The Key Role of Business Analysis in Improving Project Success

• Posted by Bill Aitken
• on 15 February 2012

Projects vary enormously in content, timeline, resources, aims and objectives. But one thing remains constant – if the project does not somehow contribute to meeting the business strategy, it is doomed to failure at some point in its lifecycle. This is where business analysis (BA) comes in. Using the range of tools it provides, the alignment of the project to the business becomes more defined and requirements engineering more grounded in the domain of what is needed rather than what is wanted. The Business Analyst is arguably the key role in ensuring that this is so.

Business analysis is often poorly leveraged within companies and Practitioners are often situated within IT departments instead of the wider business.  Getting the best out of the dark art requires that the BA is involved at strategy level within an organisation to enable them to help formulate company strategy.  In that way, they affect all projects.  From the specific point of view, they are vitally important in helping to create the business case and feasibility studies.  The project then starts off on the right foot.

I rarely meet anyone these days who does not accept the fact that requirements capture is probably the most important phase of a project.  Poorly-written requirements lead to systems built on a foundation of sand and we don't have to look very far to see the consequences of this.  The newspapers frequently declaim against the vast sums of money spent on such disasters in the NHS, Government, military and so on.  It's also a truism that the only point of an IT system is to support the business, yet we frequently see evidence that the end-users were poorly consulted.  The BA is the key role here to ensure that their requirements are properly recorded.  And something more - projects almost always have a political dimension to them.  Business analysts can negotiate between seemingly intractably-opposed viewpoints to come to a level of agreement and compromise.  Without it, projects can be stalled and even cancelled.

It's often a surprise to many that the BA is more of a creative role, rather than a technical one.  It is in business analysis that the current system, functional and non-functional requirements come together to form a vision of the future system, free from the issues which plagued the old one.  That particular cake can be cut up in many different ways and a well-trained, talented BA can offer many options of varying cost, performance and functionality.  Thus, the design and development of the eventual choice is based on options which meet the users' needs and conform to SLAs, legislation and business objectives, making eventual testing easier and with fewer re-writes.

In short, business analysts and the skills/techniques they offer, are all about bringing accuracy into those early phases of the project particularly affected by the most imperfect of machines - the human being.  Their skills in bringing order from a chaotic mess of conflicting, ambiguous and just plain wrong requirements allows the project to point in the right direction from the start.  Further, their work at the strategic end of the company allows them to have horizons wide enough to bring lessons across from one project to another, reducing time, cost and error.

What a pity so many of them are restricted to modelling processes.