Organizations only succeed when their investments generate a return. Yet many organizations struggle to not only measure performance, but even define effective and appropriate metrics. This is especially true for non-financial metrics. Organizations that can’t measure performance, can’t confirm that benefits have been realized and can’t take actions to correct shortfalls. This makes it impossible for business analysts to accurately drive the evolution of solutions and optimize customer and business value.